Dead Kennedys Songs - Holiday In Cambodia Lyrics

Dead Kennedys - Holiday In Cambodia

Dead Kennedys - Holiday In Cambodia Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables
Released: 1980

Holiday In Cambodia Lyrics

So, you've been to school
For a year or two
And you know you've seen it all
In daddy's car
Thinking you'll go far
Back east your type don't crawl

Playing ethnicky jazz
To parade your snazz
On your five-grand stereo
Braggin' that you know
How the niggers feel cold
And the slum's got so much soul

It's time to taste what you most fear
Right Guard will not help you here
Brace yourself, my dear
Brace yourself, my dear

It's a Holiday In Cambodia
It's tough, kid, but it's life
It's a holiday in Cambodia
Don't forget to pack a wife

You're a star-belly snitch
You suck like a leech
You want everyone to act like you
Kiss ass while you bitch
So you can get rich
While your boss gets richer off you

Well, you'll work harder
With a gun in your back
For a bowl of rice a day
Slave for soldiers
Till you starve
Then your head is skewered on a stake

Now you can go where the people are one
Now you can go where they get things done
What you need, my son...
What you need, my son...

Is a holiday in Cambodia
Where people are dressed in black
A holiday in Cambodia
Where you'll kiss ass or crack

Pol Pot, Pol Pot, Pol Pot, Pol Pot

It's a holiday in Cambodia
Where you'll do what you're told
It's a holiday in Cambodia
Where the slums got so much soul
Pol Pot

Writer/s: BOUCHER PKA BIAFRA/PEPPERELL/LYALL/
Publisher: Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT US, LLC
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Holiday In Cambodia

This song is about an American kid who expects to go off to college and thinks he knows everything about the ghetto ("Braggin that you know how the niggers feel cold and the slums got so much soul") and then gets drafted and sent to Vietnam. Pol Pot was the dictator of Cambodia during that time.

While playing this song live, Jello would act like a dumb American kid who suddenly ends up in Vietnam and gets shot.

This is one of the few Dead Kennedys songs that was written by the entire band - most were composed solely by Biafra. In our 2013 interview with Biafra , he said it was still his favorite song, and explained how it came together:

"The original 'Holiday in Cambodia' is more a straight punk song. We called them 'chainsaws' back then, 'chainsaw punk' after the Ramones song ('Chainsaw'). The other guys didn't like it. They didn't want to play it. I was heartbroken, I was crestfallen, they'd never done that to me before. And then Klaus (Flouride - bass player) began noodling around on what became that signature bass line. I thought, 'Hey, wait a minute. That's cool. What would happen if we swiped everything from my 'Holiday in Cambodia' song - verse, chorus, bridge - but used that as the original root rhythm?'

Actually, we had a three-chord chorus and bridge that came from the original, and then the verse we swapped out. Eventually, Ray (guitarist East Bay Ray) came up with that signature guitar part when he enters the song. It was taking a while; we didn't even play it at our first show, although we knew we had it under our belt. It was a pretty chief song for making me decide I ought to stick with these guys and it might turn into something really unusual, because I was playing around with some other people, too.

Before we played, I came back out of the bathroom and back to Ray's garage and heard that lick, and I was like, 'Yow!' And Ray told me he'd seen Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett at Winterland when he was a kid, and I took note of that. So when I was trying to get something to put on top of Klaus' riff, I kept trying to get it to fit there, and fit there, and fit there, and finally, it appeared."

The line, "You're a star-belly sneech" is a reference to a Dr. Seuss character in his story The Sneetches.

Despite this being one of the most popular Dead Kennedys songs, this actually caused a whole lot of controversy and turmoil between Jello Biafra and the other band members. In the late '90s, the Levi's clothing company asked permission to use the song in an ad for Dockers; although the other band members were OK with the song's usage, Jello refused, citing his anti-corporate stance and what he believed to be Levi's unfair work practices. This led to the rest of the band suing him for unpaid royalties, which eventually led to Jello losing all publishing rights to the DK catalog. The commercial eventually aired using a Pretenders song - it showed a guy catching a mouse and putting it in a cage when his girlfriend felt sorry for it.