‘California Über Alles’: Punk’s most seething assault on American politics
Political protest has a long and illustrious history within the realm of popular music, going back to the days of Beatniks and hippies, but it was during the searing explosion of punk rock that this political protest became far more confrontational and defiant, thanks to pioneering groups like Jello Biafra’s Dead Kennedys.
While there had certainly been politically-charged punk outfits before Dead Kennedys, none had been quite as overt or provocative in their activism as the San Francisco outfit. While the likes of The Clash were discussing issues like unemployment, racism, and the authoritative arm of the state, Biafra and the gang were singing about lynching landlords, killing the poor, and, crucially, equating then-Governor of California Jerry Brown to the leader of the Third Reich.
Even the band’s name itself was created for deliberate shock in the conservative landscape of the United States, when the assassinations of both John F and Bobby Kennedy were still relatively fresh in people’s minds.
Dead Kennedys continued that shock factor trend throughout their entire existence, in every aspect of their output, from song titles to album covers. Throughout it all, though, 1979’s ‘California Über Alles’ remained perhaps their most ardent assault on American politics.
Immediately unambiguous in its theming, the single’s title is a parody of ‘Deutschland Über Alles’, the initial stanza of ‘Deutschlandied’, the German national anthem which has heavy connotations to the Nazi regime thanks to its use by Adolf Hitler’s party throughout their rise to power.
Through various literary, cinematic, and historical references, Biafra links the California of the late 1970s to that oppressive regime in the kind of striking satire that Dead Kennedys would soon become synonymous with – namely, those attacks were targeted at Jerry Brown, the California governor who replaced Ronald Reagan in 1975.
At initial glance, that might seem an unlikely target for a group as overtly left-wing as Dead Kennedys; after all, they openly despised Reagan, and Brown was a far more liberal politician to lead California, but the song is told from the perspective of Brown as he institutes a hippie-fascist state where people are dragged away in Orwellian fashion if they are deemed uncool.
While Dead Kennedys were, indeed, more aligned with Brown in a political sense than various Republican governors of the time, Biafra has always been open about his detest of hippiedom. What had begun in earnest as a cultural revolution back in the 1960s had, by 1979, deteriorated to little more than a complacent fashion, in which politicians like Brown would position themselves as hip while simultaneously singing off on oil drilling on the Californian coast.
As such, ‘California Über Alles’ remains a perfect encapsulation of how politicians on both sides of the spectrum exploit their voter base while selling out their own principles to the highest bidder. It also helped to immediately establish the attitude of Dead Kennedys, being one of their very first songs; they took no prisoners, and called out injustice and oppression regardless of whether it was red or blue.
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