Dead Kennedys’ ‘Frankenchrist’ Is Sadly Relevant at 40

Machines are putting people out of work. Economic policies that favor the elite leave the rest of us mired in uncertainty and the most vulnerable of us in dire risk, and promote a dog-eat-dog mentality where the less fortunate are the villains, not the elites who skip out on taxes and make us gag with their opulence and all-consuming greed. Even jobs that appeared safe a few years ago are under threat from the creep of technology.

Christianity joined forces with conservative politics to attempt to force a theocracy by reinforcing that the wannabe fascist in charge is god’s chosen leader. All brought to you with bravado and cocksureness by a group of incompetents in power, unable to be bothered even to hide their corruption, while much of the populace keeps themselves satiated and dulled by sports and television. 

What year is this?

I discovered the Dead Kennedys in the early 1990s as part of my never-ending punk rock phase. At the time, I was learning how little I fit in with my high school’s culture, but I was also too timid to do anything truly transgressive aside from sharing my thoughts. I might have dressed to blend, but my head was screaming for change, alienated from my peers, and finding solace in the music I was discovering. It was a few years after the band broke up, but nothing about it felt dated, especially as the country began its love affair with being at war with Iraq. 

Dead Kennedys‘ satire of the contemporary American culture I was raised on is what appealed to me first. Frankenchrist’s “MTV Get Off the Air” and “Jock-O-Rama” in particular spoke to my life in a Flint, Michigan, high school. Being satisfied with what’s being served up was something I had a tough time understanding once I realized I had options. I found community in the all-ages punk rock club in town, and that became my home away from home most weekends. Of course, we were all working our way through the punk that preceded us to establish our bona fides, and Dead Kennedys were irresistible, from the band name to the artwork. More on that part later. 

Frankenchrist is a state of the union that remains sadly vital on its 40th anniversary. The band’s discography has all of your protest needs covered, from the classic, also sadly relevant again, “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” to the gallows humor of Plastic Surgery Disasters and the searing attack on the Moral Majority In God We Trust, Inc. Jello Biafra’s nightmarish intensity would be too much to take if it wasn’t for his acerbic wit and the band’s insistence on straying from punk dogma for its sound, incorporating surf-sounding guitars, trumpets, and synthesizers.  

Frankenchrist stirred up controversy over the insert poster of H. R. Giger’s Penis Landscape. The band were charged with violating the California Penal Code over the artwork. In 1987, Biafra and Michael Bonnano were acquitted, but Frankenchrist was banned from many record stores. Biafra wound up working the talk show circuit, debating Tipper Gore about the Parents Music Resource Center and censorship, a lightning rod for controversy and a champion of free speech. 

Opener “Soup Is Good Food” is a swipe from a Campbell’s soup ad campaign, is a tale of downsizing and the attendant fallout, all delivered with a sheen of disdain by Biafra, who spouts corporate speak like “The unions agree, sacrifices must be made. Computers never go on strike. To save the working man you gotta put him out to pasture”. It gets worse from there, with budget cuts to unemployment benefits and fudged job numbers. It’s a chilling, funny track led by one of the band’s catchiest riffs that just makes it cut even closer to the bone. 

“Hellnation” delivers the classic Dead Kennedys thrills, a scorching track with a shout-along chorus that points a finger at those who don’t lift a finger to change anything. Another chillingly relevant couplet comes toward the end of the song: “Hellnation’s when the president asks for four more fucking years/Hellnation’s when he gets it by conning poor people and peers”. The sameness of subdivisions and the violence and malaise that takes root there is the focus of “This Could Be Anywhere (This Could Be Everywhere)”, likely to be remedied by those Good Guys with Guns, who also take some friendly fire on “The Goons of Hazzard”.

Sports culture takes it on the chin in “Jock-O-Rama”, a parody of the culture that springs up around football, even tackling the inherent dangers players face before pivoting to the booze-fueled antics of fans who get excused as long as the perpetrators are business majors. Musically, the song swings from a catchy riff to a cheer chant and back again. It’s a savage critique of the culture that springs up around sports, excusing terrible behavior because of athletes’ status. 

Even though “MTV Get Off the Air” is dated in its target, its critique of the homogenization of the music industry is not. The image-conscious MTV era crawled so our TikTok pop stars could run. The algorithm-worshipping bands would have surely been scheming to get on MTV four decades ago. 

Closer “Stars and Stripes of Corruption” is an incendiary state of the union, stacked with provocations for the pearl-clutchers like “Thanks for the toilet paper, but your flag is meaningless to me”. Still, it is also filled with practical advice like legalizing drugs, taxing churches, and “not lying so much and treating other people like dirt”. It’s a platform I’d vote for, a fiery closing argument, and one of the band’s best songs, closing the record on the line, “If we can’t find a way to do better than this, who will?”

Frankenchrist is a full-scale assault on Reagan’s America–the hypocrisy, the seedy undercurrent beneath the slogans, the institutional racism, the blind eye to the suffering of the queer community, and all of it glued together by the threats posed by outsider art and culture and nuclear war. To the Republican Party, a comparison to Reagan is a compliment. Still, his presidency is remembered for corruption, trickle-down economics that didn’t work for the working class, indifference to AIDS, and demonization of inner-city Black Americans glued together by a disdain for anything not in line with “family values”.   

What’s even more disconcerting on this anniversary is that there aren’t many bands carrying the torch of bands like the Dead Kennedys and the Minutemen, whose politics-forward message and outlier status in the punk scenes captured Reagan’s America. Thematically, this year’s model is Detroit’s Big Life, whose The Cost of Progress is a searing account of 2025 America. While that band’s music has more in common with Washington, DC’s Revolution Summer sound, the lyrics on tracks like “Go-Getter”, “Out of Breath”, and “Civilwarland” read like spiritual successors. 

Dead Kennedys released one more album before calling it quits toward the end of the second Reagan term. However, their work remains as vital as ever because we haven’t solved any of the issues we were facing four decades ago. I wish their lyrics seemed dated, time capsules that showed us how far we have come, but instead, I have often only half-joked that I wish Dead Kennedys weren’t so right about everything.