Jello Biafra
Jello Biafra
Jello Biafrais the former lead singer and songwriter for San Francisco punk rock band Dead Kennedys, and is currently a musician and spoken word artist. After he left the Dead Kennedys, he took over the influential independent record label Alternative Tentacles, which he had co-founded in 1979 with Dead Kennedys bandmate East Bay Ray. Although now focused primarily on spoken word, he has continued as a musician in numerous collaborations...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPunk Singer
Date of Birth17 June 1958
CityBoulder, CO
CountryUnited States of America
They've gone to great length to disguise the fact that I'm not in the band, even sending out a photo to promoters with my picture in it which then winds up in some of the ads on the flyers.
Yes, I think it's a freedom of expression issue. My feeling is the best way to counter bad speech is with more speech.
I'm tired of being ruled by the Skull and Bones. The only place they belong are on punk-rock albums!
Punk rock will never die, until something more dangerous replaces it.
For every prohibition you create, you also create an underground.
Our biggest national security threat is the environmental destruction of our planet and the arms race with ourselves.
One of the best things that's come out of the Seattle protests is the birth of the Independent Media Center. It's not as though the independent media movement wasn't already there, but it's given it another jump-start. There's the feeling that not only should we report on our underground culture and our own situation, but now we have to start telling people what's really going on at a time when everything from CNN to USA Today is as tightly controlled as Tass or Pravda.
My attitude is if somebody blunders into the level of popularity; at least remember the human factor. These guys are still human beings and hopefully still have hearts and if you keep in touch with them rather than vilify them you may be able to encourage them to go in the right direction. What I'm hoping will eventually happen is that they will grasp the amount of power and financial clout that is now at their fingertips and use those as tools to help real people with real things the way punk politics was always designed to do before, but nobody had any money.
What they're not doing is marketing the Dead Kennedys in the spirit of what the band stood for.
Jimi Hendrix once said, 'You will never hear surf music again.' Well, tonight, you will hear 'serf' music again -- S-E-R-F music.
The last true punk band to get a major label contract was The Dickies.
I have very mixed feelings about Jesse Jackson. He's very good about labor, and human and civil rights issues, but not so good on cultural issues.
If I go without rock for too long, I feel depressed.
When "Search and Destroy" by the Stooges came on as a Nike shoe commercial, I got physically sick. That song meant the world to me, and I didn't feel this was the way it ought to be used.