We're Not Here to Entertain

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.

"After the blast, Kurt Cobain's body slumped. Next to his corpse lay a piece of paper with his last words. At the time the bullet seared his head, Cobain was a rock star, his grizzled face graced the covers of slick music industry magazines, his songs received mainstream radio play, his band Nirvana performed in huge arenas. But he had been thinking an awful lot about what he called the "punk rock world" that saved his life during his teen years and that he had subsequently abandoned for stardom. He first encountered this world in the summer of 1983, at a free show the Melvins held in a Thriftway parking lot. After hearing the guttural sounds and watching kids dance by slamming against one another, he ran home and wrote in his journal: "This was what I was looking for," underlined twice. As he dove into this world, he recognized its blistering music played in odd venues, but also a wider array of creativity, like self-made zines, poetry, fiction, movies, artwork on flyers and record jackets, and even politics. This too: how all of these things opened up spaces for ideas and arguments. Now in his suicide note he reflected on his "punk rock 101 courses," where he learned "ethics involved with independence and the embracement of your community."2 There are people who can recount where they were when Cobain's suicide became news. I was in Ithaca, NY, finishing up my dissertation... but my mind immediately hurled backwards to growing up in Washington, D.C.'s "metropolitan area" (euphemism for suburban sprawl). I started to remember the first time I entered this "punk rock world." Around a year or two before Cobain went to the Thriftway parking lot, I opened the doors of the Chancery, a small club in Washington, D.C., and witnessed a tiny little stage, maybe a foot and a half off the ground. Suddenly, a small kid about my age (fifteen), his hair bleached into a shade of white that glowed in the lights, jumped up. I remember it being brighter than expected (unlike my earlier, wee-boy experiences in darkened, cavernous arenas where bands like Kiss or Cheap Trick would play to me and thousands of stoned audience members). This kid with the blond hair might have said something, I don't remember, what I recall is that his band broke into the fastest, most vicious sounding music I had ever heard. Suddenly bodies started flying through the air, young men (mostly) propelling themselves off the ground into the space between one another, flailing their arms, skin smacking skin. Control was lost, for when a body moved in one direction, another body collided into its path. When someone fell over, another would pick him up. The bodies got pushed onto the stage, making it hard to differentiate performer from audience member. At one moment it appeared the singer had been tackled by a clump of kids, and he seemed to smile. Sometimes, I could even make out what the fifteen-year old was shouting, especially, "I'm going to make their society bleed!" Overwhelmed, I rushed outside to clear my head"--

Mattson looks at American punk of the early 1980s through excellent scholarship. His work reveals more than a music scene--which itself produced outstanding bands. He also examines anarchist thought, with roots in the nineteenth century, put into practice by youth creating their own way of life. This is a guidebook to a future for people who want it.
--Krist Novoselic, founding member of Nirvana and author of Of Grunge and Government

Historian Kevin Mattson trains his eye on the US Hardcore Punk underground during the Reagan years and digs deep into archived fanzines and recordings of the era to shed light on a bunch of kids, scattered around the country, who were disaffected by the predominant culture and desperate to make their own. The good news is that Mattson grew up in this scene and he has a clear understanding of it. We're Not Here to Entertain is a great read that focuses on a vital and largely overlooked time and place in music history. When my friend and fellow Punk Rock War Veteran Steve Turner saw the galley of this book on my kitchen counter, he said, 'It's high time someone wrote that book'--a comment that sparked a discussion about Mr. Epp playing with Really Red at the Metropolis in '83, or was it Savage Republic at the Ground Zero Art Gallery, maybe it was Solger opening for Black Flag with Dez on vocals in 1980...--Mark Arm, lead singer of Mudhoney

Firmly establishes American hardcore in the politics of the moment and the economics of the music industry at the time. An essential read for anyone wanting to understand the cultural history of the 1980s.--Vic Bondi, founding member of Articles of Faith

Authored by a co-founder of the D.C. 'political punk' organization Positive Force, this valuable book sheds light on the dynamics underlying the complex interrelationship between a mostly oppositional 1980s punk counterculture and the more conservative mainstream (including the corrupt corporate music industry). The punks may not have won their cultural battle against such a powerful Goliath. But by creating a viable underground alternative that still persists in various forms today, they didn't exactly lose, either.
--Jeffrey Bale, Middlebury College; author of The Darkest Sides of Politics and former co-editor of Maximumrocknroll and Hit List

Among the many virtues of Kevin Mattson's book is the way it shows how millions of American youth found each other in their local punk scenes and contested President Reagan's 'Morning in America' bullshit. This was not merely political posturing; as Mattson demonstrates, early 1980s punk political thinking was serious and sophisticated. Mattson--a punk politico himself in Washington at the time--takes seriously the political potency of punk dissenters in that era. And guess what? In this new age of political polarization, they still have something to teach us.--Michael Foley, author of Dead Kennedys' Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables

Consistently fascinating... Fans of T.S.O.L., Fargo Rock City, Scratch Acid, and their like should rush to this invigorating history.--Kirkus, Starred Review

Absorbing.--AV Club

This is a book worth reading because it has so much direct relevance to American punks operating today... pretty terrific work.--PopMatters

We're Not Here to Entertain is a joy to read, erudite and stimulating, capturing the excitement of creating art and music against the grain.--Jacobin

[An] impassioned new history of punk politics and culture in the 1980s... We're Not Here to Entertain shows how punk taught a new generation of white, middle-class suburban kids to critique US foreign policy or call out the military-industrial complex. The punk world emerges in Mattson's telling as a definitive cultural formation--a successor to the New Left and counterculture of the '60s and the Popular Front of the '30s.--The Nation