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

Kevin Mattson offers a history of punk rock in the 1980s. He documents how kids growing up in the sedate world of suburbia created their "own culture" through DIY tactics. Punk spread across the continent in the 1980s as it found expression in different media, including literature, art, and poetry. Punks dissented against Reagan''s presidency, accusing the entertainer-in-chief of being mean and duplicitous (especially when it came to nuclear war and his policies in Central America). Mattson has dived deep into archives to make his case that this youthful dissent meant something more than just a style of mohawks or purple hair.

We 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 (the "MTV generation"). But the decade also produced some of the most creative works of punk rock - not just the music of bands like the Minutemen and the Dead Kennedys, but also visual arts, literature, poetry, and film. Kevin Mattson documents what Kurt Cobain once called a "punk rock world." He shows just how widespread the movement became, and how democratic (not at all New York-centric), due to its commitment to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethics. Mattson puts this movement into a wider context, telling about a culture war that punks opened up against the sitting president. Reagan''s talk about end days and nuclear warfare made kids panic; his tax cuts for the rich and simultaneous slashing of school lunch program funding made punks 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 - about everything from "straight edge" ethics to anarchism to the art of dissent. By reconstructing the world of punk, Mattson shows that it was more than just a style of purple hair and torn jeans. And in so doing, he reminds readers of its importance and its challenge to simplistic assumptions about the 1980s as a one-dimensional, conservative epoch.