Archive Review: Alternative Tentacles’ Oops! Wrong Stereotype (1988)

Hardcore punk, coming of age in the late ‘70s, set the commercial music world on its collective pointy head. Hardcore’s anti-social and satirical world view, its threat of sudden violence, its passionate commitment and raw, primal energy, as well as a fair degree of musical amateurism guaranteed it a loyal cult audience even as the mainstream shunned it like they might be a leper on Easter Sunday. A thousand and one bans appeared and disappeared overnight, with the better ones, such as Black Flag, Minor Threat, Crass, or the Dead Kennedys becoming influential beyond their often brief lifespans.

Through Alternative Tentacles, their independent record label, the Dead Kennedys have supported and nourished a still-growing and important underground music scene, offering a vinyl forum for artists and musicians too outrageous, too obnoxious, and/or too fundamentally realistic for the corporate mind to comprehend. Oops! Wrong Stereotype is an inspired compilation album featuring the talents and visionary voices of a handful of Alternative Tentacles’ artists.

Alternative Tentacles’ Oops! Wrong Stereotype

Challenging your preconceived ideas of what rock music should be, lyrically and melodically, Oops! Wrong Stereotype serves up almost a dozen steamy cuts that range from the traditional hardcore style of Canada’s Nomeansno to the vocal cut-up, mutant rap hybrid of the Beatnigs; from the industrial cacophony of Stickdog to the heavy crash and burn antics of Tragic Mulatto. New York’s False Prophets add to the fun, as do Alice Donut, Christian Lunch, and ex-D.K. member Klaus Flouride.

The centerpiece of the album, and perhaps its most important cut, however, is ex-Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra’s spoken word “Love American Death Style.” Carrying on where his insightful and important spoken word LP, No More Cocoons left off, this cut is a chilling eleven-minute plunge into the abyss, a haunting indictment of those in power in this country, and their quest to rob you and I of even a thought of freedom or civil liberty. It serves as a call to arms, not only for the artists appearing on this album, but also for us listeners.

As Biafra says in his liner notes, “underground music and thought are alive and well thanks to the independent artists and the people who support them.” Oops! Wrong Stereotype is an illustration or the health and vitality, originality and creativity of this sorely-needed underground artistry. (Alternative Tentacles Records, released 1988)

Review originally published by The Metro...