Reykjavík Grapevine - 24.06.2005, Side 14

Paul F Nikolov interviews Jello Biafra
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Becoming the Media
This past June 17th wasn’t
just Iceland’s Independence
Day – it was also Jello
Biafra’s birthday. Jello Biafra
formed the political punk rock
band The Dead Kennedys
in 1978 and created his own
record label, Alternative
Tentacles, in 1979. The Dead
Kennedys took on Reagan’s
America with albums such
as Fresh Fruit for Rotting
Vegetables, In God We Trust,
Inc., Plastic Surgery Disasters
and others. As a result of the
unabashed criticism of the
status quo, Biafra often found
himself under attack from
groups such as the Parental
Music Resource Center, which
was led by Tipper Gore. The
album Frankenchrist would
get Biafra arrested in 1986
because of its inclusion of a
poster by award-winning
artist HR Geiger called
“Penis Landscape.” Charged
with “distribution of harmful
matter to minors,” Biafra
fought the charge in court and
won, but their next album,
Bedtime for Democracy,
would end up being the Dead
Kennedy’s last. After the
band’s demise, Biafra began a
series of spoken word albums
with No More Cocoons in
1987 and has been releasing
spoken word albums and
touring with his material
ever since, speaking to people
on how they can create lasting
and effective change for the
better.
Biafra came to Iceland in 2000 and
gave a spoken-word performance at
Gaukur á Stöng, and has a sizeable
following here, both for his work
with the Dead Kennedys and for his
spoken-word pieces. The Grapevine
spoke with Jello Biafra from his
home in San Francisco where he
continues to run the Alternative
Tentacles record label.
Do you find you get a different
reception as a public speaker than you
do as a musician?
Of course, it’s a different setting.
With music people want to drink,
and get wild and rock, and with
spoken word, people know what’s
going on, they show up more to
listen, find out what’s going on, and
get some brain food.
In 2004, we saw this “Rock for
Change” campaign going on to try to
get people to vote Bush out of office; lots
of money was spent, a lot of big names
signed on, but it didn’t seem to have
that much of an impact. How would
you explain that?
It had a lot of impact actually. There
were five million more young people
voting than last time and most of
them voted against Bush. It’s just
that the other side was able to bring
more voters out through working
with fundamentalist churches, and,
also, they had control of the media,
news reports, and most importantly,
control of the voting machines. So
there was all kinds of cheating that
went on at this election, just like last
election, a lot of the same tactics that
were used in the old days of Martin
Luther King to try to keep African-
Americans from voting in the South,
they were doing all that again, but
they even did the same things in
Ohio and Wisconsin.
In Ohio in particular, all kinds of
stories are coming out about people
not being allowed to vote because
they were black, and deliberately
having a voting machine shortage
in black neighbourhoods, where
people who probably couldn’t afford
to take the whole day off were
kept to wait in the rain for four,
six even eight hours to vote. So a
lot of them had to go home or go
back to work or risk being fired.
And they discovered there were half
as many machines as there were
in the last election in these areas,
but all these other machines were
still sitting in storage that they
didn’t even use. And another tactic
they used both in Florida and in
Ohio – this is what allowed Bush
to steal the earlier election – was
they put a lot of black people off
the voter rolls ahead of time by
computer. They would identify the
neighbourhoods, or where the poor
people were, and then start crossing
people off the voter lists, saying
they were convicted of crimes and
couldn’t vote. And in some cases the
crimes listed in the database were
in the future, you know, “Oh, you
committed a felony three years from
now. You can’t vote.”
If Al Gore had protested this
in 2000, he would probably be
president today, but he didn’t bother
helping the African-Americans. I
don’t know whether he was allergic
to being photographed with civil
rights leaders or what, but he
basically handed the election to
Bush. It was not Ralph Nader of the
Green Party’s fault; it was Gore’s
fault.
Well that pretty much answers the next
question -
And the same thing pretty much
happened in Ohio. All kinds of
crimes were going on but Kerry, very
quickly, the next day, conceded the
election to Bush when he should’ve
been in the streets of Ohio getting
people to surround the capital
building and refuse to leave until
the votes were properly counted.
That’s the sort of thing they did in
Kyrgyzstan, they did in the Ukraine.
That should have happened here,
too. But Kerry decided, “No, I’m
not going to bother, I didn’t really
want to win anyway. It’s not what
the corporations who own me had
in mind.”
There’s been a lot of talk about the
country being divided, that the country
hasn’t been this divided since the civil
rights movement. Do you think the
country is splitting apart?
Well, there’s a very big effort to
divide the country, yes, that’s coming
from corporations, and the right
wing that has control over most of
the mass media outlets. But what a
lot of people in Europe don’t know,
is that we do not have a free press in
America. Not even close. It is not
free in the sense that most of the big
TV networks, and the newspapers,
and the radio stations, are all owned
by global corporations run by very
conservative people who have a
financial interest in aiming the news
reports a certain way. It’s propaganda
just like the Soviet Union or
the Nazis, but it’s more cleverly
disguised. So a lot of the divisiveness
is propaganda where now they even
say, “We live in a red state or a blue
state.” I look out my front door, the
sidewalk is not blue, the air is not
blue, at least not yet until they get
rid of all the pollution laws. The
state I come from is Colorado, in
the middle of the country, and the
state is not coloured red. This is all a