History Music / DeadKennedys

** "Pull My Strings" is a scathing attack on the music. More precisely, it is directed towards the promoters of a concert who invited them to it assuming they were a "new wave band".

** "Viva Las Vegas." They even changed the lyrics to heighten the effect.

* MusicIsPolitics: Several of their songs are directly about this trope, most notably "Pull My Strings," which they performed at a music industry awards show. "Pull My Strings" addresses the payola scandal (at the same time as a TakeThat to The Knack's "My Sharona") as well as the HotterAndSexier tendencies of the music industry and a number of other tropes related to record industry politics.

* IntentionallyAwkwardTitle: Jello says that they chose the band name to symbolise the death of the American Dream. They also have several song titles that qualify, most notably "Too Drunk to Fuck." The song became the first UK Top 40 song with the word "fuck" in its title, and when it was announced on the BBC, the announcer simply called it "a record by a group calling themselves the Dead Kennedys."

* D.H. Peligro - Drums, percussion (1981-1986)

** "Pull My Strings" is a scathing attack at the music. More precisely, it is directed towards the promoters of a concert who invited them to it assuming they were a "new wave band".

* BlackComedy: Jello's stage name, which juxtaposes the name of a cheap, mass produced dessert with the infamous Biafran Civil War, one of the more publicised cases of mass starvation in Africa.

* DeadBabyComedy : "Funland at the Beach," and, more obviously, "I Kill Children."

* DissonantSerenity: The intro and outro to ''Plastic Surgery Disasters'' are a wonderful example of this trope, as the sickeningly cheerful voice over contrasts heavily with the {{dystopia}}n content of her speech and the noise freakout the band is playing underneath her.

-->Now don't worry about demonstrations; just pump up your drug supply. So many people have hooked themselves on heroin and amphetamines since we took over; it's just like [[UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar Vietnam.]] We had everybody so busy with LSD they never got too strong. Kept the war functioning just fine. It's easy; we've got our college kids so interested in beer, they don't even care if we start manufacturing germ bombs again. Put a nuclear stockpile in their back yard, they wouldn't even know what it looked like.

* FirstWorldProblems: "Holiday In Cambodia" may be one of the earliest songs to criticize this phenomena, as it's directly about privileged white kids who equate working hard at college with slavery.

* GenreBusting: In part because they played HardcorePunk when it had still been largely an UnbuiltTrope. In some of their songs they display elements of SurfRock, {{Rockabilly}}, SpaghettiWestern soundtracks, PsychedelicRock, and even (occasionally) ProgressiveRock. A few later hardcore bands took some of these influences, but very few of them used ''all'' of them.

** "Advice from Christmas Past," the title the intro to ''Plastic Surgery Disasters'' was given on some releases of the album, refers to ''Literature/AChristmasCarol.''

** "I Kill Children" opens with Jello saying "God told me to skin you alive", [[https://images.genius.com/a29bfd69f2cd7d99be2822d5ac00c6cd.904x519x1.jpg a quote from]] [[https://pt.scribd.com/document/77345042/Chick-Tract-Why-No-Revival-1970 a]] ComicBook/{{Chick Tract}}. (in turn, that got a shout out itself once Dead Kennedys' art director Winston Smith used said phrase for the collage on the cover of Music/GreenDay's ''Music/{{Insomniac}}'')

* GenreBusting[=/=]NeoclassicalPunkZydecoRockabilly: In part because they played HardcorePunk when it had still been largely an UnbuiltTrope. In some of their songs they display elements of SurfRock, {{Rockabilly}}, SpaghettiWestern soundtracks, PsychedelicRock, and even (occasionally) ProgressiveRock. A few later hardcore bands took some of these influences, but very few of them used ''all'' of them.

[[quoteright:341:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/dkny.jpg]]
[[caption-width-right:341: Biafra, Ray, Flouride, and Peligro.]]

* BitingTheHandHumor: "Pull My Strings" (mixed with SugarWiki/AwesomeMoments). Also "Holiday in Cambodia" and a line in "Kill the Poor" ("Creator/JaneFonda on the screen today / Convinced the liberals it's OK!") skewer pretentious, insensitive liberals.

* MohsScaleOfRockAndMetalHardness: They had a wider variety of material than most Hardcore bands, with their [[MinisculeRocking shortest,]] fastest, noisiest tunes being in the hard 7 / low 8 range, most of their tunes being in the 6-7 range and the odd [[SurprisinglyGentleSong outlier]] falling below that.

''I fought the law, and '''I''' won!''

-->Plow through rest area San-O-Lets
-->Splat! goes the lonely salesman
-->Wanking in the men's room

-->''I kill children. I like to see them die.''
-->''I kill children. I make their mommies cry.''

** "I Kill Children" opens with Jello saying "God told me to skin you alive", [[https://images.genius.com/a29bfd69f2cd7d99be2822d5ac00c6cd.904x519x1.jpg a quote from]] [[https://pt.scribd.com/document/77345042/Chick-Tract-Why-No-Revival-1970 a]] ComicBook/{{Chick Tract}}s. (in turn, that got a shout out itself once Dead Kennedys' art director Winston Smith used said phrase for the collage on the cover of Music/GreenDay's ''Music/{{Insomniac}}'')

* BitingTheHandHumor: "Pull My Strings" (mixed with SugarWiki/AwesomeMoments). Also "Holiday in Cambodia"'s skewering of pretentious, insensitive liberals.

* {{Bookends}}: ''Plastic Surgery Disasters'' opens and closes with a noise freakout featuring a [[SpokenWordInMusic voice over]] talking about how you should be medicated into a StepfordSmiler so you can be productive at your job. It's entitled "Advice from [[Literature/AChristmasCarol Christmas Past]]" on some releases.

The same year, Music/JelloBiafra ran for Mayor of San Francisco on a campaign that mixed serious proposals (banning cars within city limits in response to severe pollution problems, allowing neighbourhoods to elect police officers, legalizing squatting in vacant buildings) with outlandish ones (forcing businessmen to wear clown suits, erecting statues of Dan White so the parks department could sell eggs and tomatoes for people to throw at them, hiring unemployed workers as panhandlers in wealthy neighbourhoods), and using the commercial slogan: "There's always room for Jello." He finished [[http://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=130138 third with 3,79% of the votes.]] As he shared the ballot with a DragQueen candidate named ''Sister Boom Boom,'' the San Franciscan authorities responded by passing a law requiring all mayoral candidates in San Francisco to use their real names.

In the late 1990's, the band members got caught up in a complicated royalty dispute, and led to a 1998 fraud trial which stripped Music/JelloBiafra of his rights to the back catalogue and gave them to the other members instead (he lost two further appeals and was forced to pay damages). This burned the bridges between Biafra and Ray, Flouride and Peligro thoroughly, worsened by the others inviting Biafra to reunite the Dead Kennedys, which he refused on moral principles. Dead Kennedys albums were reissued on Manifesto Records and tour dates were announced after the court victory, with [[TheOtherDarrin Brandon Cruz]] replacing Music/JelloBiafra. (Cruz, a FormerChildStar, turned out to be the first in a series of {{Replacement Scrappy}}s -- the new DK's have had ''five'' lead singers so far.) This incarnation has been severely criticized for [[MoneyDearBoy betraying Dead Kennedys' anti-corporate ideals]] and touring without their most important member. Lately, the group's official site has reported that both Flouride and Peligro are leaving due to health issues, leaving Ray the sole original member.

Music/JelloBiafra went on to become a spoken word performer and political activist, sometimes also collaborating with other bands like Music/{{Sepultura}} and Music/{{Melvins}}.

* YourCheatingHeart: Referred to in "I Am the Owl."

Their first single, "California Über Alles," was released in June 1979 on their Alternative Tentacles label. It was the song that [[ImageSong established]] their hallmarks: Ray's psycho surf punk riffs, Biafra's sarcastically biting lyrics (parodying UsefulNotes/{{California}} governor UsefulNotes/JerryBrown as a fascist hippie), and a rejection of the StrictlyFormula loud fast short structure of hardcore punk. During their tour in support, they were invited to perform at the Bay Area Music Awards on 25 March 1980. In typical subversive fashion, the band started "California Über Alles" but stopped quickly and instead played the scathing "Pull My Strings", an attack on the music industry's practices.

* HalloweenSongs: "Halloween" is a variation. It's not about the spooky or supernatural aspects of All Hallows' Eve; its subject is a repressed office worker who uses the holiday as an excuse to dress up and get "shitfaced", while allowing "social regulations" to dictate his behavior the rest of the year.

* TheEmpire: How the [=DKs=] view America. Hell, Biafra even outright calls it "an evil empire" in "Stars and Stripes of Corruption," and ends the song with: "I think I love it more than you / I care enough to fight!"

* GenreBusting / NeoclassicalPunkZydecoRockabilly: In part because they played HardcorePunk when it had still been largely an UnbuiltTrope. In some of their songs they display elements of SurfRock, {{Rockabilly}}, SpaghettiWestern soundtracks, PsychedelicRock, and even (occasionally) ProgressiveRock. A few later hardcore bands took some of these influences, but very few of them used ''all'' of them.

** The band invoked this trope with their first single, 1979's "California Über Alles," which denounced the Golden State's then-Governor Jerry Brown and his hippie followers as "Zen fascists." The second half of the song fantasizes about Brown's regime killing "uncool" people with "organic poison gas." In [[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/18/AR2010071802839_pf.html an interview]] during Brown's successful 2010 campaign to be re-elected as Governor, Biafra said that: "I realized early on that maybe I'd misfired and exaggerated."

* HalloweenSongs: "Halloween" is pretty self-explanatory.

This evolution continued on 1985's ''Music/{{Frankenchrist}},'' which showcased more extended pieces, horns, and synthesizers. High points included the industrial "At My Job," the multi part "Stars and Stripes of Corruption," the organized sports parody "Jock-O-Rama," and the timely "M.T.V. - Get Off the Air." The band got in trouble for including Creator/HRGiger's "Penis Landscape" as a poster with the LP, and were charged with distributing harmful matter to minors. [[{{Pun}} The case ended in a hung jury]] and was dismissed, but it was a PyrrhicVictory, as the cost of the trial drove the band and Alternative Tentacles to near bankruptcy despite donations and support from their fanbase and other PMRC persecuted musicians like Music/FrankZappa. Exhausted, the band broke up in 1986 after releasing their last album ''Bedtime for Democracy,'' a 48 minute final ''tour de force'' employing many musical styles and their expected thought provoking lyrics, which included several songs expressing disillusionment with the state of the punk scene ("Anarchy for Sale," "Chickenshit Conformist"). One compilation of early singles and lost tracks: ''Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death,'' was released in 1987, and the band members went their own way afterward.

* InLoveWithYourCarnage: All but implied in "Kinky Sex Makes the World Go Round."

* HolidayInCambodia

* DrivenToSuicide: The protagonist of "Straight A's," who is [[EducationMama pressured by his parents to excel academically]] and is only sought by classmates if they want to learn what will be on the test, while laughing at his misery otherwise.

* ClusterFBomb: A few of their songs, such as [[CaptainObvious "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" and "Too Drunk to Fuck."]] Probably the majority of their songs have very little to no profanity, though, especially from ''Plastic Surgery Disasters'' onward, and many other uses of the F-word in their discography count as examples of a PrecisionFStrike.

** The variants featuring UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan and Creator/ArnoldSchwarzenegger also qualify, as they depict both as more literal fascists (which, [[RuleOfCautiousEditingJudgement regardless of opinions on them,]] they were not).

Music/JelloBiafra went on to become a spoken word performer and political activist, sometimes also collaborating with other bands like Music/{{Sepultura}} and Lard.