Holiday in Cambodia

Jello Biafra was American punk's most relentless satirist — whose targets included both the American right and the American liberal class, holding both accountable with equal ferocity. The Dead Kennedys' debut Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (1980) is the founding document of American hardcore satire.

Holiday in Cambodia addresses the Khmer Rouge genocide and the comfortable insularity of American college students with a directness and wit that the mainstream could never achieve. East Bay Ray's guitar work — surf-rock inflected, technically accomplished — gives the song a propulsive energy that makes the political content land harder rather than softer.

The Dead Kennedys' legacy is complicated by subsequent legal disputes between Biafra and the other band members. The records themselves stand apart from those complications.