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 Dewar MacLeod We’re Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America. By Kevin Mattson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. xvi + 388 pp. Cloth $27.95. The title in its starkness—“We’re Not Here to Entertain”—shouts out the audacity, even silliness, but admirable nonetheless, of entertainers who announce they won’t entertain. Punk rock in the United States of the 1980s was about much more than pleasure or escape; indeed, the punk rock shows and records were attempts to challenge power and change the world. Kevin Mattson’s new book does an excellent job of demonstrating how youth culture should be studied as the actions of young people who attempt to shape their own destiny, not simply follow fads. After the first wave of punk rock in the late 1970s, new and varied punk scenes emerged throughout the United States, many of them focused on their opposition to the politics of the era. The hardcore scene in Southern California, the Straight Edge scene in Washington, DC, and the Northern California Bay Area scene centered around the zine Maximum Rocknroll (MRR) were the most directly political and influential. Other writers have studied hardcore and the politics of local scenes, but Mattson tries to create a national narrative that emphasizes the coherence of political punk while recognizing its variety, with different iterations in different locales. He brilliantly shows how wide, fluid, and varied the punk scene was, making connections that are left out of a narrow focus on hardcore. He insightfully highlights the important influences of earlier generations of rockers and punks from the 1960s and 1970s. And he explores the exciting cross-pollinations between different subgenres and scenes, giving attention to Portland (the Wipers, Sado-Nation), San Jose (Tim Tannooka’s Ripper zine), and the scenes that spread across the country. Some of the strongest material in the book comes from close readings of punks’ perspectives on the world. MRR’s Tim Yohannan interviewing Bill Graham on KPFA is fascinating and illustrative. Graham was the pioneering rock promoter of the Fillmore and Winterland clubs in San Francisco who, by the 1980s, controlled the local promotion for touring bands. Yohannan blasted Graham for losing touch with youth culture and pushed him to stay out of booking punk shows, arguing, “This is a folk culture which music is only part of” (57). Mattson’s analysis shows us how punk politics connected the local music shows with larger political ideology and DIY actions. [End Page 348] While the politics of 1980s punk was mostly cultural—attacking the record industry and the larger consumerist entertainment culture of the US—Mattson takes us on the “Rock Against Reagan” tour of bands traveling to Washington, DC, to directly challenge “Reagan, Radiation, Racism, the Right, Repression, Registration, and Recession” (151). Throughout the book, he deftly explicates the many political debates within and between punk scenes, especially as they played out in zines like MRR. Mattson makes the case that we should take 1980s punk seriously for its politics and its impact. This book is important both for how it ties together so many strands of punk and independent music and for how it links those punk scenes to the larger political developments of the decade. Mattson weaves together an unwieldy set of themes and topics—from squatters’ rights to libertarianism to cop shows to cyberpunk and so on—showing how punk sat at the center of the “real culture war” of the Reagan era. The most glaring omission is the voices of women and girls. While Mattson acknowledges that “young, suburban white males dominated” (81), he makes no effort to dig into why that was. He makes only one mention of sexuality, which is unfortunate because several of the most important bands were led by gay and bisexual members. MRR was addressing these issues early on, discussing the Dicks as a “Commie, faggot band” and publishing a women’s poll and article that called for punk to “Annihilate Sex Roles” in 1983. If Mattson...