[lbo-talk] DK brouhaha

[B.]

{As well, "Kill Children" was a target of Tipper
Gore's "PMRC" -- boo. Still, I have to agree with Joel
Schalit when he wrote, in _We Owe You Nothing: The
Punk Planet Collected Interviews_,  when he wrote:
"[The DK were] arguably the most important band  in
the history of punk politics. ... [T]he DKs were
instrumental in providing American punk that
transcended the nihilism, ignorance, and stupidity of
the early hardcore scene." (p. 33) Baby killers they
were not. -B.]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Kill_Children

"I Kill Children" is the ninth song on the Dead
Kennedys album Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. It
is sung from the first person perspective of an
unnamed murderer of children. Jello Biafra had said on
his spoken word tours that he wrote the song when he
was 18 years old after thinking about how and why
people became serial killers, and actually considers
it one of his weakest songs. Despite this, it's often
cited out of context by "parental watchdog" groups for
"excessive violence", only citing the chorus:

I kill children/
I like to see them die/
I kill children/

I make their mamas cry
and not considering the bridge, where the protagonist
explains (in a mentally unbalanced way) why he does
what he does.

The line "God told me to skin you alive" may be a
reference to, or possibly influenced the title of God
told Me To Skin You Alive, a Winston Smith artwork
that was also used in the Dead Kennedys' Plastic
Surgery Disasters.


>
> Chriss Doss: 
>
> "But how is filming a rape scene more tasteless than
> singing about how you like to kill children and use
> chemical weapons on golfers?"
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