California Über Alles
single by Dead Kennedys
"California Über Alles" is the debut single by American punk rock band Dead Kennedys. It was the group's first recording and was released in June 1979 on the Optional Music label, with "The Man with the Dogs" appearing as its B-side. The title track was re-recorded in 1980 for the band's debut album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, and the original recording as well as the B-side were later included on the 1987 compilation Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death.
Meaning
The lyrics were written by Jello Biafra and John Greenway for their band The Healers. Biafra composed the music in one of his rare attempts at composing on bass.
The title is an allusion to the first stanza of the national anthem of Germany, which begins with the words "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles" ("Germany, Germany above everything"). After the end of the Third Reich in 1945, the anthem was shortened to just the third stanza of the original song, as this passage is sometimes associated with Nazism and, in following, claims a large area of land that is no longer contained within the current borders of Germany.
The lyrics are a pointed, satirical attack on Jerry Brown, the Governor of California from 1975 to 1983 (and later 2011–2019), and are sung from his perspective, as an imaginary version of Brown outlines a hippie-fascist vision of America. The line "Serpent's egg already hatched" is a reference to a comment on the corrosive nature of power from William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, and also a reference to the Ingmar Bergman film The Serpent's Egg set in 1920s Berlin that gets its title from the Shakespeare play. The lines "Big Bro on white horse is near" and "now it is 1984" refer respectively to a statement Brown made during his first governorship that Americans were supposedly looking for "a leader on a white horse", and to the totalitarian regime of George Orwell's classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four to describe a future (from a 1979 perspective) where Jerry Brown has become president, and his "suede/denim secret police" kill "uncool" people in "organic poison gas" chambers.
The public source identifies “California Über Alles” as single by Dead Kennedys. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around California, Über and Alles.
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This entry incorporates text from “California Über Alles” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.