In We’re Not Here to Entertain, Mattson paints a picture of 1980s punk as musically diverse, experimental, intellectually curious, and motivated by a growing need for some sort of radical change. There are the usual suspects: Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Bad Brains, Minor Threat. There are also wildly inventive songwriters; radicals and avant-gardists; intellectuals, sci-fi writers, poets, filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Alex Cox; graphic artists like Raymond Pettibon and Gary Panter, and an endless list of scenes and zines.
The zines, many of them little more than xeroxed pamphlets, play an essential role in Mattson’s narrative. Virtually every metropolitan area had its underground scene in the early 1980s. Within each you would find local kids stapling photocopied pages together, containing everything from reviews of local shows to treatises on art and politics. Taken in toto, they are Mattson’s archive of American punk, its samizdat and communiqués, the basic unit of who and what it rejected and desired. Who the scene rejected is, to a degree, obvious. The book’s subtitle is “Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America.”
How Reagan’s Rise Fueled Punk’s Politics
Reagan’s wrinkled, smiling visage peers out from countless album covers and flyers from the era, often with blood pouring from his mouth or mushroom clouds in the background. He was indeed a loathsome figure. But it wasn’t just Reagan who punks hated. Through a countercultural lens, he becomes the avatar for everything that made the 1980s a dismal era, worthy of rage and opposition wherever possible. To call the conflict between Reagan and punk rock the “real culture war” isn’t to discount the very concrete wars he waged on Central America, on poor people, leftists, trade unionists, AIDS patients, or people of color. Rather, it is to say that the way Reagan went about waging these political and material attacks had a huge impact on what it meant to resist culturally, in the realms of art, aesthetics, and creativity.
No prior president had so effectively wielded the auratic power of mass media like Ronald Reagan. Sure, his acting was third-rate, but decades of film experience gave him an understanding of how fanfare and spectacle can blur the lines between commerce, politics, morality, and repression.