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Jello Biafra – Machine Gun in the Clown’s Hand CD Alternative Tentacles 2003
This album makes me feel physically ill. When I listen to it, my stomach knots up, my head feels like it’s in a vice, and all the muscles of my neck tense up into rocks. I know that doesn’t sound like much of a ringing endorsement, but it is. Since the dissolution of The Dead Kennedys, Jello Biafra has built a name doing his own brand of “spoken word”. But some clarification is needed here: when most people think of spoken work, they picture bad Beatnik poetry scatted in a smoke-filled room with some dude in dark sunglasses playing bongo at the back of the stage. This is not what Jello does. Jello’s brand of spoken word is really more political rhetoric and alternative education. Once he hits the stage, he machine-gun-spits facts, figures, and metaphorical stories about the worst and the darkest of contemporary politics in his nasal voice, peppering it with gallows humor and an eerie sense of timing. He’s sort of a punk rock version of Michael Moore, and Jello also uses comedy to remove some of the bitterness from the pill. This album, like the others, was taped live with an audience, which only reinforces the strength of his rhetoric, giving the listener both a laugh track and a crowd to howl along with, making you feel less alone in your anger. Jello’s speeches tend to ramble all over, following the connections rather than sticking to just one theme, largely to point out how politics and the economy and big business affect one another in ways you might not expect. I had been introduced to No More Cocoons a few years back, and was positively blown away. But since that album was released in 1993, even if it was super-controversial at the time, there was still a safe distance I could keep from my outrage. The Iran-Contra scandal was well behind us (right?) and we didn’t have a Bush in the Whitehouse then (or all the Iran-Contra cronies for that matter), so it seemed like somehow Jello had won. I could be angry with a weird sense of historical pride. But that left me totally unprepared to deal with how much outrage I would feel listening to the three discs of Machine Gun in the Clown’s Hand. The subjects Jello tackles here are profoundly current - from how Bush stole the election to the connection between the war and big business, and so much more - and of course I got this album right as we began bombing Baghdad, so the effect on my psyche was initially more than I could bear. But I’ve returned to it now, and I’ve come to realize that what I initially viewed as a negative or even cynical thing - being forced to confront and understand how hard the shit has hit the fan - was not negative at all. Jello truly believes that, though politics has probably reached one of the lowest points in American history, and corporations now rule our lives like never before, this is not how it should be. And overcoming that sense of powerlessness, even though it might cause a bellyache or two at first, is the most powerful idealism there is. - Michael Houghton
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