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Title details for We're Not Here to Entertain by Kevin Mattson - Available

We're Not Here to Entertain

Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America

by Kevin Mattson
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Many remember the 1980s as the era of Ronald Reagan, a conservative decade populated by preppies and yuppies dancing to a soundtrack of electronic synth pop music. In some ways, it was the "MTV generation." However, the decade also produced some of the most creative works of punk culture, from the music of bands like the Minutemen and the Dead Kennedys to avant-garde visual arts, literature, poetry, and film. In We're Not Here to Entertain, Kevin Mattson documents what Kurt Cobain once called a "punk rock world" —the all-encompassing hardcore-indie culture that incubated his own talent. Mattson shows just how widespread the movement became—ranging across the nation, from D.C. through Ohio and Minnesota to LA—and how democratic it was due to its commitment to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tactics. Throughout, Mattson puts the movement into a wider context, locating it in a culture war that pitted a blossoming punk scene against the new president. Reagan's talk about end days and nuclear warfare generated panic; his tax cuts for the rich and simultaneous slashing of school lunch program funding made punks, who saw themselves as underdogs, seethe at his meanness. The anger went deep, since punks saw Reagan as the country's entertainer-in-chief; his career, from radio to Hollywood and television, synched to the very world punks rejected. Through deep archival research, Mattson reignites the heated debates that punk's opposition generated in that era-about everything from "straight edge" ethics to anarchism to the art of dissent. By reconstructing the world of punk, Mattson demonstrates that it was more than just a style of purple hair and torn jeans. In so doing, he reminds readers of punk's importance and its challenge to simplistic assumptions about the 1980s as a one-dimensional, conservative epoch.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 14, 2020

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780190908256

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780190908256
      • File size: 1422 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from June 1, 2020
      In which Ronnie Raygun and corporate entertainment come in for a slagging, courtesy of three (distorted) chords and the truth. If you wanted to get beat up in high school in the early 1980s, your best strategy would be to show up with your "hair cut into a spikey mess" and listening to punk rock--not the sellout punk of the decade before but truly antinomian acts like Black Flag, Millions of Dead Cops, and Jodie Foster's Army. That cohort of musicians and their fans, writes Mattson--now a professor of history at Ohio University, then a denizen of the mosh pit--stood strongly against the prevailing politics of the time, with a president who "lived in a bubble of entertainment, who referenced Hollywood films to justify his policies." The DIY ethos of second-generation punk extended beyond music to include filmmaking (Alex Cox's Repo Man comes in for close analysis), publishing (with mimeographed zines the coin of the realm), art, and other endeavors. This was all in protest against not just Reaganism, but also a corporate culture that served up product instead of music--and whose vision of what youth was supposed to be, courtesy of the Republican-lite John Hughes, was an offense to actual young people. "It was like People's Park," Mattson writes, "create something yourself, lay the sod, and then defend it against those with power." True, some of the leaders of second-wave punk found themselves being served up as product: Once Nirvana broke, for instance, MTV couldn't find enough grunge bands to fill the hours. Still, writes the author in this consistently fascinating music history, we should remember the punk rock of the '80s both for its creativity and "as a moment when kids saw themselves as creating their own culture, prompting them to think about the world differently"--not bad as aspirations go. Fans of T.S.O.L., Fargo Rock City, Scratch Acid, and their like should rush to this invigorating history.

      COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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