Music Arcades: Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables

I've been looking forward to this cropping up. When I bought it 25 years ago, a big part of the appeal was the irony of enjoying the first lines of the most famous song (identical to the pleasure my friend John "Loadsamoney" B took in reading aloud the stuff about Marx on the back of the first Housemartins album):

So you've been to school for a year or two
And you know you've seen it all
In your daddy's car, thinking you'll go far
Back east your kind don't crawl
Play ethnicky jazz to parade your snazz
On your five-grand stereo

Even allowing for a strong exchange rate between the pound and the dollar, my stereo was never five grand. However, I was a year or two into my degree at the time, and did occasionally drive my daddy's car. Or more often my mum's. Again, that's a technicality. I knew Mr Biafra was singing to, or rather at, me. I suspected he might have hoped to be more of a nuisance than a pleasure. That's recuperation for you.

I've never been exactly sure what ethnicky jazz is. (I mean, is Charlie Parker ethnicky? Perhaps Miles' Agharta is ethnicky, but Porgy and Bess isn't? Or is this just a way of saying "not Dave Brubeck"?) Nevertheless I think I know roughly what it is. And I have to say ethnicky jazz has dated rather better than this testosterone-driven agit ranting. In the intervening years, my collection of ethnicky jazz has grown, and through the attentions of people like Prefuse 73 it's stock has risen. Aside from one or two tangentially-related items (Big Black, maybe), my hardcore collection has remained static and almost permanently shelf-bound.

Still, at least this album doesn't hang around. I was able to listen to over half of it during the tea break of Surrey's current game against Derbyshire. The rest slipped down while I was giving the Boy his nigh-night bottle of milk — it was a little unfortunate that the first song was I Kill Children, but he's just trying to master the first full line of his first lyric, "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall", so I tried to console myself that he wasn't taking it in.

Thus, in my own little way, I like to think that I am still subverting the intent that the creators of Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables had in mind when they made it.