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Point Man Against Censorship
By Jeffrey Drake
From the May 14 issue of PitchWeekly
In order to talk about censorship, Jello Biafra doesn't
necessarily have to do much research beyond his own memory. As a member of the seminal San Francisco punk band Dead Kennedys, Biafra was targeted in 1986 by Tipper Gore's Parents Music Resource Center. At the PMRC's behest, Biafra's house was raided by members of the Los Angeles and San Francisco police departments and Biafra was hauled into court. The object of their ire was the DK album Frankenchrist, which featured an erotic poster by surrealist H.R. Giger, which was deemed "harmful to minors." Though charges against Biafra were dropped, chain stores nationwide stopped carrying his albums, Dead Kennedys albums and anything else on Alternative Tentacles, the label Biafra still owns.
All this just weeks after his first spoken word engagement, something Biafra says he was "dragged into" by Los Angeles mover and shaker Harvey Kubernik. "(He) worked his ass off tirelessly for years and years trying to promote spoken word artists and getting people known as musicians into the mix," Biafra says from his San Francisco home. "You know, co-billing Exene (Cervenka of the band X) or Henry Rollins or Dave Alvin
with a poet they might never cross paths with otherwise. And he started calling me saying, 'You know, your interviews are interesting, your lyrics are good, you should try spoken word.' And eventually I said, 'Oh what the hell, why not? I'm so goddamn smart, all I have to do is just do it off the top of my head like I did on that Witch Trials EP.'
"It was intended as a poetry reading at Kerckhoff Hall at UCLA, but I noticed rather quickly that the audience was much more interested in my warped sense of humor and at the suppressed information I was weaving into the material." Thus developed Biafra's down-to-earth, non-artsy delivery of the world as he sees it, sort of a cross between a standup routine and a sermon.
That performance - and the raiding of his house in the following weeks - aided Biafra's evolution into, as he puts it, "sort of a commentator or anti-pundit." That aspect of Biafra's performance résumé - aside from occasional duties as the vocalist for the band Lard - has yielded four releases of his anti-punditry, each of which are multi-CD sets.
"After that happened (the raid and the trial), I suddenly found myself thrust into the role of point man against censorship. And it meant that if Frank Zappa wasn't available for an interview or a talk show, I wound up doing it instead. And thus the so-called lecture offers began to come in, but instead of giving people a formal lecture at a podium, I gave 'em my spoken-word ranting and raving instead. I took the commentary and
political and information end of it a lot more seriously from that point onward."
And information is what Biafra has at his fingertips, on
virtually any subject an interviewer might bring up: whether the government's "paramilitary crackdowns" on pirate radio stations, the "swooshstika on Tiger Woods' head," Wal-Mart banning Sheryl Crow's album or the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
"Almost every single event that's actually relevant to our lives is being censored out of the corporate media these days. This means I can talk about just about anything I want," Biafra says. "I mean, I'm sorry, but Monica's magic orifice just is not the most impressing scandal in the country right now. It's the same sort of distraction of the shoppers by fluff-propaganda that the O.J. Simpson trial was.
"Granted, it can be entertaining at times, just like watching a woman with teeth missing tearing out her enemy's hair on Jerry Springer, it's about at the same level. I mean, I saw Ice T speak awhile back, and he proposed settling the whole Monica affair on Jerry Springer, get all of Clinton's ho's out in the room and then have Hillary come out and beat them all up."
Biafra's solution was a coloring contest of the president's "distinguishing characteristics," with the winner giving the president a blowjob on Larry King. "That way the American public could achieve that all important closure and get on with their lives and move on to real issues."
Biafra shouldn't be mistaken for a conspiracy theorist, just a firm believer in the reality of corporate-owned America. "It's not so much that there is some arbitrator up top, some sort of conspiracy where this stuff is deliberately X'd out of the news," he says. "They just simply don't report it at all."
To fill the information gap, Biafra likes the power of
underground zines - which he calls "the most important contribution punk has given the world" - and the Internet.
"With the corporate press being so censored and dishonest and Disney-fied, underground zines and the Net are what's left for people to find out what's really going on." Biafra adds a caveat, however. "People need to use the Internet as intelligently as possible," he says. "People who surf the net for their information need to double-check the stories they pull off the Net to make sure that they're true. If something sounds
too good or too wild to be true, it probably is." To illustrate that point, Biafra recounts a report of his own death which was widely discussed on the Net just last fall.
"People who get too caught up in (the Internet) remind me
of...the CB craze of the 1970s. 'Breaker, breaker, good buddy, am I talking to a real trucker?' How different is that from, 'Wow, cool, I'm online with Courtney (Love) right now'? A friend of mine tried to get an E-mail address for me and put out the word on the Net, and 12 different people responded and none of them were me."
Biafra believes a little distrust of news sources might be a good lesson for the public. "Maybe all the choices of different stories of varying levels of bullshit on the Net will teach and condition people not to be so easily led. In a way, that may be a light at the end of the tunnel there.
"I agree with Chuck D of Public Enemy that 'We are the real CNN' and my part is the spoken word pieces and the content of my music lyrics. At a time when more and more mass media is being Disney-fied and Springer-ized, it's up to every artist in every medium to tell people what's going on, 'cause otherwise they can't find out the truth. Every political act on the part of an artist - be it a journalist in a small town or a local punk
rock band, all the way up to Marilyn Manson tweaking the fundamentalist Christians - every single act like that takes one more potential Rush Limbaugh listener away from certain stupidity and doom."
Jello Biafra will be bringing a whole host of new topics, which admittedly "go all over the map," to his spoken word appearance at Liberty Hall on this Friday night, and more opinions and rants to the panel discussion, "Taking an Inventory of Culture: Indie Publishing and the Next Millennium," Saturday at 3 p.m., at UMKC's Pierson Hall.
"I'm quite grateful that people are interested in what I do and what I say," Biafra says. "I never thought I'd be able to survive off of my big mouth and bad attitude."
Both events are part of Culture Under Fire IX.
Jello Biafra
Friday, May 15 at Liberty Hall
Saturday, May 16 at Pierson Hall (3 p.m.)
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