'Shooting The Shit'
from Maximumrocknroll #11, 1984
WITH
JELLO BIAFRA, DEAD KENNEDYS
VALE, SEARCH & DESTROY and RE/SEARCH
JEFF BALE, MAXIMUM RNR
TIM YOHANNAN, MAXIMUM RNR
and verbal graffiti by:
FRANK DISCUSSION, FEEDERZ
VALE: Did you see anything interesting the last time you were in Europe?
BIAFRA: There's this film that's shown around Europe and other Second and Third World countries called This Is America. It was shot at the Mabuhay right after the Mayoral campaign [when Biafra ran for mayor].
MAX R&R: Where was it?
BIAFRA: We saw it in Helsinki in a porno theater. They showed a car wash in L.A. where women washed cars with their tits -- I think that was staged just for the movie. But, one of the reasons I think they didn't show the movie in this country is that they showed how Kentucky Fried Chicken is made. They never said it was Kentucky Fried Chicken, but they flashed "Kentucky Fried Chicken" beforehand, saying, "Do you wonder where this comes from?" And it showed row upon row of these featherless, bald, globby chickens who were unable to fly. They'd been bred to be this way; they couldn't even move. They spend their whole lives in one cage and are fed their own shit over and over again -- it drops to the ground, and is recycled in this massive whirlpool which they also showed. After they kill the chickens, they have to inject them with flavor enhancers just to make them taste like chicken.
FRANK DISCUSSION: Well, there's nothing new about that. People, too, are put into boxes and fed a bunch of shit all their 'useful' lives. It's called work.
BIAFRA: Klaus's girlfriend Jean uncovered this information about pig farms. Now they have these stacked cages where pigs are raised -- they're injected and fed and fattened up as quickly as possible. So they grow to fit the cage -- they're shaped like a rectangular cube when they're shoved out and minced into pork and bacon and sausage.
VALE: That's just bending animal biology in the direction of agribusiness mechanization, which started in the Fifties with the square tomato.
BIAFRA: Yes, tomatoes. Agribusiness has streamlined the tomato, settling on a few favorite hybrids with that nice, red, tomatoey color, although they may not be the most nourishing or the most tasty... In the seed industry, Northrop King has a monopoly with this tomato -- you've got to buy it. So now there's one species of tomato taking over where there used to be 3500. If there's ever any kind of disease that they can't burn off with their pesticides, it'll be like the Irish Potato Famine again. The Topco syndrome comes back...
TIM: The what? Topco?
BIAFRA: This is the Age of Topco: slowly (but surely) as our civilization or industrialized world falls into decline and repetition and runs out of ideas, stupid descendants take over companies that were built by geniuses way back when.
Topco is a company based in Skokie, Illinois, that makes a lot of generic food products and grocery brand foods that you see in stores in the Midwest. Topco products can always been distinguished from regular products: 1) the packaging is always worse, 2) it's always a few grades worse -- the light bulbs often don't work, the toilet paper falls apart in your hand, the food tastes awful. It's always a few grades below what you'd pay 10 cents more for. Topco has this symbol like a flower on all their products, and the legend: "Manufactured by Topco -- Our Finest Quality."
Applied to other situations -- when Gerald Ford was President, what could be a more Topco brand of President than Gerald Ford? Topco music floods the airwaves, the Carter family was the Topco Kennedys, Topco rockabilly is the Stray Cats.
VALE: I think a lot of this decline is due to the rise of cost acountancy -- cost accountants are running everything now...
BIAFRA: The system feeds itself. Remember the quasi-racist sociological theories about, say, Arkansas hillbilly towns. Where you'd have whole little towns full of retards, because everybody had fucked each other for several generations. This has now happened among the rich ruling classes in the industrialized world. So now you have these really stupid people running things who are only interested in short-term gains for themselves, who have no long-term vision at all. Gerald Ford epitomizes this: he only wanted to maintain the status quo, and didn't have a clue about what to do with the future. Sha la la, let's live for today, in practice.
FRANK: That's what's called the 'Standard of Living.'
BIAFRA: The DuPont Corporation is the same family-run multinational for generations, but how can you possibly expect these people to be as intelligent as their forefathers, when there's been genetic inbreeding going on with other rich bluebloods. Slowly but surely their intelligence pool is draining away... I mean, how many people who own General Electric today could actually figure out on their own how to build a toaster from scratch?
FRANK: They're only interested in extending a miserable past into a boring and miserable future. More profit there.
JEFF: I was looking at a Fortune magazine list of the 500 Wealthiest Families, and so many of the people on this list inherited their wealth and haven't a clue as to how it was once engendered.
TIM: But don't you think you're giving the originals a bit too much credit for intelligence?
BIAFRA: When the Industrial Revolution was breaking out of its egg and you didn't have things like mass-produced automobiles and airplanes, it definitely took some kind of intelligence and know-how to come up with those things.
VALE: The impetus behind the Industrial Revolution was design for democracy, so that everybody, not just the rich, could have a car and a toaster...
JEFF: A lot of people really believed in those things.
BIAFRA: Now, the Graph Paper heads who run these companies haven't a clue as to how they got there. And what better example than the big-time music industry? At any level, how many fans are there, except in the very small independents? I mean, how many people at Warner Brothers really like music, let alone actively search out anything interesting or new?
TIM: Do you think they did 20 or 30 years ago?
VALE: Well, in the Thirties and Forties you had John Hammond running Columbia Records; he almost single-handedly was responsible for 'discovering' and documenting most of the major American blues artists.
BIAFRA: An exception. If it were up to most of those old record company presidents, we'd still be listening to Glenn Miller now, wearing those same Lounge Lizard suits with those same haircuts --
VALE: It's total necro-culture on every level.
FRANK: Culture is an invasion of life -- that's a graffiti from the Paris riots.
BIAFRA: In San Francisco you can see billboards with old pictures of Jefferson Airplane with their skin painted ghostly grey: "We still play their songs." -- KCBS radio, who won't play anything new or adventurous --
FRANK: But in a society that abolishes all adventures, the only thing new and exciting would be abolishing them --
JEFF: What counts is shifting units --
BIAFRA: It's not fun, it's not music, it's units.
FRANK: Yes, everything would be fine if we'd only agree to be proper 'units' like nature intended. You know, 'Unit Music for Unit People.' All designed to work us into a shopping frenzy.
VALE: So, isn't the point of all this new music to get a different message across? But, what are you going to do -- tell everyone to learn how to make bombs and leave them at Neiman-Marcus restaurants (which happened recently). Somebody also blew up the phone booth outside Mama's restaurant at Washington Square Park -- what exactly did that accomplish?
BIAFRA: I like this new 8 1/2x11" sticker that Frank made: a big 'happy face,' designed to be pasted on entrances to department stores and the like, that says 'Shoplifting Zone.' In some ways that could be more effective than blowing up a phone booth, especially if you used an indellible glue and it stayed up for more than 2 hours.
FRANK: I ain't gonna shed no tears over a goddamned phone booth, especially when everything that surrounds us participates in keeping us in submission. To 'destroy what bores you' is quite appropriate. In this case, somebody just chose to 'redecorate' their landscape on their own terms.
JEFF: Well, I don't see the point in blowing up a phone booth, unless it's inside the Pacific Telephone building --
VALE: Even then I don't see the point. I can definitely see the point in blowing up the IT&T Board of Directors -- that might do something, but actually, all that would do is create a lot more business for the booming 'security industry.' Although, corporations themselves have historically practiced espionage and assassination as means of wiping out the competition. Only recently has there arisen a new genre of detective fiction, all about corporate murder, crime and theft, with writers like Timothy Harris, early Ken Follett... But corporate crime exposes don't seem to change anything. What happened after Polanski's Chinatown came out? Nothing.
TIM: Backtracking a little, when we were talking about change; I wanted to ask you both about your perspectives on how this music scene has changed.
VALE: I don't believe in any 'scene.' When it comes down to it -- you're born alone, you die alone, and what counts is your individual life lived according to your personal will and desires. I only believe in individuals, and there's very few interesting indiduals on the whole bloody planet -- maybe about 1 to 1 million. Of course, if there were more interesting individuals around, the world would be more fun --
BIAFRA: More to the point, convincing people that Yes, they're interesting, and there's hidden talent in there waiting to come out... Also, interesting people can learn from people who may not think that they're interesting. That sounds real generalized, but, putting it another way -- if all you ever talk to is other musicians all the time, and other people in the music 'scene,' pretty soon you end up with tunnel vision revolving solely around music, music scene, world as interpreted by music scene -- personal soap operas. Whereas, if you get information from different kinds of people who have nothing to do with your music or music scene, who lack stereotypical dress and attitudes, you can learn a lot more.
VALE: I try to stay awake enough to look for every possible source of deviance.
BIAFRA: Most people are born with some kind of unique and special talent; unfortunately most people either never realize what talent they have and apply it, or worse -- especially in the American school system -- are encouraged not to develop it. And so part of what we're trying to get across is for people to believe in themselves. I think that's a basic goal, even for people who are coming from very different angles: to look inward and find something unique about themselves and make it grow.
VALE: Just to focus on every aspect of deviancy is this so-called culture seems to work, specifically as a technique. To investigate deviancy.
BIAFRA: The joy of being weird.
VALE: Yes, and I think it's important to totally dis-affiliate yourself from the notion of a scene, or a group, or anything except individuals.
BIAFRA: When you circulate within only one scene, that scene becomes the normality. The normal. And you worry about whether or not you're normal or cool. One thing I've had to always fall back on is that I've always been like a social outcast since I started school. And towards the end of elementary school I learned to thrive on that and enjoy it and realize how being kind of cast to one side could work in my favor, both in learning things and in developing the ability to fuck things up in the status quo. Now, in some cities where underground scenes are taken for granted, it's important to realize that now this [underground] is a new normality. And there are people who worry very deeply about whether they're cool -- in other words, whether they rebel properly, according to proper rebel etiquette.
FRANK: Well, it can be important to know whether you wash your hands before or after you loot a department store.
JEFF: Exactly.
TIM: Well, now people are developing their 'self' and they're pleasing themselves -- what does that add up in terms of potential for change? Even if everyone found that 'special aspect' in themselves, then what?
BIAFRA: You're spreading some disease --
VALE: Anyone who takes their brain seriously does active research, because the kind of information that is relevant, subversive, and deviant is not handed to you by the mass media. Reagan succeeds so well because of television, yet he consistently gives false and incomplete information --
BIAFRA: But it's critical to keep in touch with how the other half -- 99% -- lives.
VALE: But if you watch a lot of television, the hardest thing to do is maintain a critical, scalpel-edged eye on everything. Because the way television works is, you see napalm, then deodorants, a plane wreck, then panty shields, and it all turns into one continuous commercial which numbs you out of sheer volume of image assault.
FRANK: I've stolen some of my best material from adverts, then I just advertise different things, that's all. The news, etc., overloads (or underloads) with facts, which is just information as a commodity. Real knowledge is elsewhere.
JEFF: The problem of image overload -- it's totally impossible for people, unless they really train their minds, to distinguish between what's relevant and what's not. Personally, I think reading should be emphasized a lot more, because this whole idea of passive observation --
FRANK: Like punk or hardcore shows?
VALE: The thing is, school turns you off to reading.
BIAFRA: Starting in the second grade, once you're taught how to make a little bit of sense out of words, next you're punished for not making a perfect letter B in penmanship. Or, you're punished for trying to write something on your own when you hadn't finished your math.
FRANK: Yeah, school is their way of getting you to accept that your life is occupied territory. Ever wonder why they call a job your 'occupation'?
BIAFRA: In order for an industrial society to turn out an efficient work force, you have to make people numb -- numb to boredom -- at a very early age. So you can have people who are numb enough to do their job and not ask questions.
You'll notice that from a very early age now it's an accepted thing that nobody likes their job. Nobody likes the activity they do that takes up a good chunk of their time each day, just to get money. But this is an accepted thing: you're not going to like your job, so just get used to the idea. Don't search for something you like to do that you can live off of -- be prepared to accept a shit job. And that's a breaking of the spirit that begins at a very, very early age. Daddy comes home from work and he's tired. It's not like Daddy comes home from work and he's excited.
FRANK: It's blatantly admitted that work is just so much wasted time. Miller time is before you got to work, not after. Some people are starting to realize that full employment is a threat, not a promise!
VALE: People are indoctrinated with the idea that it's normal and natural to get a job. Rather than deciding what do I really want to accomplish with my life? instead it's, Well, I'd better get a job.
BIAFRA: And it has to be a job. It can't be like building your own Watts Towers or whatever.
FRANK: Or making some pretty ruins of... let's say, San Francisco.
JEFF: People's sense of outrage gets numbed early in life. Like, you come to expect that corruption is "just part of government."
BIAFRA: In my United States Government class we were taught to accept corruption. The textbook had drawings of those happy, atomic age smiling, wavy-haired, clean-cut, pinstripe-suited politicians walking down an aisle, with people holding out their palms and smiling at them, labeled 'farm lobby,' 'business lobby,' 'General Motors lobby,' etc. Politicians by definition are bought off and accountable to highly-organized, well-funded pressure groups. If we ever want to have any kind of impact like this, it requires more money than any of us have combined.
For example, if you really want to convince people that it's time to stop covert aid to Nicaragua, and stop American involvement in El Salvador, then who's got the money to rent that billboard that Camel has now? The one right over the main freeway into downtown where all he commuters get stuck during rush hour. If that billboard had a real horrific photo of a woman whose face was melted by acid by Green Berets in El Salvador (that's on MDC's EP sleeve, anyway) maybe it would have an impact.
JEFF: There was a billboard saying "Stop U.S. Intervention in El Salvador" around the Bay Area. It had a picture of a helicopter on it.
VALE: But the trouble was, it wasn't a product of the J. Walter Thompson Agency, who know how to really get you. It was just a boring ineffectual slogan.
FRANK: Hell, the Left's still trying to re-live the 1917 failure -- er, revolution -- in Russia. You can't expect such mentalities to produce anything but endless repetitions of the same old insipid, meaningless slogans and causes -- to bore us to death, I suppose. Does anyone really believe that shit will really change anything, here or there? The Left loves to whine about faraway places. That way, maybe no one will notice how pathetic and ineffectual they really are.
JEFF: That's right -- the picture was totally neutral even though the words were suggestive of something.
BIAFRA: Not to mention that people are immune now to anything that doesn't act like an axe-blade between their eyes.
VALE: The violence-reaction threshold is so high now because of TV.
BIAFRA: That's why some of our more 'humorous' songs, like "Kill the Poor," were picked up on by a lot of people who have since gotten down on us for getting too serious. It gave them an out -- "Ha ha, funny joke" -- without their having to really come to terms with the underlying message. And so when something really horrific like "Bleed for Me" came out -- people in straight media (as well as people who liked the DKS during the "Fresh Fruit" era) think this is just going too far. They say, "These guys don't have any sense of humor anymore -- they're preachy now."
"Bleed for Me" was a partially successful attempt at an illustration of torture and repression in countries including our own, and who funds it any why, but it was deliberately trying to give an Alice Cooper-type graphic illustration of horror. It seems to have struck precisely the raw nerve we hoped it would.
TIM: You really thought that was the impact it would have?
BIAFRA: It's affected some people that way, and other people in other ways.
JEFF: Some people probably didn't even know what the song was about!
VALE: Blame the school system for that --
BIAFRA: The Weekly World News ran an article, accompanied by out-take photos from old Wolfman movies, about how Russia is breeding a new subhuman race to do its dirty work and fight in its armies in order to take over America. But what kind of threat is that when we're already surrounded by a subhuman threat all around us? In order to turn out a race like this, the schools emphasize learning rules, like submitting to your coach or your P.E. teacher, and learning that the way to get by is by being tough, macho and simultaneously submissive to higher authority. Or, they flood the mind with swill, such as complicated, bullshit mathematics that most people are never going to apply to their daily lives.
While emphasizing the macho male image, they push the "new working woman on the go." She's helping bring home the bacon for the bank account, but not asking questions why. So you have these people -- Vince Lombardi damage is at work here -- who have this goal drilled into them that winning isn't everything, it's the only thing. These people are not interested in any kind of craftsmanship, or any kind of real deep satisfaction or self-respect, because they're just interested in the "short-term win" as defined by straight media. That's what's dealt with in our "Trust Your Mechanic" song. The guy who fixes cars isn't doing it because he's into cars or the beauty of the automobile or making an old car run good for years on end. He's interested in making them fall apart so people will bring them in more often.
The same attitude characterizes doctors in this country. There's so much unnecessary surgery -- the cancer industry is the worst example of all. America is the only really big country in the industrialized world that doesn't have nationalized medicine. Just across the Canadian border, health insurance is taken for granted as something everyone has...
JEFF: The American medical establishment is unbelievably disgusting --
FRANK: It's not medicine. Never mind holistic medicine -- here's holistic repression. It all just seems so normal. Advertising, subliminals and the other techniques used to condition us and 'modify' our behavior can be used to de-condition us. So, a society that prides itself on its constant modernization meets its modernized negation. Hello!
VALE: In a controlled society, the only possible freedom is going out of control --
BIAFRA: The control isn't so much fear of repression by the state, it's fear of peer repression: I'm inadequate, I'm not keeping up with the Joneses, I don't have as cool a stereo, I don't have as much cocaine, I don't have as many studs on the back of my leather jacket. Do I have as many cool toys as my peers? In a way it's almost government by fun. You're inadequate if you're not having as much fun as Cheryl Tiegs! That's how you breed the insecurity that keeps people tapping into fad after fad after fad, without setting any long-term goals for themselves, or noticing the lack of them in their society.
In England, detergent isn't sold as a "fun" experience, it's sold as "This will help you cut corners, and be a more efficient housewife." It's sold as a need rather than as a fun experience.
TIM: That hasn't changed with the incursion of American television?
JEFF: They're really thrilled by the prospect of doing their laundry.
BIAFRA: It's more the thrill of cutting corners.
VALE: All these media offer us a parallel, idealized life for us to try and approximate.
FRANK: They just want us to achieve a "New Freedom." We can solve our differences -- "Shout it out!"
VALE: Speaking of differences, do you watch Russian TV or read Russian daily newspapers?
BIAFRA: Pravda, the daily swill paper over there, usually has only about 8 pages per day. It's the same paper for everyone, there aren't local editions with local news. In other words, what people don't know...
JEFF: That's misinformation --
FRANK: Oh, I know her...
JEFF: Look, that isn't true. Pravda is the national newspaper of the U.S.S.R. But there are all kind of different localized media in the Soviet Union, although they all follow the party line.
FRANK: Both local and general anaesthesia -- a constant parade of 'events' to help people forget the non-event of their lives...
BIAFRA: OK Pravda is the national newspaper, kept short and to the point -- nothing too in-depth, because what people don't know won't hurt them. And the less they know the less they'll ask questions.
Now in this country, you'll remember awhile back that President Reagan made a call for more "happy news." He was tired of hearing bad news and people criticizing him or making fun of him -- "let's have happy news!" Suddenly, presto, in vandal-proof newstands all over the country -- even in a little crossroads town in Mississippi -- we have, beamed via a satellite, the USA Today. Happy news! Generic news with very little depth, and the tone is always: "It's going to be another sunny weekend; let's go to the beach!"
JEFF: Or they'll say, "More good news on the economic recovery!"
BIAFRA: And the same kind of bright greens and yellows you find in McDonaldland glasses that you get free at their fast-foodstands. Those are the colors that USA Today uses for their graphs showing that the economy is prospering -- going up, up, up. It's just one fucking lie with a smiling face on top of another.
FRANK: That's good news for parakeet fanciers who want to make their pets in their cages happier --
BIAFRA: The point I'm making is, now America has its own Pravda.
JEFF: I don't agree, because in Pravda there's 10 times more international news, and in-depth international news, even though it all follows the party line...
TIM: They don't go in for sensationalistic stuff and plane crashes [this interview preceded Sept 1!]
JEFF: They don't have two pages about somebody losing their cat in Hayward. There's a lot more meatly, political analyses of world events.
BIAFRA: My favorite, the most blatant propaganda newspaper in this country, is the Weekly World News, with headlines like "Survey Proves Most Americans Love Their Jobs."
FRANK: I'd agree with that headline. At work I'm constantly thinking to myself, "God, how I love my job," and, "Frank, please repeat those useless gestures 'til the juice runs down my leg..."
JEFF: Of course, has anyone you know ever gotten a phone call asking their opinion on any of these subjects? No.
BIAFRA: Everyone should be happy. Follow orders.
FRANK: Well, orders are orders. Authority should be given all the respect it deserves -- got a match?
TIM: Speaking of opinions, do you still think the Dead Kennedys have a potential for spreading the disease, as you put it?
BIAFRA: I think that we're still at the cutting edge of the ice-breaker, moving into different fringes of mainstream society. Even if some of the 'harder-core' have now disowned us and moved on, we're still ones who are bringing in new people. And in order to grow and thrive or just survive and not get jaded and repetitious, every scene/movement/culture has to have an influx of new people.
VALE: It's easy to rebel for a short time; it's very difficult to sustain rebellion --
FRANK: Yes, why don't we stop here and go out and rebel for a short time, OK?
TIM: How do you keep tabs on whether you're still in a position to have an impact while maintaining your 'integrity'? So you don't become like the Clash?
BIAFRA: Well, for one thing I think I'm far more weird and neurotic than anybody in Clash so I just naturally get annoyed with things and question them -- to me that's normal. On another level I'm a die-hard music fan -- I'm always interested in what's coming out and what other people are creating and saying, in somewhat of a fanatical way.
VALE: But who wants to be either a fan or a musician?
TIM: Still, how do you know that you haven't been corrupted?
BIAFRA: I try to be my own and the Dead Kennedys' best critic. In live performance, I try to work as hard as I can to make it good enough to be something that I personally would go and see. I try to enjoy and get something meaningful from other people's work. On a local level you haven't seen us working with a certain monopolistic rock promoter as a matter of choice. On the East Coast, where a lot of people want to see us, it's hard to get gigs. Because we don't want to work with the rock'n'roll mafia, literally, that controls the larger rock'n'roll scene there. And it's harder and harder to find people who will put up with the bullshit to got out and rent a hall and get a show together, especially when they have the rock'n'roll establishment in cahoots with the police trying to shut them down. And in a lot of places, you wind up paying off the bar not to sell booze because you want people under 21 to get in. That's only part of the way it's rigged -- I hope you're in a band someday so you can see the other side of the fence...
TIM: Another sticky question: the Kennedys have records released in 20 countries now --
BIARFA: I would say closer to 10.
TIM: Of all the American bands you're the most renowned. Are you rolling in dough -- are you rich rock stars?
BIAFRA: One of the ways people like the Clash or Devo have gotten supposedly wealthy is that neither of those two bands ever bothered with forming their own labels, or tried to help expedite artwork by anybody else. A lot of our money went into forming Alternative Tentacles records. The purpose of our compilation LP, Let Them Eat Jellybeans, was to alert people overseas and wherever to American talent and diversity. With Alternative Tentacles we got out a number of records by other people which might not have appeared -- the Maximum Rock'n'Roll LP set, 7 Seconds, etc. But not without problems.
TIM: Well, you've still skirted the question of what have you guys done with the large amount of money you made?
BIAFRA: It depends on what you call a lot of money. For example, none of us own houses. We all pay rent and live with roommates. It's not as though we suddenly have gone off to suburbia and bought tract homes. Basically we have been able to live for the past 3 years in income from the band. So on a day-to-day subsistence and existence level we've risen to that level, which is a lot further than many other people in the punk scene have been able to do, and that breeds a certain amount of jealousy. I take great pride in the fact that we've been able to support ourselves through the band without working 8 hours a day at degrading shit jobs that tax our energy and creativity. We sort of rose and fell in the financial department -- at this point the band is pretty much broke.
VALE: You don't have any trust funds hidden away?
BIAFRA: No! I'm not the kind of business whiz who would know enough to dive into the right money market funds the minute I got any money.
VALE: Do you think there's anything wrong with doing something like that, Tim?
TIM: No. The reason I bring up the question is -- you have 'politically-oriented' punk bands who are accused of preachiness. From my perspective, it's important for bands who are talking or singing politically to practice what they preach, in a sense. Bands who make no bones about being out for bucks I have no expectations of.
JEFF: They have no responsibility.
TIM: Bands who are going out to the public and trying to inform and agitate about political matters do have a responsibility to maintain credibility with the public.
BIAFRA: I didn't come from a wealthy background and I've never mixed well with wealthy people; have barely met any in my whole life. My mother's a librarian and my father doesn't work at all. I'm very proud of him -- he works a lot, but he doesn't work any shit jobs, he writes, primarily...
People who expect too much of me, who want to lift me to the level of great leader or guru and thus isolate me as a zoo animal -- thereby putting me below the level of a human being -- I find that ugly. If I got out to other shows, which I do, I don't like getting vibes from some people: "Oh, what's he doing here? There's Biafra the asshole rock star," without ever talking to me. Just viewing me as something to be resented.
JEFF: I think that's inevitable.
BIAFRA: It might be inevitable, but it hurts. I have far more respect for people who walk up to me and say "I think you're full of shit, for this reason...", then sneaking around and stirring up shit behind my back, and refusing to admit they did it. And some of the people who engage in this are some of the most macho people around in 'the scene.' No names will be mentioned, but...
JEFF: I agree, I think it's really depressing, but -- you have to deal with it.
BIAFRA: It's easy, sure -- how would you deal with it?
VALE: Obviously, if you've got your own interests, your own identity, your own goals, and you're busy working on projects of your own choice, then --
TIM: But most of the people that Biafra comes in contact with are quite young, and don't have the accumulated life experience that gives self-identity and self-confidence.
BIAFRA: I don't think that age necessarily determines that. Some young people are very self-assured.
TIM: Some, but that's a rarity.
VALE: I think this whole interview is about potential and rebellion. We're dealing with the problems of developing one's individuality while sustaining rebellion over a long period of time. And you can't just tell people, "Don't conform."
BIAFRA: For the most part most media figures, you've got to admit, are pretty damn suspect.
JEFF: I think a key element in all this is the question of information. You can't just sit back and expect to understand the world by being a passive spectator. You have to motivate yourself to go out and seek out information. You have to go out on your own and try to get as much information as possible and make sense out of it.
BIAFRA: The thing is, seeking out this information and being curious and forming one's own opinion is not drudgery and hard work -- it's fun. Most people don't realize that. They think that reading or trying to dig beyond the surface is a dreadful chore that's boring.
VALE: Blame it on the school system again. If, in high school, you were shown books on forensic pathology -- like, I saw a book just on the pathology of female sex organs, and there was one photo of a double vagina... There's a lot of almost unbelievable information and photos out there.
BIAFRA: You can read The Wall Street Journal and get a totally different angle on news events, as well as some damn good information.
VALE: Critical media are often not on your basic magazine rack. Like Search and Seizure which occasionally reports on legal decisions which could personally affect you. Even with available media, the business section of the daily paper generally has a lot more hard information than the front section -- you just have to draw conclusions, that's all...
One problem with the punk rock scene is -- everything points towards the ideal of the victim. This is paralyzing, and prevents you from actually asserting yourself -- you know, dressing like a victim, being readily categorizable. That's what I see in punk rock -- being proud of being a victim.
JEFF: The glory of glorifying your own misery.
VALE: On the other hand, the post-surf-punk idealization of physical strength and muscle display is a pathetic compensation for lack of the only real power in this world -- brains and money...
BIAFRA: One of the best points Minor Threat has made in song after song is: quit dwelling on your own misery -- get out of it.
TIM: Don't you think that's a constructive stage to go through -- identifying as a victim?
VALE: I think it's inevitable, because when you're young you have no power, absolutely none at all. Except to display violence -- hence your basic street mugging. But you can't stay there...
BIAFRA: Why should adulthood ruin the junior high school joy of mischief? I think part of our role should be to do what we can to encourage the number of troublemakers. One of Frank's greatest hours was -- when he worked in a bank, he perpetrated little, subtle forms of disruption such as putting out-of-order signs on the xerox machines. Or putting memos on the supervisors' desks purportedly written by other supervisors calling emergency meetings. If more people did this --
VALE: Plus, acts like that change your whole attitude -- at least I hope they do...
BIAFRA: No matter how old you are or what you're doing, if you're stuck working in a serf-type job it's your moral obligation to sabotage...
VALE: What I think everybody is feeling a lack of, is being part of a meaningful social experiment in which you could test out a lot of creative possibilities you can only have in an actual social-experimental context.
FRANK: Like free love and living in a hippie commune?
VALE: Ha ha. I think the vocabulary and content of creative rituals, like the intricate trance dances and the sword dance I saw in a Moroccan documentary on Paul Bowles, are sorely lacking in Western 'civilization.'
BIAFRA: The reason people suffer lack of meaning so much in their lives is that they cling to the disposable -- the fads and the fake fun thrown out by the mass media.
VALE: Well, everything in the world is there to be used. I'd like to know more people that are actually working in certain specialties. I'd like to know some actual forensic pathologists, some genuine "computer experts." There's a lot of information out there that we don't even suspect exists! Uncovering the sources is half the battle. Basically, all life can be seen as information processing --
BIAFRA: That's a scary statement: "Life to me is information processing." That could be an IRS auditor talking --
VALE: But on any given topic I usually find that the information I like the most seems to be the hardest to come by. On almost any given topic. And there's no reason on earth why with a cheap computer and a phone (and phones should all be free, as Monte Cazazza reminded us, and so should all video channels, and there should be at least 1000 ideo channels) we shouldn't all have free access to the entire Library of Congress, at the least.
In California Lawyer there was a big color ad for a computer service you can subscribe to if you're a lawyer. Once you're accessed and have the proper passwords (and probably some 'hacker' has long since figured that one out), you can plug in basically any key word and get a readout on all of the rulings on, say, assault with a double-bladed knife as opposed to a single-bladed knife.
JEFF: Well, there's all kind of potentiality and possibilities. The fact is that technology, if properly harnessed and applied, could be a liberation force. But instead it mostly constricts people.
VALE: Also, travel should be almost free all over the world. These potentials exist.
JEFF: Even when you buy your skateboard -- that has political ramifications. With today's technology that skateboard could have cost $5.
TIM: There's this whole anti-political backlash going on now --
VALE: Even if people don't think they're political, they are -- every moment of their life is charged with political content.
JEFF: Fundamentally, people who claim to be anti-political are objectively supporting the status quo through inaction, through lack of an effort to make things better -- to do something better or positive. so in a sense, they're making the task of the ruling groups easier...
BIAFRA: I think all empires must collapse when they get too comfortable, and this empire's collapsing before our very eyes. It's really a very interesting form of vaudeville, and a hideous form at that.
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