California Über Alles. Dead Kennedys. 1979. Alternative Tentacles.

 One of the means of expressing resistance to the imposition of mass homogeneity upon a populace by a governmental head or body is the use of satire. It’s a tricky art form to deploy, and our culture is littered with countless examples—including some sacred cows—of failed attempts to execute it. But when satire connects with its intended  target, the results are revelatory, offering clear-eyed perspectives on the machinations of social and cultural institutions, and their insidious, often overlooked, associations. Jello Biafra’s and John Greenway’s lyric for California Über Alles is an absurdist imagining of the American fixation on health and self-improvement as further propagation of governmental control over its citizenry, with some of the funniest lines ever heard on an American record. It may be impossible to hear California Über Alles without thinking of some of the wickedly influential comics who came before Dead Kennedys: Saturday Night Live’s Not Ready for Prime Time Players, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, National Lampoon; which might have been the point. Biafra the activist sought the attention of like-minded individuals who would help effect social change, both on a local and a national level. Yet Biafra’s strength was in artistry, and he was savagely artistic (the artist whose sensibility Biafra’s comes closest to resembling is William Burroughs). California Über Alles is an example of the undiluted rage that fueled not only punk rock, but also the American arts, comedy especially. The propulsive rhythmic attack of the Über Alles backing track helps make fluid the flow of the Biafra/Greenway lyric from humor to outrage and back again to humor.  You get caught up in the cycle until the song’s relentless momentum has carried you to its final chord, by which time Biafra’s vision of a hygienic society thoroughly, and willingly, scrubbed clean of its humanity is complete, cemented in your consciousness, and you never see things the same way again. Humor is the darkest of the black arts. 

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