2020 wouldn’t be complete without a new album from Jello Biafra.
Punk rock’s semi-official mainstream diplomat and his band The Guantanamo School of Medicine (GSM) have been dropping singles sporadically throughout the year, culminating in the release of their third LP, Tea Party Revenge Porn. The album is now available on all streaming platforms, with a physical release date in January 2021 via Alternative Tentacles.
“Sorry it’s only out online folks!” Biafra interjects. “I much prefer vinyl that I can hold in my fucking hand. But we’re still having manufacturing turnaround issues and I had to get this thing out before the election. So, suddenly the digital age turned out to be my friend!”
The former Dead Kennedys frontman and card-carrying member of the Green Party wears many hats – singer, songwriter, actor, spoken-word activist, comedian, politician – so it only makes sense that his songwriting is equally chaotic and genre-hopping. It should also be noted that since his departure from The Dead Kennedys, his songwriting has only gotten faster, heavier, and at times, darker. It’s uncommon to hear a song from GSM (or any of Biafra’s projects) that doesn’t utilize several distinctly different and seemingly conflicting musical genres.
“I’m really proud that no two of my music albums have ever sounded alike,” Biafra exclaims.
For example, on “We Created Putin”, the first two minutes kicks off with classic ’80s hardcore riffage combined with Soviet-style vocal harmonies over the chorus, ’cause you know. Putin. But then the band pumps the brakes and hard-transitions into a dub-reggae breakdown that sounds like it was ripped straight off of a Sandinista-era Clash B-side. So yeah, there’s a lot going on here – that was just the first single off the record.
“I wanted some kind of a move out of left field there, you know, instead of just another straight hardcore song that had kind of a Russian-music flavor to it already,” Biafra elaborates on his process. “I think it was Matt Kelly – who did most of my stuff, except for Lard and the stuff I do with The Melvins. He told a recording studio magazine that dealing with me was more like trying to work for a movie director than a music producer. And there’s the method acting training in my background too – being able to immerse myself in other scenarios, as some other scenarios, other people, other characters, including writing from their point of view. You know, who needs another ‘boohoo, nukes are bad’ song when you can write it from the Pentagon and the military industrial complex point of view, and hand the world ‘Kill the Poor’?”
Extreme subjectivity has always been Biafra’s bread and butter when it comes to songwriting – a stylistic choice he has utilized since The Dead Kennedys, and one that allows him to really sink his teeth into whatever subject he might be singing about. On Tea Party Revenge Porn, he cranks the satire up to 11, from social media-driven narcissism on “No More Selfies,” to climate change in “The Last Big Gulp.”
“As a lyric writer, I’m more directly influenced by sparks or even Zappa than I would be by Iggy or Hank Williams or something,” Biafra says. “What’s challenging on a song like ‘The Last Big Gulp’ is there’s only room for so many words, or the song just isn’t going to rock.”
“I’m not really like a personal lyric emo kind of guy at all,” he continues. “In no small part because I get so goddamn bored with people who just can’t stop talking about themselves. Oh, boohoo! Somebody left you? Okay, fine! Maybe you’ll write a good song next time! Oh, boo hoo! We used our parents’ money to start a band! We bought all this cool equipment and now we’re signed with a major label, and life is so hard! And I’m like ‘why don’t you just go try and beg for change on Haight Street? Or see how long you last in a tent in San Francisco for that matter?’”
Having lived most of his life in San Francisco (including during his infamous run for mayor in 1979) Biafra laments the city’s ever-growing disparity of the rich and poor, which manifests visually via the notoriously large tent communities.
“I get so angry when I go by the tent camp,” he says. “Not at the people in them, but the fact that people have been forced into this in the first place! It’s not like anybody wants to do that ’cause that’s their choice? Hell no!”
“Because the profession I’m in and everything else, another thing that always kind of eats at me with those situations is: this could be me, and it could still be me if one or two or three things go wrong,” he continues. “I can’t ever forget that. That made me get kind of scrappy in trying to survive. And go as far as I can, without being an asshole about it, which was always the tightrope throughout your life as a human being. But there is a wolf at the door, way back behind me, who’s always there following me.”
At age 62, Jello has no plans on stopping anytime soon. Having built his entire persona around fighting injustice while thinking up new ways to lampoon the unjust is the reason he’s stuck around for long. While many of his colleagues have either passed away or faded into obscure curmudgeonry, Biafra keeps walking that tightrope.
“I cannot stress enough how grateful I am that people dug our music in the first place,” he concludes.” And my spoken word stuff, and everything else, to the point where I’m still able to sustain myself on my big mouth and bad attitude. I don’t think anybody would give me a real job. Even if it was in a record store or as a bartender. I don’t know how to make drinks! What good am I? I went to UC Santa Cruz for one quarter, studying Beginning Acting and History of Paraguay. And then went straight into punk and never looked back.”
Pick up a copy here
