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Ex-Dead Kennedy Fights For Convicted Cop Killer
By Chris Nelson
Music News of the World, November 25, 1997
Jello Biafra's label releases LP of death-row inmates' essays to raise public awareness.
Addicted To Noise Staff Writer Chris Nelson reports:
As former singer for the archetypal political punk group the Dead Kennedys, Jello Biafra knows all too well the importance of preserving free speech and the battles that have been fought over this basic right.
After all, his band split up amid a free-speech legal war with California authorities over controversial art included in the Dead Kennedys' Frankenchrist album. In all these years, he has never forgotten the cause and continues to fight for it.
One of the scariest aspects about the case of convicted killer and former journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, according to Biafra, is just how far a government will go to quell the free speech of its critics. "He's a textbook illustration of how if America wants to silence a political dissident, our kangaroo courts can be just as nasty as Stalinist Russia," said Biafra, who recently released an album of Jamal's audio essays in an effort to get his message out.
To ensure that the world hears Abu-Jamal's unique perspective from Pennsylvania's death row, the former DK's singer and owner of the Alternative Tentacles record label recently released Mumia Abu-Jamal Spoken Word with Music by Man Is the Bastard.
Abu-Jamal, an outspoken supporter of radical African-American organizations such as the Black Panthers and MOVE, has served 15 years on death row for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. He has consistently maintained his innocence.
The unique collection features several Abu-Jamal commentaries on subjects such as police violence, the war on drugs and the prison system, along with four cuts by the California hardcore band Man Is the Bastard and additional exposition from the late poet Allen Ginsberg, civil rights activist Assata Shakur and Biafra himself.
Abu-Jamal's supporters -- including Amnesty International and South African President Nelson Mandela -- have called for a new trial, asserting that local police intimidated witnesses into identifying him as the shooter and that ballistics tests, if completed, will prove his innocence.
In 1994, Abu-Jamal recorded a series of essays for National Public Radio, but NPR, under pressure from critics who called the perspective unbalanced, never aired the commentaries. Seven of those compositions now appear on Mumia Abu-Jamal Spoken Word, proceeds of which will go to Abu Jamal's legal defense fund.
"I thought it was something we could do to illuminate his horrific situation for more people," said Biafra, 38, by phone from his San Francisco home. "He's a textbook illustration of why the death penalty should be abolished."
Man Is the Bastard bassist and singer Aaron Kenyon said the band made its contributions to the album with unusual speed to maximize its fundraising potential. "We wanted to get it out as fast as possible so he'd still be alive to reap the benefits of the thing," said Kenyon, 27, who added that the album is in keeping with the band's mission to "bring up the negative to direct toward the positive."
Dale Wilcox, a spokesman for the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police, said he was unaware of the album, and did not want to comment on the case. "The FOP is not interested in creating a controversy so that this guy can sell records," Wilcox said. "Our position is the same as the position of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the City and County of Philadelphia: He's a convicted cop killer. The law in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is that people convicted of killing police officers face the death penalty."
Abu-Jamal's defenders are hoping that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court will grant him a new trial. Should the court deny his appeal, Governor Tom Ridge has pledged to sign a death warrant immediately.
"They're trying to kill him as quickly as possible so they don't have to admit they're wrong later on," Biafra said. "But after that, the guy's gone. What are you gonna do about it?"
The label head said that by including Ginsberg, Shakur and himself on Mumia Abu-Jamal Spoken Word, he intended to illustrate that concern for Abu-Jamal "is not confined to any kind of radical fringe community. It should be a concern of anybody who has a strong sense of right and wrong," Biafra said.
Kenyon, songwriter for two of the MITB's tracks on the album, agreed. "We saw it as this bringing together of heavy-duty minds which are really on the consciousness tip, on the social change tip," he said, calling Pennsylvania courts' past denials of Abu-Jamal's appeals an "old school, old boy, old world attempt to keep the system closed."
"I'd like to see some interference in this process," Kenyon said. "I'd like to see someone come in and say, 'Look, you guys are not going to play your power game anymore. We're going to have to take this power away from you because you've obviously abused it.' " [Mon., Nov. 24, 1997, 9 a.m. PDT]
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