Following the release of their incendiary debut album Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables in 1980, Dead Kennedys vocalist Jello Biafra noticed that violence at their shows began to increase dramatically.
“Pogoing became slam-dancing, now known as moshing, and some of ’em didn’t seem like they were there to enjoy the music, as much as they were there to beat up on people – sometimes in a really chickenshit way,” Biafra said in an interview with GQ’s Steve Knopper in 2018.
One new song saw the singer and lyricist liken the violent contingent’s behaviour at their shows to that of far-right thugs – but he never intended the 63-second punk blast of Nazi Punks Fuck Off to be the bluntly confrontational anti-fascist anthem it is today.
“I thought if we’re gonna play this music, we need to distance ourselves from that side of the scene,” he explained in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2012.
“When I wrote [the song] in the first place, I wasn’t writing about actual ideological Nazis,” he added in a interview with Variety. “The Nazi skinhead thing hadn’t yet erupted in England yet. The song, then, was about the early stages of slam-dancing where people would show up, without any interest in the music at all — real buff jock types — who would run off the stage, target someone, and punch them in the back of the head, or the face, and run off. They just wanted to wail on somebody.”
Nazi Punks Fuck Off appeared on the San Francisco quartet’s eight-song mini-album In God We Trust, Inc. The whole set – which marked the debut of the late drummer D.H. Peligro – was recorded not once, but twice over the course of two sweltering days in the summer of 1981, thanks to some defective recording tape.
Recorded at San Francisco’s Mobius Studio on August 22 by engineer Oliver DiCicco, the song itself is sarcastically introduced by Biafra as being “overproduced” by Joy Division producer Martin Hannett, who was some 5000 miles away in Manchester. The mini-album itself is credited to producer 'Norm', who was later revealed to be the studio engineer's cat.
The song itself was anything but overproduced. Peligro’s drumming is frantic, East Bay Ray’s guitars is like a chainsaw, and Biafra’s spit-flecked vocal delivery is focused yet full of undiluted rage.
In the weeks leading up to the release of In God We Trust, Inc., Nazi Punks Fuck Off was released as a seven-inch single, which was packaged with a free anti-swastika armband, cementing its place in the pantheon of punk protest songs.
“The initial premise of the song was, ‘You violent people at shows are acting like a bunch of Nazis’ and that was as far as it went,” Biafra told the Los Angeles Times. “Then the real ideological Nazis began coming out of the closet. They attacked Dead Kennedys shows after that. One time, a more hard-core version of (Britain’s) National Front showed up in tandem with the road crew of a band, and that connection always creeped me out.
“Punk is such an extreme form of music, the most extreme form of rock and roll ever invented, and it’s always attracted different kinds of extremes,” he added. “So Nazi Punks evolved in people’s minds into an anti-fascist, anti-Nazi anthem.”
The song remains depressingly relevant some four decades after its release.
In the year Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States of America, Biafra joined Dead Cross – featuring Mike Patton, Dave Lombardo, Justin Pearson and Michael Crain – for a retooled version of the song at Berkeley’s UC Theatre on August 23, 2017. For the show, each musician wore a shirt printed with ‘Nazi Trumps Fuck Off’ along with the President’s face pleasingly smack-bang in the middle of a circle-backslash. After the lightning quick rendition, Biafra bid farewell to the crowd urging them to “Make America smart again.”
In Trump’s second term, Biafra joined The Cavalera Brothers and Necrot at the Marquis Theater in Denver in March 2025 – what the Guardian described as “ICE’s deadliest year in two decades” as 32 people died in custody – for a performance of the revamped song.
“It was originally just written about people being really fucking violent in the pit and acting like a bunch of Nazis,” Biafra told the Colorado crowd. “Then [the song] got to places that had real dictators and real fascists, like Brazil, and Eastern Europe, it became more; it became kind of a revolutionary cry. For the first time ever, we are staring at real, live fascist dictatorships with red, white and blue brownshirts all over this country.”
And now, as new horrors unfold apace across the United States of America, Nazi Punks is as important as ever.
“When I formed Guantanamo School of Medicine specifically to play new music, not be some old-man punk retro act, I heard from fans who actually grew up under true fascist regimes – countries with military dictatorships,” Biafra told Variety. “They wanted to hear Nazi Punks. They told me that song gave them courage.”
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