A taste of Jello
Biafra brings the spirit of ‘76 with him on his speaking tour
John Kendle

“Home is where the disease is,” Jello Biafra says. “As long as I stay in America, I don’t run out of things to say or to write about.”

That’s how Biafra (pronounced ‘bee-afra,’) reacts when asked why he hasn’t left the U.S.A. for friendlier climes. His country is running riot in the world, so the former Dead Kennedys singer is making damn sure that someone with a loudspeaker and an audience is around to kick against the pricks.

Even though the DKs broke up almost 20 years ago, the former Eric Boucher has become an empowering symbol of punk’s original spirit. He’s a polished speaker, an outspoken critic of capitalist economics and U.S. government policy and he’s still a shit disturber who loves to prank. Since the Kennedys split up in 1986 in the midst of an obscenity trial, Jello has made five spoken-word albums, recorded with several groups (most recently the Melvins) and produced god knows how many acts for Alternative Tentacles, the label he founded 26 years ago so he could release DKs records. Even today, Alternative Tentacles is just as active as its 46-year-old founder, though he says the company is still in debt thanks to a vicious lawsuit courtesy of his former bandmates.

Yes, Biafra remains a punk rock warrior through and through. When Uptown reached him at his San Francisco home, he sounded tired and hoarse. He’s been producing a new album by Metal Urbain, a French band from the first wave of punk in ’76, and so has spent a lot of late nights in a recording studio.

Still, Biafra is one of those guys who’s so well versed with his subject that he speaks in complete paragraphs.

Here’s a selection of what he had to say:

On his name, which juxtaposes a sickly sweet dessert with the name of a country that was the symbol for famine in the 1970s:

(Jesse Jackson) was the only one who ever got weird about my name in three decades of using it.

The more common problem now is that later generations are not as familiar with the Biafra war and have no idea where it came from, although I’ve never shied away from assuming my audience is intelligent and telling them to go and research something I’m yammering on about if they don’t know what it is.

On the state of Africa some 30-plus years removed from the Biafran war:
Many other horrible things like that have happened since. Everything from Darfur to Rwanda to famines in Ethiopia and now even one in Kenya, of all places. Africa has had a much harder time recovering from their nations being divided by European borders than other places have. As long as corporations are able to get away with propping up horrible, corrupt dictators so they can get away with plundering a country’s resources, then that’s what they’re going to do. In South America they’re having a lot more trouble with that these days. But Africa and Central Asia are the very ugliest side of what ‘business as usual’ means. I would even argue that Africa is really ‘post-colonial.’ Instead of military colonization, we’ve moved on to political colonization. All you’ve got to do is sign on the dotted line for a loan from the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank and you are a colony to be plundered and exploited.

On how colonization creates terrorists:
Exhibit A of how globalization and economic colonization can actually cause terrorism would be Pakistan. Why did Dr. Khan (Abdul Qadeer Khan, an award-winning Pakistani scientist) sell gift-wrapped, do-it-yourself build-a-nuclear-bomb kits to Libya and Iran and North Korea? Apparently he didn’t even keep the money; the money went back to the country. Were they that broke? Were they that desperate?

Apparently so, because they’ve closed most of their public school system, too, and allowed them to be replaced by these so-called madrases which are funded and staffed by Saudi hardliners who teach a strict Wahaabi interpretation of the Qur’an and crank out jihad warriors.

This never had to happen. But apparently Pakistan spends 40 per cent of its national budget paying off interest and debts. If the World Bank and the IMF would forgive those debts, perhaps Pakistan could put the money back into building a more neutral secular school system and not be so interested in selling nuclear technology to lunatics