Creativity Quote by Jello Biafra

There is no poetry here because Jello Biafra isn’t aiming for poetry. He’s aiming for a paper trail. The sentence reads like a press release crossed with a warning label: repetitive, blunt, built to be quoted in full so no one can pretend they misunderstood. In punk, outrage can be performance; this is outrage as documentation.

The specific intent is threefold: legally defensive, morally accusatory, and fan-facing. “Not authorized,” “do not endorse,” “without my permission” forms a tripwire for labels and distributors who rely on ambiguity and inertia. Biafra isn’t merely complaining; he’s establishing ownership, consent, and a breach of both. Then he lands the line that turns a rights dispute into a gut-level injustice: “I’ve not seen a dime.” That’s not an abstract argument about masters and publishing. It’s the oldest story in the music business, told in the plainest words: someone is cashing in, and it isn’t the artist.

The subtext carries an extra sting because Biafra’s public identity is built on calling out institutional scams. His politics have always targeted systems that launder exploitation through bureaucracy; here, the bureaucracy is the record industry itself, and the victim is him. The context is the long afterlife of punk catalogs: reissues, live tapes, “archival” releases marketed as historical preservation while functioning as revenue extraction. By refusing endorsement, he also refuses the nostalgia machine. He’s not letting the brand of “punk authenticity” be used to authenticate a product he didn’t approve and didn’t profit from.