DEAD KENNEDYS Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables CD (1980)

There are debut albums and then there is Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables, a record that arrived in 1980 fully formed and furious, like it had been waiting its whole life to make everyone deeply uncomfortable.

Jello Biafra was writing political satire with a serrated edge while the rest of hardcore punk was still learning three chords. California Über Alles alone rewrote what a punk song could say, and Holiday In Cambodia proved it wasn't a fluke. East Bay Ray's surf-inflected guitar gave the Dead Kennedys a sound nobody else had, not quite hardcore, not quite post-punk, but absolutely its own corrosive thing. This is one of the non-negotiable records in American punk, sitting comfortably alongside Black Flag and the Circle Jerks as something that permanently altered the DNA of alternative music. If you own a leather jacket and don't own this, that's a situation worth correcting.

CD, full length album, released 1980. Country of origin: USA. Genre: Punk/Hardcore.

Fans of: Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Bad Brains, Subhumans, The Addicts, GBH, Minor Threat.