We're Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America by Kevin Mattson

Abstract

Reviewed by: We're Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America by Kevin Mattson Andrew J. Salvati (bio) We're Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America. By Kevin Mattson. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 416. $27.95 cloth; $9.99 ebook) There was the apparent end of the "boomer" wave of punk rock in 1979; the conglomeration of the music and entertainment industries; the rise of arena rock, Top-40 radio, new wave, and the "blockbuster" cultural product. There was the great "mellowing out" of the 1960s counterculture and its musical icons. There was the stultifying conformity of suburbia and the disintegration of the nuclear family; the increasing bellicosity of the Carter administration, and the smiling authoritarianism of Ronald Reagan; the worship of wealth and celebrity; the culture of narcissism and Yuppie hedonism; the reinstitution of the Selective Service, Cold War II, Central American adventurism, and the looming threat of World War III and nuclear annihilation. The tensions and anxieties that permeated American society at the dawn of the 1980s are usually concealed by the smooth gloss of nostalgia—by catchy electro-pop tunes, coming-of-age comedies, hip commercialism, and a splash of pastels. But as Kevin Mattson demonstrates [End Page 108] in his richly sourced history, We're Not Here to Entertain, the experience of these cultural and political shifts was intensely important to a new generation of suburban kids—the so-called "teeny punks"—who wanted to rejuvenate the DIY punk ethos of the 1970s, rebel against the conservative-corporatist mainstream, and create a culture of their own. Like previous chroniclers of punk rock (for example, Mark Andersen, Stephen Duncombe, Dawson Barrett, and Dewar MacLeod, among others), Mattson approaches his subject with the care and love of a former participant, opening We're Not Here to Entertain with reflections on his own introduction to what he calls the "punk rock world" as a teenager in the early 1980s: going to shows, discovering MAXIMUMROCKNROLL, and starting a band. But more than just the music, Mattson writes that for him, and for thousands of other kids across the country, punk was an ethos, "a consciousness or vision as much as a movement, fueled by discussions of personal ethics (straight edge, for instance), existentialism, anarchism, and the art of dissent" (p. 287). Mattson's memory of the scene serves as the entry point for what he calls a "history of creativity" that emerged from the punk rock world of the early eighties, and the forms of DIY artistic expression—music, fanzines, movies, fiction, art—that channeled a politics of angst "at a bloated entertainment industry and a president who equated governing with entertaining" (p. xvi). It is this "culture war" between a rebellious youth culture and the entrenched political and industrial powers that at times villainized it (as in anti-punk episodes of network TV shows Quincy and CHiPs, or in Reagan's tendency to interpret dissent, including the punk-infused nuclear freeze movement as communist propaganda), overwhelmed it (the spectacles of the culture industries' synergistic "blockbusters," or increasing police harassment of punk club owners, fans, and performers), or co-opted it (Mattson's prelude charts Blondie's arc from CBGB regular to chart-topping blockbuster) that provides the central conflict of Mattson's narrative. It is a culture war that Reaganism and the entertainment [End Page 109] industry would eventually win. By 1985, and certainly by the success of Nirvana in the early 1990s where Mattson's book begins and ends, punk rock had become just another "style" or "choice" in the corporate buffet. But the strength of We're Not Here to Entertain as a political and cultural history lies not only in its specific argument, but in Mattson's approach to reconstructing the punk rock world. While previous scholarship has focused on DIY cultural expression (for example, Duncombe, Triggs), political activism (Barrett), regional histories (MacLeod), or band biographies, Mattson has integrated each of these approaches in a way that is conscientious of the heterogeneity of punk rock. Rather than a singular narrative, We're Not...