‘Mellow out or you will pay!’: The society of the spectacle in Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables and other late Cold War literature

In Fresh Fruit, Dead Kennedys, like Joan Didion in Democracy (1984) and Thomas Pynchon in Vineland (1990), examine the American cultural landscape through the lens of an exaggerated and victorious totalitarian political regime as a way to investigate the failures of past cultural protest movements. Though Dead Kennedys and these authors may disagree on whether resistance to such a regime is futile, they can agree that recognizing the methods by which the society of the spectacle operates is the first step towards dismantling it. Fresh Fruit enters into a literary dialogue taking place throughout the last official decade of the Cold War, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, continuing throughout Reagan’s re-election in 1984, and ending after his presidency. Seeing Fresh Fruit in dialogue with these literary traditions, I propose that what the album adds to the cultural conversation taking place between these mediums is how it subverts the society of the spectacle. While Vineland (1990) and Democracy (1984) contend with the threat of gradually becoming a part of the society of the spectacle, Fresh Fruit seeks to arm its audience against that threat with the tools of resistance in the form of musical performance, lyrics and album artwork.