Dead Kennedys: Bedtime for Democracy

Dead Kennedys: Bedtime for Democracy

1986

Alternative Tentacles Records

Format I Own it on: Compact Disc

Track Listing: 1. Take This Job and Shove It  2. Hop with the Jet Set  3. Dear Abby  4. Rambozo the Clown  5. Fleshdunce  6. The Great Wall  7. Shrink  8. Triumph of the Swill  9. Macho Insecurity  10. I Spy  11. Cesspools in Eden  12. One-Way Ticket to Pluto  13. Do the Slag  14. A Commercial  15. Gone with My Wind  16. Anarchy for Sale  17. Chickenshit Conformist  18. Where Do Ya Draw the Line  19. Potshot Heard 'Round the World  20. D.M.S.O.  21. Lie Detector



**** Note: It's late and I'm too tired to edit, so I'm just posting this (despite the fact that every time I take a quick glance at this post I spot another glaring error)...Hey, look at it this way...You can test your editing skills at home on this raw, unedited post! A fine, constructive way to spend a Thursday....***********


Ugh, my portable CD player broke when I started my shift at work yesterday...The good news is that it has an FM radio built in, so I can listen to that...The bad news is that I have to listen to 8 hours of radio everyday...I don't know where you live (a few guesses, either Hale, Michigan, Tempe. AZ or Tucson, AZ) but radio here in the Tempe/Phoenix area is the worst! I can't even take 5 seconds of modern auto-tune pop radio and there's no way I'm going to spend the day listening to Tejano, so that leaves about 1 classic rock station, 1 active rock station, 1 soft rock station and 1 random hits of the 60's, 70's, and 80's (with that horrible Sheryl Crow/Kid Rock duet from the 2000's thrown in for good measure) station,  so I usually flick back and forth between those three stations...I've had people recommend NPR, but holy Christ, is NPR boring! 

In the eight hours I listened to radio yesterday I heard that acoustic Green Day graduation/last episode of Seinfeld song three times!!!

 Same with "Another Brick in the Wall Part 2."  I also had to listen to Creed...To be more accurate I had to listen to about 80 different Creeds... Who the hell started that Creed style of singing where everything is delivered in a manly, blustery manner in an octave lower than usual?  I heard Jeff Tweedy of Wilco refer to it as the "Singing Mule" style, which is perfect...Was it Alice in Chains? Pearl Jam? If so...

FUCK YOU ALICE AND CHAINS AND PEARL JAM!! WHAT HELL HATH YOU WROUGHT UPON MY EARS?!?!?!?! Nahhh, I guess that's not fair...I'm sure they had no idea what they had unleashed...Actually, thinking back, I believe the Stone Temple Pilots were officially the one too many...



I also heard a new Avenged Sevenfold song that sounded so much like Metallica's "Sad But True" that I couldn't believe it! It's seriously exactly the same except the words are different!! Check it out if you don't believe me!

...and here's the Metallica one...Or it might just be the Avenged Sevenfold again...It's hard to tell...

But man, those Avenged Sevenfold guys are brave...

Sure, bitchy T-shirts aside,  Overkill was pretty cool about letting them steal their logo, but Metallica have a pretty litigious reputation... Oh yea, another thing that blew my mind...Somebody actually called in to request "Sweet Home Alabama"!!! Who in the hell hasn't had enough of that song?!?! Why even bother calling? You know they're going to play it every five minutes anyway!  Either way, I bought a new CD player and hopefully that'll be the last I hear of the radio for another 10 years...

Anyway, I didn't invite you here to bitch about the radio all day...I invited you here to talk about the final Dead Kennedys album, "Bedtime for Democracy"...

 It's weird that this is the only DK album I don't have on vinyl, since it was the first one of the first records I ever bought ..I must have given my copy to a friend or something...It's also weird that at one point in time this was easily my favorite Dead Kennedys album, since it's probably my least favorite one now...I don't know why my perception of it changed so much...I think I might have been blinded over how brilliant the best tracks on the album are (there really are some stunners) but for the most part a lot of it is kind of an indistinguishable, samey-sounding (although pretty exciting) blur...

It's one of those instances where the lyrics are stronger than the music. In the past the incredible lyrics were matched to ace melodies and interesting instrumentation, but now the music kind of just functions as a plain, white backing...It might be their decision to go back to "In God We Trust, Inc"-style straight hardcore, however lacking the raw enthusiasm for hardcore they once had...Still, there's some knockout stuff here that ranks above my favorite DK material...I love "Shrink" which has a hilarious sci-fi concept...Basically, to overcome overpopulation and the dwindling of Earth's resources, they come up with a plan to shrink people to insect size, but of course once all the common citizens (and their poodles) are shrunk the people in power break it to them that they, of course, won't be joining in:

"So now you've made the big shrink
Meanwhile we'll keep acting big
We well-bred beautiful people
Who says we have to go too?
Cops and Mason businessmen
Were exempted from the ovens.
As if you weren't already
the rest of you are all our termites now..."

It works so well because the great idea is matched to a catchy melody that won't leave your head...Compare this to "D.M.S.O" or "Dear Abby" which also have funny and smart concepts, but ultimately fail because there's no melody at all (That said, one of the most amusing things on the album is "A Commercial" which is essentially spoken-word)...

The best songs on here expand on the mid-tempo "Frankenchrist" style."Chickenshit Conformist" being one of my personal favorites...It's kind of heartbreaking to hear the normally indefatigable Jello Biafra finally giving up and outlining his disillusionment with the punk scene. The lyrics couldn't be more dead-on:

"If the music's gotten boring
It's because of the people who want everyone to sound the same
Who drive the bright people out of our so-called scene
Till all that's left is a meaningless fad...

Who played last night?
"I don't know, I forgot.
But diving off the stage Was a lot of fun"..."

And "Cesspools in Eden" is just the band doing what they do best...Revealing the (this time literally) poisonous underbelly of the American Dream over a creepy crawly soundtrack...Dream homes built over toxic waste dumps...Nothing to do but drink pink lemonade and watch Martinez burn...

So yea, if I was forced to rank DK albums this would be on the bottom, but that's not really indicative of its quality...It still rules, it's just that not every album can be the best one...Still, I can imagine punk purists ranking this much higher than more experimental offerings like "Plastic Surgery Disasters" or "Frankenchrist." It's just that my personal tastes lean more towards their more "out-there" stuff..The overall quality of the band's output was so high anyway that ranking the albums against each other is pretty pointless...

Let's just shut up and listen to "Shrink" by the Dead Kennedys...Enjoy...