Album: Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables
Year: 1980
I’d heard of Jello Biafra before I’d ever heard a note of the Dead Kennedys’ music.
Back in 1979 — as an early indicator of his lifelong comittment to being a provocateur — he ran for mayor of San Francisco. And as we had a subscription to the San Francisco Chronicle, I followed the news of this punk rock guy running for political office with great interest.
He didn’t win, sadly — that would be Dianne Feinstein, sigh — but I’ve always liked that he did it, and the both the clearly ironic and the clearly serious points of his platform felt equally well thought out and impossible to execute.
More successful in every way, of course, was “Holiday in Cambodia,” a landmark hardcore single, and still one of the most ferocious pieces of music to ever come out of San Francisco. Or maybe anywhere.
Fueled by East Bay Ray’s recontextualization of surf music into thrash, “Holiday in Cambodia” is a clear answer song to the Sex Pistols “Holidays in the Sun,” with Jello trying to one-up Johnny Rotten by positing Cambodia instead of Berlin as a tourist destination.
Whether or not they succeed is besides the point. Personally, I think that “Holidays in the Sun” is perhaps the greatest song from one of the greatest albums ever made, and Jello Biafra just isn’t Johnny Rotten’s equal as a singer.
That said, there’s hasn’t been a moment in the past 30+ years where I’ve eaten rice without Jello’s “You’ll work harder with a gun in your back / for a bowl of rice a day” going through my mind, so there’s that.
There is also this: I much prefer the single version — which I first discovered years later on a punk rock compilation called Burning Ambitions — to the album version. Both feature East Bay Ray’s amazing surf punk guitar and the exact same lyrics, but on the single, the guitar solo just explodes out of Biafra’s screech of “craaaaack!” and doesn’t let up for a second. And during the “Pol Pot” section, Jello just recites:
Pol . . . . . . . Pot
Pol . . . . . . . Pot
Pol . . . . . . . Pot
Pol . . . . . . . Pot
Pol . . . . . . . Pot
Pol . . . . . . . Pot
Pol . . . . . . . Pot
Pol . . . . . . . Pot
Pol . . . . . . . Pot
without ever speeding it up to “PolPot, PolPot, PolPot,” and I think that not speeding it is the better, more menacing choice.
Fan-made video for “Holiday in Cambodia” original single.