“Kill The Poor” by Dead Kennedys

"Kill the Poor" was Dead Kennedys' third single, put out on Cherry Red in 1980 with "In-sight" on the flip, and the band cut it again for their debut album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, the same year, though you'd be hard pressed to tell the two takes apart. Jello Biafra's lyric is a vicious bit of satire, casting the ruling class as only too happy to drop neutron bombs on the poor so long as the property survives.

Biafra sings it over East Bay Ray's guitar, Klaus Flouride's bass and Ted's drums, and Norm produced, with Ray assisting and Oliver DiCicco engineering. It spent three weeks on the UK singles chart, getting as high as 49. More than a year earlier, the band had played a disco version of it at a March 1979 show that later surfaced on Live at the Deaf Club.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.