Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (CD - 1980)

Additional personnel: 6025 (guitar); Paul Roessler, Ninotchka (keyboards).

Recorded at Moibus Music, San Francisco, California.

All tracks have been digitally remastered.

Dead Kennedys: Jello Biafra (vocals); East Bay Ray (guitar); Klaus Flouride (bass guitar); Ted (drums).

Additional personnel: 6025 (guitar); Paul Roessler, Ninotchka (keyboards).

To followers of the early-'80s West Coast punk scene, few acts have greater import than the Dead Kennedys, and FRESH FRUIT FOR ROTTING VEGETABLES is their definitive work. Fueled by the hyperactive, paranoid rants of frontman Jello Biafra, the band lays out a blueprint for societal upheaval, preaching distrust of everything, and the eventual breakdown of the totalitarian police state in which we live. His disturbing world view is propelled by the guitar stylings of East Bay Ray, who replaced punk's stereotypical volume assault with carefully chosen and flawlessly executed bursts of musical sarcasm and frightening sonic inventiveness.

The album's opener, "Kill the Poor," is a jubilant excoriation of society's treatment of poverty. Songs like "Let's Lynch The Landlord" and "Stealing Peoples' Mail" provide detailed (and hysterically funny) plans for undermining society's oppression, as does "Chemical Warfare," which even goes so far as to act out the violent rebellion. This was rage of unprecedented intellect, vitriol whose eloquence only served to make it more effective. The politics of the classics "Holiday In Cambodia" and "California Uber Alles" are extreme and violent, but also expertly stated and brilliantly executed. minimize