Kevin Mattson - Were Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America

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Kevin Mattson 2020

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mattson, Kevin, 1966 author.

Title: Were not here to entertain : punk rock, Ronald Reagan, and the real

culture war of 1980s America / Kevin Mattson.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019044699 (print) | LCCN 2019044700 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780190908232 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190908256 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Punk rock musicUnited States19811990History and

criticism. | Rock musicUnited States19811990History and

criticism. | United States. President (19811989 : Reagan)

Classification: LCC ML3534.3 .M385 2020 (print) |

LCC ML3534.3 (ebook) | DDC 306.4/84260973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044699

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044700

For Jay, so he can understand why his father seems so unglued at times

Teeny Punks: Pioneer Your Own Culture! (19801981)

It Can and Will Happen Everywhere (19821983)

Its 1984! (1984)

Marching toward the Alternative (1985?)

A persons life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.

Albert Camus

After the blast, Kurt Cobains 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.

There are people who can recount where they were when Cobains suicide became news. I was in Ithaca, New York, finishing up my dissertation... but my mind was immediately hurled backward 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 saw 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 dont 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, Im going to make their society bleed! Overwhelmed, I rushed outside to clear my head.

There I found some kid hawking a fanzine for pocket change. Xeroxed images ran alongside typewritten commentary or handwritten prose, replete with scratching-outs. My visual senses came unglued, the way my aural senses had inside. It looked nothing like Newsweek, the slick magazine my mom subscribed to. This zine-meister explained to me that he was an anarchist who believed in producing his own culture and means of communication. I thought to myself: I could do that, and soon I would, with friends who were trying to make sense of this world opening up.

Other kids from inside the club spilled out onto the sidewalk. Conversations ensued. Most of these raggedy-looking kids came from what were called broken homes, a byproduct of the skyrocketing divorce rate that defined the 1970s me decade and that played its course out during the 1980s. I noted ambivalence about parents, matched with a hatred of high

* * *

Punk rock faggot! I remember the shout and how it made my body tense up. That scream reminds me of the way it feltafter I had jumped into the punk rock worldto be a threat. It first happened when I came to high school with my hair cut into a spikey mess and then, over the course of a few weeks, changing my hair color from orange to blonde, red, and black. I remember wearing the ugliest shirt I could find in a thrift store; it was light blue with different drawings of Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Bird standing in front of Roman ruins (inexplicable and surreal). My hair and shirt didnt get the sort of reception they would today: Oh, OK, here we have a kid adopting a punk style and exhibiting a subcultures symbols. Instead, they garnered rage and reaction. I remember one kid in my chemistry class screaming, You cant do that! every time I came in with a different color in my hair. Kids much bigger than me would shove me into the lockers that lined our hallways. My homeroom teacher asked me in front of other students if I were a fag. I remember how amused I was that bullies and jocks somehow felt threatened by my presence, that I could provoke such violence normally submerged underneath the quaint faade of my suburban high school.