The Dead Kennedys officially formed in June 1978, but they didn't start to hit the relative big-time (in the context of being a snarly, snotty, highly political underground punk band) until 1980.
That year, the group released its debut LP - Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables.
And my world was never the same again.* :)
* That's not actually true. I would say the first punk song that I heard was the Ramones' Cretin Hop, and that went off in my head like the proverbial bomb. That song is from Rocket to Russia, which was released in 1976.
I can write the opening lyrics to Kill The Poor off the top of my head. Observe:
Efficiency and progress
Are ours once more
Now that we have
The neutron bomb
It's nice and quick and clean
And gets things doneAway with excess poverty
But no less value to property
No sense in war
But perfect sense at homeThe sun beams down on a brand new day!
No more welfare tax to pay!
Unsightly slums
Gone up in flashing light!
The jobless millions whisked away
At last we have more room to play!
All systems go - Let's kill the poor tonight!
In case you forgot (or never knew in the first place), the neutron bomb was a stunning development in death technology that killed people with radiation but left buildings standing.
The thesis of Kill The Poor was essentially that a neutron bomb would be a perfect gentrification tool. Fucking brilliant! And I suspect the thought would have crossed the mind of some Reagan administration officials, who restarted the weapons program in 1981 after President Jimmy Carter cancelled it in 1978, according to Wikipedia.
Police Truck, Holiday in Cambodia, California Uber Alles, Let's Lynch the Landlord, and Too Drunk to Fuck* ... they created some great songs.
* The irony of this little sneer at frat-boy culture is how the frat boys themselves embraced it. :)
But being perpetually outraged is a real energy suck. The DKs also had to fight a criminal charge over its use of a penis-laden laden painting in one of their final albums, Frankenchrist.
The original band called it quits in 1986, which is really when the American hardcore scene as a whole petered out. At its centre, hardcore punk is pure, distilled adolescent energy rage -- awareness untempered by nuance. And you gotta grow up sometime. :)
As Agent Orange wrote in its classic Bloodstains:
Things seem so much different now
The scene has died away
I haven't got a steady job
And I got no place to stay
Not a happy place to be.
While it's not a great film, you can check out the doc American Hardcore for a look at the overall scene of the 1980 to 1986 period although strangely, I don't remember much on the DKs.
Urgh A Music War has some DKs performance footage, but this movie is long out of print, and the best you can hope for is some ancient VHS version (in Toronto, try Suspect or Queen City Video, for starters).
This page at Interpunk shows some of the DKs audio/video/DVD merch available.
Perhaps more on this subject in 2010. Or perhaps not. :)