"At a time when you can’t tell the difference between NBC Nightly News and Entertainment Tonight," says Jello Biafra by phone from Los Angeles, "then it’s up to the artist to fill in the blanks and tell people what’s really going on." This Sunday, at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, the former Dead Kennedys frontman will do just that.

Although Biafra has hardly abandoned the punk muse (right now he’s recording new tunes in a genre he dubs "disease music" or "toxic rock"), the years since the rancorous 1986 implosion of his legendary Bay Area polit-punk outfit have seen him focusing largely on the spoken-word albums he releases on his own Alternative Tentacles imprint. These caustic smartbombs of incisive and enlightening exegesis, critique, and exhortation take aim at the good, the bad, and the ugly of American politics, the perils of censorship (a scourge Biafra knows well, having emerged bloodied but unbowed from the infamous 1986 obscenity trial over an H.R. Giger poster included in the Kennedys’ Frankenchrist album), and even the reasons he’s glad the space shuttle blew up (NASA, he says, had planned to load the flight after the Challenger with 50 pounds of plutonium).

In April, Alternative Tentacles released another short, sharp shock called The Big Ka-Boom, Part One, his brief oration on September 11 and its Orwellian-bellicose fallout. Now comes Machine Gun in the Clown’s Hand, a more substantial two-disc spiel that expounds further on the disquieting zeitgeist of the past year. Anticipating the answer, I ask Biafra what one can expect to hear when his sing-song nasal cadences fill the Coolidge’s lofty art-deco expanse. His lightning response proves me right: "101 reasons why invading Iraq for the hell of it is a bad idea." Other talking points, he adds, may include the predations and the book-cooking of various subsidiaries of "The War on Terrorism, Incorporated," and even some oldies-but-goodies like King George the Second’s Florida election theft and "the manufactured California energy crisis."

One subject that may or may not be broached is the legal back-and-forth between Biafra and his former bandmates. In 2000, East Bay Ray, Klaus Flouride, and D.H. Peligro sued him for back royalties and control of the Dead Kennedys name and catalogue. They won. This past March, he shot back, slapping them with a suit for touring under the DK name with a Jello Biafra "impersonator," Brandon Cruz — erstwhile kiddie star of the treacly ’70s TV show The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.

When I ask whether he wants to comment on the still-pending proceedings, Biafra sighs: "I’d rather not, except to say that it just gets worse and worse." Then, typically, he keeps talking. "They’re just so drunk on their own greed that they believe their own lies and it’s gone to their heads. I know they’re deliberately trying to trash everything Dead Kennedys stood for and make it into a big joke party band as a way to keep their scam going, but this makes me very sad. I’m glad I’m not a part of it, and I’m glad I’m not in a band with people like that anymore. They even brag that they don’t rehearse! It shows. I feel sorry for people who’ve paid as much as $33 a ticket. It’s sort of like paying to see the original Black Sabbath and finding out the singer is Donny Osmond."

Jello Biafra speaks this Sunday, October 13, at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard Street in Brookline. Tickets are $10; call (617) 734-2500.