The Artwork of the Dead Kennedys

This chapter examines how the visual aesthetic of Dead Kennedys embodied a politicised ideology that had a wide-ranging impact on second-wave punk. It documents how the tentative visual aesthetic of the first album was transformed into a powerful and coherent visual language through the collaboration with West Coast artist and illustrator Winston Smith, whose “Cross of Money” artwork adorned the front cover of the band’s second major release, “In God We Trust, Inc.” The EP release coincided with a dramatic change in political power in the US, and the focus of the band’s ire - which had been directed towards Democrat figures such as Jerry Brown and Dan White and hypocritical liberal college kids (lampooned in the first album’s standout track Holiday in Cambodia) – found its natural target in the new regime. The collages accompanying the band’s subsequent record releases juxtaposed photos featuring police brutality, Orwellian State repression and the Reagan government’s murderous foreign policy, with lifestyle magazines and advertising from the 1950s, critiquing the hollowness of the new focus on “family values.”

The chapter contextualises the band within the visual history of punk, with a special focus on the parallels with the UK anarcho-punk band and collective, Crass (1977-84). Lead singer Jello Biafra is on record saying that one of the impetuses for the formation of the band was looking at what Crass had achieved and wondering “Imagine if Crass were funny.” Once Smith got involved, the association becomes much deeper however, and analysis is made of Smith’s aesthetic for Dead Kennedys in comparison with the one that Gee Vaucher created for Crass. The artists, who became close friends, shared preoccupations of State power, warmongering and the prospect of nuclear holocaust, as well as rising social inequality and injustice fostered by the neo-liberal alliance in the West.

Both were also older than many of the protagonists in the 1980s punk scene, and the chapter explores how Smith was inspired by the Dada inflected, alternative art scene in San Francisco, interrogating the design language he cultivated through Fallout (1979-1985), the independent magazine he produced in partnership with the artist, Jayed Scotti. Fallout provided political commentary, spoof flyers and advertisements together with satirical collage and illustration work. The chapter analyses how the experimentation facilitated by this independent format allowed Smith to develop the incisive and iconic music graphics that became inextricably tied with the music and message of Dead Kennedys. In this respect analogies are drawn with the approach of his contemporaries in the UK, Jamie Reid and Gee Vaucher, who used self-produced publications to produce experimental designs that fed into their work for Sex Pistols and Crass respectively.

My methodology draws on a private archive of Smith’s work, for which I’ve been granted access, as well as correspondence with the artist. It situates Smith’s work in the context of 20th century avant-garde art movements. It uses the ideas of Situationist thinker, Guy Debord, to develop insight into how Smith’s collages undermine messages circulated by capitalist mass-media to manipulate society into conformity. It argues that Smith’s work provided a more extreme positioning from which to critique culture in the era of Reagan, due to the pervasiveness of postmodernism. This connects with wider critiques concerning how punk provided a “culture of resistance,” thereby connecting with the radicalism of the former decades.