What is the meaning behind the Dead Kennedys’ band logo?
No band embraced punk rock’s transgressive approach as a method of social commentary and a force for change quite like the Dead Kennedys. Some of their best-known songs, ‘Holiday in Cambodia’, ‘California Über Alles’, and ‘Kill the Poor’, spiked the hearts of pro-establishment liberals and conservatives alike.
Their brand of politically charged satire wasn’t only limited to their songs, though. It ran through the band’s entire image, including the choice of the cover photo for their album Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, which shows a row of police cars on fire during the “White Night Riots” in their native San Francisco.
Even the Dead Kennedys logo was carefully thought out by singer Jello Biafra, with very deliberate political connotations and practical considerations behind the design. Biafra described how he started “drawing out chicken scratches” of the logo idea he had before taking it to local surrealist guerilla artist Winston Smith for the final design.
The fact that Smith’s name matches that of the protagonist in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 only adds to the Dead Kennedys’ legend. But Biafra’s primary considerations with the logo weren’t metaphorical or aesthetic, but purely practical. “I wanted to make sure it was something simple and easy to spray-paint so people would graffiti it all over the place.”
Biafra had the elided letters “DK” – the band’s initials – sketched out already but needed something to go behind it. Smith came back with a few different interpretations, Biafra’s favourite of which was a “bricks” background, which incorporated the graffiti aesthetic directly into the logo.
But in the end, he decided to go with another of Smith’s designs, which used a simple red circle as the backdrop for 3-D embossed black lettering. The plain red and black colour combination represents the band’s anarchist political leanings. The red circle resembles the bullseye of a darts board, too, as though reflecting how the group is aiming squarely at a target with its art.
However, the sharp-edged black being embossed with white shadowing, combined with the circular shape of the red background, is also reminiscent of a very different political symbol. It is clearly a nod to the Nazi swastika, a symbol the punk rock movement has consistently flirted with since it began.
You can’t get more controversial than Nazi iconography. Yet, in the case of the Dead Kennedys, it was in keeping with the frequent allusions to Nazism in their songs. They satirised the American establishment of the late 1970s and early 1980s by pushing the politics of the ruling elite to what they saw as its logical extreme – outright fascism. Their own political stance couldn’t have been further from such a position.
What’s more, Biafra’s instincts about the practicalities of the design’s simplicity were proven right. In a 2007 interview. he described the extent of the logo’s reach, with graffitied versions of it popping up “behind the Iron Curtain in some of the most repressed former Communist countries”, as well as in the Palestinian West Bank and rural Minnesota.
Regardless of how its political subtext can be read, then, the logo is undoubtedly an iconic symbol of defiance, freely asserting an identity and DIY artwork. A fitting reflection of the Dead Kennedys themselves.
