Jello Biafra’s Incredibly Strange Interview and dance party with furries: San Francisco, 12/1/18
by Patch O'Furr
Info: Frolicparty.com or Facebook – Frolic with Jello Biafra
Are you a man or are you a mouse?
If you love your fun, die for it!
– The Power of Lard by Lard
Man or mouse: why pick just one? Furries can have their cake and eat it too. (It’s cheese cake, of course!)
That line jumped out of my car music on a drive to San Jose’s PAWcon, on the day after Halloween. Besides rocking my giant ears, I was geeking out about just doing a 45 minute phone call with Jello Biafra.
Jello is a punk legend, the singer for Lard and the Dead Kennedys, the founder of Alternative Tentacles (one of the longest running indie record labels)… and he’s friendly to this fluffy fandom. Is that punk? Well, will it annoy purists and/or make you laugh? Then it just might be. And will the average furry care? I’d say it’s cooler than the times when furries infested the White House and assimilated Insane Clown Posse. If you could put all those things together, and let the mayhem commence with cute animals and crazy clowns doing a coup on the Capitol lawn, it would only be half as outrageous as this amazing event.
Speaking of Halloween, that wasn’t just a date on the calendar. Halloween is a classic Dead Kennedys song, and Jello referenced it when I asked for his thoughts on furries. The song rages against social regulations and asks why people don’t express themselves like that day, every day? So, furries, you got compared to a classic punk rager by the legend who wrote it. (He also wrote Nazi Punks Fuck Off. By the way, Nazi Furs Fuck Off!)
See why I was so stoked? Getting in that spirit also reminds me of Ministry’s Every Day is Halloween; Jello’s band Lard is a metal/industrial collab with the guys from Ministry. And when I asked what his fursona could be, he gave the punkest answer:
I was just about to tweet that this is my all time fav Lard song. This EP sat next to my Dead Kennedys records all throughout high school. It blew my mind hearing Jello's vocals over Ministry's music, and done very hardcore punk style. Absolutely amazing EP.
— Midwest MonsterFest '18 (@TwitchDaWoof) November 2, 2018
(Of course it wouldn’t be some cuddly thing, even though there’s the Lard song about “I wanna be a drug-sniffing dog”)…
Those are some highlights of the interview, but don’t just read it. Come to San Francisco and experience this weird mix of Jello and fur at his Incredibly Strange Dance Party. It’s joining forces with Frolic, the original furry dance party. This maniacal mingle was arranged by Frolic founder DJ Neonbunny, and it definitely won’t suck, even if it has lampreys!
There’s lots of love here. I asked for fan art, and got talent to feature from ex-San Francisco punk furry artist, librarian, and sweetheart/bad ass Boiler Roo.
For the talk, I tried to find out: What does Jello expect from us? How do fun and humor fit with politics? And what are good ways to tell nazis to fuck off?
Patch: Hi, is this Jello? Can you hear me okay?
Jello: Yeah, I’m fine. And suddenly you started getting garbled, so be very careful of where you place your orifice. And you know which orifice I’m talking about.
I’ve got many, but I think this is the right one.
Right? Considering this is at The Eagle, we’ve got to make all these things clear.
Have you been to the Eagle many times?
Many times. They treat you like family there, really good people. I’ve done the Incredibly Strange Dance Party there before, but never at a furry event. This is both an honor and an exciting new adventure.
I’m curious to see what happens you meet the furries! And you know it’s mutual, you’re probably the most amazing person who’s ever done a party with us.
I think you’re giving me way too much credit there. I have to live with me on a daily basis and I’m not always terribly amazing. Then again, not everybody gets asked to DJ at the Eagle when people have a bunch of animal costumes on. I can hardly wait.
Well, we’ve got people flying in for this.
You’re kidding. Wow.
At least a few.
Are they going to be in costume on the plane?
That’s actually happened. There was a service called FurFlight that would fill most of a plane with them.
Oh Wow. Ironically you’re interviewing me the day after I performed that old dead Kennedys song Halloween at the Damned show. Sitting in with The Darts. I don’t know how familiar you are with the lyrics to that song, but I was shocked when I came out here, how seriously people took Halloween and everything when it was supposed to be unserious. Months in advance, it was “what are you going to be for Halloween, what are you going to be?” And this was even when I was still in my one quarter of college education at UC Santa Cruz. So finally I got so disgusted with it all. I went to the Halloween party dressed as Hitler.
Oh man. You gotta be careful about that these days. But that’s a lot of effort. [I wish I told Jello I used to date the UCSC Banana Slug, no kidding…]
Of course. You know, I did it for anti social shock value and considering it was UC Santa Cruz, it really accomplished that.
I can imagine, back in the day you had Siouxsie Sioux and Sid Vicious doing that kind of stuff.
That was a whole different motif that I’m not entirely down with. Siouxsie had been rumored to have some pretty right wing views for real, but hopefully not. I don’t know. But the second part of the song is, why not every day have Halloween, wouldn’t it be great to go into a bank and find a teller dressed as a Moose or something like that? It should be Halloween all year round, which is what makes the furries so much fun. There’s an old photo in one of the Re/Search Pranks book of cops arresting an Earth First protestor. And the Earth First person is in a full bear costume. Not like a taxidermied bear, but closer to Yogi Bear, which makes it even better.
I’ve been told that Wavy Gravy used to dress up as the Easter Bunny because it looked bad having cops arrest the bunny, and they just didn’t want to do it.
Yeah. One of my many unusual friends in high school showed up with two foot rabbit ears on his head one day, to show he was an individualist. I’m not sure that lasted until the afternoon. But then another time, my girlfriend was on an airplane, and there was one of those guys who dresses like they came out of a GWAR show or something to go to an Oakland Raiders game. You know those people, right?
Oh yeah, they’re all painted.
The guy was in full Neo-GWAR regalia sitting like that in his seat on the plane! Because the raiders were playing the game out of town, he was flying to the game in costume. And she asked him like “what are you doing?” – “I’m the Violator, man”. And you know, that was his name. He had to be “The Violator”.
That’s a lot of effort there.
If that’s what somebody has to do, to reclaim some of their dignity after getting all the beatdowns of the workaday world we’re in now, then okay. But if you’re going to go fly out of town as The Violator to games, some of us have the right to laugh.
I hope he took it in good humor too.
I have no idea. I’m not sure you could tell whether he was smiling or not. I don’t know if it was a mask or just makeup.
Can you tell me about the Incredibly Strange Dance Party and your music collection? What kind of surprises are we in for?
I hadn’t DJ’ed in years until Jonathan Toubin, the New York Night Train guy who has this event called Soul Clap, and you forget the kind of music that gets played, high energy vintage, 60s, 70s soul – and first he brought me in to judge a dance contest so I could put my name on the ads. I was at the Elbo Room, and Jonathan and I really hit it off with talking about records and music. We both knew Billy and Miriam from the Norton label in New York, one of the great reissue and archival labels in the world. Then the next time he came through was a big old 2 room thing at 111 Minna. He said “why don’t you just do a set?” and oh, okay, soul isn’t my main area. I just started liking it after all these years. I’ll just bring some stuff I like that’s kind of obscure, and a few other things I think I can get away with squirting in. And it all worked really well, to the point that some of the other DJs like Jonathan and DJ Primo, a really, really good oldies DJ from the bay area, they were looking at my records. “What’s this?” So then I knew I was in.
Then when I could do my own events, I decided to go all over the map, mixing soul, 60’s garage, instrumental, trash, dementia, punk here and there, post punk, maybe some metal, although it’s usually some Ministry or Lard if I do any of that. I just kinda mix and match. Neonbunny told me he mainly plays house music, so this is going to be a huge contrast.
Yeah, big change of pace.
Hopefully people find value in it, and I guess I have to measure it by the heads bobbing and the tails swirling.
Nobody parties like furries. They’re going to be jumping up and down and you’ll see kangaroos hitting the ceiling.
It’s such an open slate with me because I know so little about this scene. I can’t really give you many impressions because I just don’t know. I’m gonna find out. One thing I can guarantee though, sorry folks, I can’t do this gig with a big old fox head on me because then I can’t put the headphones on or see what I’m doing.
And the incredibly strange part of the name come from those two books Re/Search put out, Incredibly Strange Music Volume One and Two.
I’m familiar, I met Vale [the publisher in San Francisco.]
I’m known for being the first 56 pages in Volume Two, and a collector of the wild and weird and cool, you know, I wanted that. I wanted the flow of people in Two. Although Jon Ginoli of Pansy Division told me that he was disappointed that my set wasn’t completely strange. But you know, I like the dance part. It’s nice when people get wild, and I’ll kind of follow the groove and see what’s floating people’s boat.
There’s a dance floor as well as what’s strange and fun and crazy. I trust that you’re going to do an awesome job.
Because it’s not like I have to look at all my old Eagle playlists and try to figure out what people haven’t already heard or liked or didn’t like. It’s kind of a blank slate with people used to hearing house music. While I’m sure a lot of them know other things too, hopefully lots of fun will be had.
You’re going to get a young crowd too. That’s what the furry fans tend to be. It’s a lot of college age people. There’s a very wide spread, of course, I was born around when your first album came out, but I’m a fan.
Damn and you’re already 40, it reminds me of how fucking old I actually am.
You’re only as old as you feel. And as old as you want to play. Which brings me to what animal would you be, if you could choose? What would your fursona be?
Shit man, I was afraid I was going to be asked that. I put no thought into it whatsoever… (pause)… How about that lamprey on the cover of the Power of Lard EP?
That’s a great choice. (Laughs) I don’t know a lot of parasite animal furries, but there’s always oddball choices. Like my friend Jaden wants to be a Turducken.
I don’t even know what that is.
It’s a duck inside a chicken inside a turkey. [His name is “Stovetop” – he’s a dom and a top.]
Do you think there will be any Hawkwind fans there?
I don’t know. I mean I’d get down to that.
In their heyday, around the time that amazing all-time one of the most important albums of my life, their Space Ritual album came out, the live album. Lemmy was still in the band. Nick Turner, their Sax Player, wore a full lizard suit on stage.
That’s so great.
He was a little man with a big old head with a place for him to put the reed for a sax in his mouth, big tail and everything.
You’re going to see some of those out at the party.
Any dinosaurs?
There are dinosaurs, but it’s funny. They tend to be sort of soft and cuddly ones. They’re not going to rip your head off or eat you. Unless you ask them nicely. And there are people into that.
Well, I’d rather have those kind of dinosaurs than Trump and Pence.
That makes me really curious. You have a lot of experience battling these assholes. How do the politics of right now compare to the Reagan days?
I hate to say it folks, but we are being subjected to a slow but sure, full on corporate coup. That started with Reagan and maybe even with Carter. And you think of a coup as a slow, very slow moving tank. Every once in a while when they think they can get away with it, they really step on the fucking gas. With 9/11, they stepped on the gas, rammed the Patriot Act through, and things like that. Now they’re really going crazy, even scamming a completely unqualified ideological thug like Brett Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court. The cement is now beginning to dry.
I don’t think it’s going to get as horrible as what’s happening in the Philippines and is about to happen in Brazil. But you know, in spite of all the gentrification and all the nasty spite of the tech boom in this town. One of the reasons I’m still here is that I noticed, Trump only got 20 or 24 percent of the vote in San Francisco. Maybe I should stick around here after all.
Or run for mayor again?
Then I’d have to give up all these other things, including DJing furry parties. I’d have to really do it right, from door to door and everything else. I’ve toyed with the idea of running against Pelosi, but I also realized that would mean giving up music, and doing a lot of other things I’m not sure I really want to do.
If I were to run for anything again, it couldn’t just be a wild outsider prank campaign. What the alternative is, people would expect a lot more out of me.
Once you do a prank once, you don’t want to stay stuck in a rut. The amazing thing about your career is how you keep going and do what you want.
Thank you. I knew that when the Dead Kennedys split that I needed to spread my wings, try other things so I didn’t wind up singing Holiday in Cambodia in titty bars in Modesto to pay for my meals and stuff. I didn’t want to wind up like the other three have, let’s put it that way. Then spoken word took off way beyond what I ever thought it would, and I put a lot of time into that. But I also know that a lot of my songs don’t sound like anybody else’s. It’s just what comes out of me, so if I don’t do them who will? The last thing I want to do… I’m actually kind of offended that a lot of elements in the punk scene have become so retro and nostalgia oriented, and therefore conservative. At least culturally conservative. No, even in the 90’s they were so, “Things should sound like they did in the eighties,” and everybody who was really good that inspired us should just freeze in 1977, or 1982, or whatever. Either play those songs and nothing new, or play nothing but songs that sound like increasingly pale imitations of that. I didn’t want to do that, I’m not a retro guy. I’m a now guy. I think, being involved in Alternative Tentacles as long as I have has been a big help here. Because I’m always trying to dial in on newer stuff.
I like the expansive definition because that encourages me to kind of fit the furries under that. They’re very DIY and grassroots in how they organize. It’s all cottage industry and there’s no corporations running what they do.
Not yet anyway. Look at how commercial and cuddly and smiley faced the whole zombies thing has become.
They can turn it into a soap opera that keeps going and going.
Now there’s zombies here, zombies there, and I think part of it, it’s because they’re trying to find that evil Other to get people to relate to that kind of good and evil battle. You can’t do it with cowboy shows where the bad people are the indigenous native Americans any more. Unless you’re as evil as the Trumpkins, you can’t do it with brown-skinned terrorists, you’ve got to find something else where there’s not going to be any zombies crying bigotry and foul against you. They have to have a fictional Other.
There’s not going to be any Zombie identity movement or anything like that.
Remember that band Servotron? It was an offshoot of Man or Astroman. Another one of these great concept bands. They were a robot supremacist band. No end of bigoted remarks towards humans in between the songs.
That’s just great humor. Now, one of the perplexing things that kind of brings us together in a weird way is, the furries, these nerds, these people who love cuddly cartoon animals, we’ve got this Nazi invasion element and it’s really screwed up.
What causes you to label them full blown nazis?
Well, it’s part of Internet culture. It’s complicated but it ties into places where they come to radicalize youth culture, like they tried with punk way back. It crosses over with furries in a weird way. They’re very small but it’s a real crossover. We had this guy who was admin of the Richard Spencer alt-right chat and he was a furry at the same time, and they were trying to recruit kids here.
Let me guess, he was a wolf, right.
NAZI FURS FUCK OFF! pic.twitter.com/Qen6w4iRcB
— Deo (@DeoTasDevil) April 12, 2017
Some of them favor those generic canine type, but it’s hard to say. Honestly they’re not really very furry. They’re just kind of using it as a cover. It’s like another form of Klan hood. They’re not really devoted to characters.
Whoah. That’s disturbing. You can go under cover, just like undercover cops who go to peaceful protests and start violence, with black balaclavas on, calling themselves black bloc when not all of them are. You know, black bloc or Antifa. It’s so much easier to disguise an undercover cop with people showing up wearing stuff like that.
Do you have any opinion in general about the Antifa, are they over the top?
Speaking as somebody who’s been in a lot of protests, some of which got to be wild, I’m not in favor of starting shit. Self defense I get, but often it’s stooping to those people’s level. Not only are the undercover cops going to be mixed in on their side. But we have some of them wearing disguises as Antifa to try to turn peaceful protest violent. We also have to remember that no matter how good you think you are at fighting people, one on one, the people in the so-called alt-right, who used to be known as neo-nazis, before the corporate media cooperated with them to change the term – they’re probably going to be able to out fight you, and they may be armed. Don’t go there.
Number two, I remember in the Seattle protest, it was one big one, it wouldn’t even move there were so many people protesting the WTO, which ultimately helped bring a lot of that down of what they wanted to do… But then, somebody threw a news machine through the window of a Starbucks. And yeah, cool. I love the sound of breaking glass. This is awesome. But I knew full well what would happen afterwards. Sure enough it did. Corporate McNews TV people, from that point onwards, covered Seattle as a violent riot. It wasn’t a peaceful protest, it was a riot. Never mind that even the airline pilots union, the nurses union, the Teamsters, were all joining together on this peaceful protest. They labeled it a riot! They tried to make it as being not just the protest, but also what the protesters views and demands were, all bad. It also showed the cops an excuse to then launch a police riot. Which the Seattle police did. You don’t want to give the cops and the corporate media an excuse to dismiss you as rioters, period.
That’s such a loaded word, to riot. If you have a badge on they don’t use the same word. [Or there’s a double standard for violence at a game with The Violator.]
Yeah.
I labeled these guys full blown Nazis, the furry ones that I told you about. Some of them were at the Charlottesville nazi march. But you know, one of the best things about the furries is as contentious and dramatic as they can get sometimes with arguments, there’s never a fight. They never have fights. You can go to a party that’s full of hundreds of them and they’re wild and bouncing up and down and they never have any fights.
Because it’s so recent, as culture, it’s kind of a wacky alternative wild west. It’s what you decide to do with it too.
It has been around since the early eighties, but it’s only in probably the past 10 years when it’s really taken off to where you can get almost 10,000 of them in one place, like in Chicago at the biggest convention.
That’s a lot. Wow. Speaking of zombies, hopefully it doesn’t turn into what a lot of raves did in the end. Doing bad drugs, listening to really bad disco music and wandering around and staring at people!
Honestly, there’s quite a crossover with rave culture and there’s some problems with partying too much. You’ll have ambulances showing up at the hotels.
You’re always going to have that. The bigger the event, the more it’s upon the person running the event to be properly prepared.
That’s part of this Nazi problem, is they’re taking advantage of how grassroots this stuff is and how shoestring it is. It’s a bunch of fans who started throwing their own parties, no corporations, big money or investment. So the security is kind of self provided and they don’t have a lot of money to hire. These Nazis, they’ll do stuff like call the hotels and threaten the hotels, and force the hotels to demand formal security, which adds $25,000 on the cost of a convention and it kind of kills them. That’s one of their tactics. It almost compares to swatting if you know what swatting is.
Remind me. Oh, calling a SWAT team via the internet on somebody who may be clear across the country. Yeah. Some innocent person got killed that way.
That’s the extreme of it. But the lesser extreme is where they just sort of threaten hotels and make them raise the costs. That’s pretty much the weapon these cowards prefer.
It’s also what’s driven concert tickets through the ceiling. It’s the insurance cost. Like you’re paying these huge ticket prices to see the insurance officials and the security people. Nobody’s really going to that show to see the cops. But that’s kind of what it is.
That makes me want to ask you more about the business of music. Going from a rock and roll tour to doing spoken word, that’s quite a difference in cost I imagine, you don’t have to hire a bus?
Ha! I don’t hire buses in this country anyways. I haven’t gotten that far up the evolutionary scale. Very few bands I know well have.
It seems like you’ve had amazing longevity with running Alternative Tentacles, and I wanted to ask, how do you see music changing with online delivery?
I’m not sure I have a total up to date answer to that. Dominic Davi, who’s now the general manager of Alternative Tentacles, is much more tech and online savvy and is changing all kinds of things around to get us to more people who are used to being served that way. I’m kind of giving him free rein. But I can’t deny that there’s been a huge problem with file sharing and that has blown huge holes in all kinds of labels, some bands have broken up. A lot of retail mom and pop vinyl stores went belly up in the past few years. Now there’s newer ones starting up because there’s a little bit of a vinyl boomlet again, but it doesn’t really make up for everything lost by any stretch of the imagination, or even streaming where, if you’re Lady Gaga, you’ll be getting some money from that. But if you’re me, you ain’t gonna get shit.
I just hope people who still do the file sharing scene would at least pick and choose what to share versus what to buy, because you know, artists who don’t get supported at all will break up their bands. They gotta go find a job to pay the students loans and fucking rent, not just in this town, the cost of living is nuts now for stuff like that. Major labels go so far out their way to rip off their artists anyways that I have no problem with people file sharing off the big boys. They don’t treat their artists fairly anyways. But if somebody grassroots, you know an artist run label or close to it, or Alternative Tentacles, people should think twice before going “Oh yeah. I really like this band you put out, I just shared it with 50 friends, the whole album”… hey wait a minute! It gets tough, it’s not as though I’m rolling in money from all this, it’s the opposite. The whole digital revolution in some ways can do a lot more good than harm. But I wish people would be smarter and grow sharper bullshit detectors, and apply the same cynicism they have towards Fox News or CNN to every last other thing somebody posts on the net somewhere.
You know, I haven’t died in a while. My death hasn’t gone viral in a few years now, but every once in a while that used to happen because nobody stopped and asked, hey, wait a minute, is this even true?
I guess that’s a sign of success when people start spreading rumors about you so badly.
Not just rumors about me, that’s chicken feed compared to what they say about immigrant invasions, or Hillary having a child porn ring in the basement of a pizza place that doesn’t even have a basement in Washington D.C. A guy who believed it walked down there with an automatic rifle. Luckily nobody was killed. This stuff, the fake news and the rumor mongering, it’s really fucking dangerous now. It’s not just Putin’s bots that are doing it, they’re coming from all kinds of places, including people talking shit about somebody else. And then somebody else automatically believing it, adding a little bit to it, and the snowball happens from there.
It’s interesting when there’s a tug of war over the truth, how much power satire and humor has to cut through some of that. I guess that was part of your trial against the Moral Majority types?
It wasn’t against them, it was against the LAPD and the city attorney’s office. I was criminally charged in that case involving Dead Kennedys Frankenchrist album. It was the test case to appeal to the anti music hate movement spearheaded by Al Gore’s wife, Tipper Gore.
That was so nasty and she was so dishonest and barely disguising that she was acting as a Trojan horse for Focus on the Family and the Moral Majority and whatnot. You know, she claimed she was a Liberal Democrat, a feminist, and this that and the other. But the PMRC and that anti music hate campaign had a lot more to do with costing Al Gore the 2000 election than Ralph Nader could have ever hoped to if he wanted to. There was not a lot of youth support for Al Gore. Three guesses as to why.
Not fighting the vote fraud and the rigging in Florida was a bigger one, but that played a major role. And you realize that George W. Bush stole two elections, and the wimpy little corporate Democrats barely did anything to stop that. So the vote fraud, that kind of vote fraud, the real vote fraud, continued. Trump steals 2016 through the interstate crosscheck program, disclosed by Greg Palast. What this means is, Kavanaugh isn’t the only stolen seat on the Supreme Court. There’s not one, you count Gorsuch, there’s not two. There’s four. Roberts and Alito don’t belong there either, they stole those seats because they stole the election.
It tells me something about the power of these sort of culture wars and entertainment to mobilize people. That’s something that I try to get across with my news site. It’s about furries and cartoon animals and all that, but there’s important reasons to have fun and love what you do and be sincere no matter what’s being sold to you. Especially if bullshit comes from inside the house.
That’s why the little subtitle of my Incredibly Strange Dance Party is the roots of the roots. Maybe some of the later, more generic punk and hardcore and metal bands got their inspiration and influence from listening to other punk rock albums or hardcore stuff. But the O.G. punks didn’t have that option because those didn’t exist yet. When Dead Kennedys started in San Francisco playing the scene that revolved around Mabuhay Gardens, the peer pressure was not for every band to sound the same, it was for every band to sound different. Or no one was interested. Most of the audience was people in the other bands, it was very, very small. So people were drawing their inspiration from the Stooges, The Velvet Underground. Some of us weirder people were getting stuff from Captain Beefheart, and some people were really digging David Bowie and the New York Dolls and also James Brown, or the early Rolling Stones. Even even when one of those really rare Phil Specter girl group albums would pop up in the thrift store, it would wind up in a punk rocker’s apartment. Johnny Cash, you know, we were drawing from everything else. If you want to know some of my roots, then that’s what the Incredibly Strange Dance Party is for. I do it for fun, people are being very generous to me for this, but it’s also really cool to be able to play all those cool obscure 45’s I listened to in my bedroom really loud through a P.A.
You had influence in other ways too, like furries going Nazi Furs Fuck Off is a popular message.
I heard about that. Sounds like somebody actually needs to rewrite the words to make it more applicable to this problem. And address racism and everything else full on, as well as don’t believe the hype, like all the fake news shit that gets thrown at us from above as well as below. In this day and age when a lot of bands make little videos and put them up on Bandcamp or Youtube or whatever, if somebody’s going to make a Nazi Furs Fuck Off parody of the song, there damn well better be a video for it too. Seeing people in full blown furry regalia, rocking out or dancing out to Nazi Furs Fuck Off, that would go so fucking viral. It might bring in too many people, who knows, overnight to save the dying malls, there’ll be a furry version of Hot Topic opening up.
They try it, Hot Topic or even Walmart are kind of getting into it. But there’s this divide where the whole essence of it is having stuff custom made, you make your own fursona, you design your character and have somebody build it, it’s really involved and there’s just no way to fully industrialize it.
And it’s not all for sexual fetish reasons, is it?
That’s undeniably something that people do, because that’s part of being human, but I think it can bring honesty. People do it because they love it, like they love music…
In other words it’s totally wrong to stereotype furries, or plushies, and I guess there’s a difference, as all doing this for reasons of a sex fetish, and it may be that to some, but it’s not that to all, maybe even to a majority, right?
Even the ones that are into that, they’re also devoted fans as well. They’re not like one dimensional people, these are just really passionate people. They’re the nerds, and there’s a lot of gay people there, so it’s like double what got you beat up in high school.
Does it cross over and attract any ponies?
There’s a lot of crossover with a lot of things, I say if it was a Venn diagram, it would be kind of plaid. It’s a really broad concept. Here’s talking animals, you can plug that into anything.
If you can talk to the animals, does anybody show up as Doctor Doolittle?
There was a parade float themed like that in Australia at the Sydney Mardi Gras. And they go all out. They have a big budget for that.
Wow! Okay. I gotta roll.
Thank you for giving me so much time Jello, it’s a real honor. I can’t wait to meet you, I have my punk rat fursuit that’s on the flyer, so I’ll come up and say hi and I don’t bite.
There you go. This should be an interesting evening. Alright, take care.
UPDATE: WHOAH
@Jello_Biafra was really cool to let me get him on video after @frolicparty tonight. pic.twitter.com/CoFuxRIR9E
— Dogpatch Press (@DogpatchPress) December 2, 2018
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How about me signing my name Johnny Auschwitz? Anybody remember what and why Biafra was all about? Do you guys know what happened there? Judging from what I have read in this very good blog, liberal sensibilities are in the drivers seat. This name, Jello Biafra, is an obscenity and it is not cool or funny. Of course what can one expect from anything associated with the Dead Kennedys? If you want to hear the real voice of punk let me suggest the Ramones, for one, who at least did not mock starving children with their stage names.
Yours-
Billy Ojukwu
If you got some idea that the name mocks starving children, I’m sorry to say you severely missed the point. Jello and this show are getting tons and tons of good notices on Twitter from people who can’t wait for it. Unfortunately the Ramones disbanded 22 years ago and all of them are dead, but a guy who is really beloved and actively doing all kinds of stuff is here for those who want the opportunity to enjoy a one of a kind show.
Yes, I have the idea that the name mocks children. I also realize that Mr. Biafra is probably not too concerned with such an appellation. This site is very quick to point out transgressions against furries, which is fine. If this was a comic book villain I would not say a thing. As far as the death of all the Ramones, what does that matter in an age of recorded music? That is a straw dog argument.
“During the two and half years of the war, there were about 100,000 overall military casualties, while between 500,000 and 2 million Biafran civilians died of starvation”. Wiki.
I take it you did not grow up watching the horror that was the Nigerian civil war filtered through the pro-Nigerian press. No matter, I wasn’t there either. Both of us certainly had plenty to eat so what do a bunch of nameless African children matter now? You are making excuses for a heartless musician who is known for shock value and not much else. How beloved he is matters not in this interesting discussion. The name is repulsive, particularly when used by someone with plenty to eat and enough spare time to run around dressed like a baggy animal.
Your argument is that stage names do not offend and I should not call out someone for this. I enjoy reading this site but I say what I think. If I was to sign off with a name like “Johnny Auschwitz, Jr.” you guys would ban me without a second thought and I would very much deserve it.
There. I am calling the name under discussion insensitive and repugnant. I have made my point. But all this is my opinion and I want everyone to have fun! After all, that is why I read this site. Oh, yeah, may as well say this. No one has written an anthro book worth reading since “Watership Down”. Now that is a position which can be argued against!
*woosh*
I’m sorry to any readers who are looking for good comments on what Jello and the furries do, try the Twitter feed.
Sorry to hear the idea behind Jello’s name is going over you head.
I’m gonna go out on a stretch and say their music probably does too.
The name is meant as an ironic juxtaposition between mass produced junk food Americans eat and the starvation that many associate with Biafra.
It is supposed to be absurd (much like their music) and points out inequalities.
But I’m guessing the name did it’s job, you’re now thinking of such inequalities, and may act upon them.
If you think “Johnny Auschwitz” is going to evoke the kind of response you want it to together with your music, then by all means, go for it.
Imagine if someone thought the song “kill the poor” was a literal command instead of commentary.
Edit: You can have the last word. I’ve closed the thread and adding for Paul’s benefit that he should not continue posting on this thread. This site is for quality content, not a soapbox for going off into the weeds with arguing that has nothing to do with Jello or the upcoming show. He’s welcome to continue doing worthy comments on other ones.
My benefit that I should not post on this thread? You mean I could be banned? This is free exchange of opinions, dog boy. Mar A Lago, über alles!
Your move, pops.
I doubt that I missed your point, I just don’t agree with it, as you don’t do mine.
But just to clarify, I can see more benefits to having an uncomfortable alias as an artist in the same vein as what I stated earlier.
An example would be that you put uncomfortable subjects into the minds of people who think or talk about you, things that maybe need more attention but don’t receive it due to them being uncomfortable. Even more so if you’d happen to make a headline.
And please, do keep assigning labels to me from what you gather out of a few sentences, as well as take offence to pretty much everything, even though it’s not an attack on you or anyone else.
Since you’ve clearly made up your mind about these things, I’ll take my leave and with you the best of luck in the future.
P.s. I do like the post you made, highlighting the horrors that befell Biafra. What put that that into your mind?
Dude, this site is for quality content, not what you’re posting. Don’t post on this topic again, please. If you want to post something interesting on other topics then that’s welcome. But this thread is closed.
Ho, hum.
‘Sorry to hear the idea behind Jello’s name is going over you head’.
I’m just responding to you comment.
“If you want to hear the real voice of punk let me suggest the Ramones.”
If “real punks” grow up to vote for George Bush, I’ll stick with Perry Como.
I don’t mind some bubblegum type music, but the voice of 1976 is basically museum stuff, at least with stuff that isn’t out there and active. I like going to shows and talking to people who aren’t recordings.
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