A “Punk Rock World” or a Punk Rock Nation?

In the Reagan Era, International Punk Rock Mattered Too

At two points while reading Kevin Mattson’s We’re Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America, I had to pause to take a photograph of a page. I sent one photograph to a friend whose band Mattson had mentioned and another to a different friend whose zine Mattson quoted. I could not resist sharing, of course, as it is a singularly strange and fun experience to get to tell someone you know that they—a regular and not famous person—have been immortalized in an academic history book for something they did as a teenager (and, in the case of both of these friends, have continued to do into adulthood). The nature and extent of their involvement in their respective punk scenes in Arizona and Massachusetts underscores a key aspect of We’re Not Here to Entertain, which is the centrality of the DIY or “do-it-yourself” ethos to punk in the United States, not just in in the early 1980s but even into the present day.

In its narrative style as well as its argument, the book captures the diffuse yet interconnected character of what Mattson terms the “Punk Rock World” during the Reagan years, telling the stories of how young people all over the United States started their own bands, venues, and record labels to produce their own music, zines, and other cultural artifacts. Yet despite the punk rock “world” framing, the book is very much focused on the United States, with some coverage of US foreign relations during the Reagan administration and mention of some well-known U.K. and European bands. After reflecting on Mattson’s argument about the relationship between DIY practices and punk political opposition to Reaganite policies in the 1980s, I would like to offer a few thoughts on the “world” or international side of the story. Considering the international scene makes clear that the punk scene in the United States was not unique in its patterns of cultural resistance and reveals how punks abroad contested repression and militarism in their countries and around the world—repression and militarism that hegemonic American power (both before and during the Reagan administration) had often fostered.

The punk embrace of DIY that We’re Not Here to Entertain highlights represented a rejection of the dominant mass monoculture and corporatization of the early 1980s. Mattson makes the case throughout the book that by creating and producing everything themselves, the US punks of the era “unleashed a culture war from below, one that aimed its sites on the entertainment industry—corporate record labels, FM radio, ‘blockbuster’ movies, eventually MTV” (xv). Furthermore, those “DIY practices…fueled a DIY politics” that mobilized these young people to agitate against Ronald Reagan’s reactionary policies at home as well as abroad (76). The book develops this argument using an impressionistic narrative style, with each chapter containing multiple vignettes that describe local scenes, discuss key bands and analyze song lyrics, and reflect on mainstream as well as punk films, novels (including science fiction works by William Gibson and other authors), zines, and art. This structure allows Mattson to demonstrate the independence and self-sufficiency of individual local scenes while also highlighting the strength of the connections that linked punks across the country and facilitated the national cohesiveness of the subculture in terms of evolving musical styles and ongoing political debates across locations.

Interspersed throughout the book are snippets of historical context on national mass culture and Reagan administration policies, including Reagan’s Cold War revivalism, nuclear saber rattling, and interventions in Central and South America. These sections serve as connective tissue within the narrative, relating vignettes from local punk scenes to one another and to a larger emerging national network of early 80s punk. For example, after introducing the Contra War, Mattson provides quotes from a few zines revealing how punks reacted with frustration to the aims and secrecy of the covert intervention that saw the US lending support to violent counterrevolutionary forces in Nicaragua.[1] He then transitions to a section on the movie Repo Man, which starts off: “Covert operations. Secret military action. CIA. Lying. Covering up. . . . Sounded like a good time to rejuvenate noir movie making. . . . Which explains why Repo Man, a movie released in the Spring of 1984, became a testimony to how punk kids felt living in the age of Reagan.” (184). The association between these events and the sentiments of punks in the United States that Mattson seeks to draw here is evocative, offering a loose correlation between US interventionism abroad, punk aversion to that interventionism, and how corporate entertainment culture (perhaps) captured some elements of the prevailing punk mood. Yet his interpretation in this instance and in other places throughout the book comes through more as implied linkage than it does as explicit analysis. Still, it is very effective for providing readers with a sense of the US punk scene and how its participants reacted at once against yet within the cultural and political environment of Reagan’s 1980s. DIY culture itself was inherently political, in that it was an attempt to create an independent mode of production and distribution that operated in opposition to the mass entertainment industry; the national (and international) networks that DIY scenes created allowed the punk and hardcore subculture to flourish.

Given the sprawling and disperse nature of the US punk scene and the well-known antipathy that punks had to Reagan’s presidency, it is entirely sensible that Mattson would focus on the domestic United States. He captures this history beautifully through his technique of close readings of zines in relation to more atmospheric impressions of Hollywood films and political developments. He also teases out some genuinely intriguing if implicit connections between US foreign policy, mass culture, and DIY punk politics. As such, what follows from here is not at all intended to be the typical reviewer’s lament that the author did not adequately attend to an aspect of the topic of particular interest to the reviewer. Rather, as both a foreign policy historian and a collector of US and international punk and hardcore records (and in light of the nature of this open forum), I want to offer some loose thoughts about the “punk rock world” of the 1980s more in terms of how US punks engaged with international punks in this era and in particular how Reagan’s foreign policy shaped the world in which punk bands abroad operated.

The DIY punk and hardcore scene was not confined to the United States, and many punks abroad were fighting “culture wars from below” as well. Their particular domestic contexts were distinct from those in the United States, but US economic, cultural, and military power at the time could shape those contexts, whether by propping up authoritarian leaders, waging covert or overt wars, or contributing to debt crises in their countries, escalating the threat of a global nuclear conflagration, or, less calamitously, by setting global cultural norms through media, music, and fashion. Although the scholarship on the “culture wars” of the 1980s has tended to focus mostly on domestic politics, religion, and culture in the United States, looking at DIY punk from a global perspective and considering the transnational flows between scenes allows us to better visualize the range of cultural resistance that emerged in reaction to Reaganite and Reaganite-aligned economics and politics worldwide.

Throughout We’re Not Here to Entertain, Mattson cites the zine Maximum Rocknroll, which Tim Yohannan (Tim Yo) founded in 1982, because the publication’s articles provide excellent insight into how punks discussed and contested the political issues of their day. MRR is also a treasure trove of record reviews and from the very first issue onward, Tim Yo made sure to include reviews of bands from outside of the United States. This is because there was indeed a “punk rock world” in the 1980s, one that was connected perhaps not as closely as the punk rock nation that Mattson describes domestically, but one that was connected and reciprocal nonetheless transnationally. The review section for MRR #1 included a review of the Swedish band Headcleaners, and noted that the band thanked “Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Disorder, and Dischord Records…which should give you some idea of their influences.”[2] This does suggest that bands in other countries were influenced by US bands, but the inclusion of international records in MRR meant these bands would likewise be introduced to US readers and listeners, creating opportunities for mutual influence networks across national boundaries. Indeed, bands like Sweden’s Anti-Cimex, Italy’s Raw Power, and the UK’s Discharge influenced the musical style and political aesthetics of a number of US punk and hardcore bands (and we should not forget the influence that Jamaican reggae and ska had on a number of UK bands, including the Specials and the Clash that then in turn influenced US bands. The cultural flow was multidirectional). The editor opened this inaugural section for international record reviews by asserting that they hoped to include releases from “Canada, continental Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa (!), Mexico, and anywhere else,” and by calling on punks to send MRR copies of records from abroad, since poor distribution presented a challenge.[3]

This distribution challenge proved surmountable, as soon enough the “World” section was very well populated with releases from all over the globe.[4] Early issues even included entire “scene reports” from countries as far flung as Yugoslavia, Denmark, Greece, and Brazil, a trend that only expanded as the zine continued publication throughout the 1980s and into the recent past (MRR published its last issue in 2019). This is where US readers could learn about all of the tremendous and exciting punk and hardcore coming out of Japan, Singapore, Finland, Poland, East Germany, Argentina, Brazil, and beyond. In addition to this, many of the most well-known and formative compilation albums, such as the International P.E.A.C.E. Benefit Compilation, were explicitly international, featuring 55 bands from all over the world. Reminding us of Mattson’s domestic focus on punk in the context of Reagan’s America, most of the bands submitted songs with a political focus.

In 1984, MRR released its own compilation LP titled Welcome to 1984, which the editors described to magazine readers in the May 1984 issue. Their two-page article asserted that one of the key themes of this “first release on the MRR record label…is the ‘international angle,'” as the record included “bands from 17 different countries in 5 continents, a testimony not only to the proliferation of our scene, but to the similarity of the social circumstances which have led to ‘punk rock.'”[5] In particular, the editors noted, “American cultural (and economic) imperialism has brought fast food, ‘Leave it to Beaver,’ and rock’n’roll to the world. Now, not only do we all share the same middle-class upbringing and value indoctrination, but we are united by our rejection of that same vacant, shallow, numbing culture.”[6] Such sentiments accord well with Mattson’s thesis about the nature of the punk rock “culture war” of the Reagan era, yet internationalize it (and in language that historians would well question, given that we cannot assume, as the editors did, that members of bands hailing from Yugoslavia, Brazil, or Japan “shared the same middle-class upbringing” and values as Americans, even though they might indeed reject the long-standing efforts of the United States to project its economic, political, and cultural values abroad). The editors’ call for their readers to “write to as many people around the world as you can afford to, finding out about their particular cultures, views,” and bands because “we’re all in this together, fuck nationalism!!” speaks to the very serious international focus of the punk scene in the early 1980s. It also gave an implicit nod to the strong political themes that ran through many of the bands’ songs, including the rejection of what we might think of as Reagan’s vision for a US-led world and a revivified fight against global communism

That said, there did tend to be more representation from European bands than from, say, Latin America, though bands from Brazil and Argentina did get a good amount of press in the pages of MRR. Reading Mattson’s We’re Not Here to Entertain and thinking about the internationalism of the punk scene in the era that he was writing about has led me to ponder the possibilities for future scholarship in this area. Throughout the book, Mattson addresses the angst that US punks felt about Reagan’s interventions in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, and Grenada, and their fears that they might be called up to serve in one of these conflicts—or that they might be annihilated in a nuclear attack brought on by Reagan’s muscular rhetoric about the Soviet Union. Again, the book is primarily and by design focused on the United States. It would be exciting for future historians to investigate how bands from this period from South and Central America were engaging with the politics of their countries, particularly in light of Reagan’s interventionism and US military, economic, and cultural power. They might build on works like Eric Zolov’s Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture or José Agustín’s La Contracultura en Mexico, but with a greater focus on the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond. Reagan’s foreign policy wrought devastating effects in many of South and Central American countries. There were punk and hardcore bands who were actively playing and recording in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, and elsewhere throughout Latin America during the 1980s. Many of them took genuine risks by playing in punk bands that were critical of their governments. Many were in communication with and sharing their music with punks elsewhere in the world, including in the United States. Yet there is comparatively less documentation about these bands and the “punk rock world” that they too inhabited. Given the significant place that Latin America occupied in Reagan’s foreign policy agenda, and this relative dearth of information, this would be a potentially illuminating path for those inspired by Mattson’s book.

International Zines

As a side note, if you wish to read more about international punk bands from the 1980s (and beyond), including some absolute favorite bands of mine from Sweden, Japan, and Finland, check out old copies of Stuart Schrader’s Game of the Arseholes zine, old issues of which are available here and here.

Latin American Hardcore and Punk Playlist

If you would like to listen to a playlist of Latin American hardcore and punk bands from the 1980s, check out the following songs:

Brazil
Ratos De Porão ?– Crucificados Pelo Sistema

Olho Seco ?– Botas Fuzis Capacetes

Lixomania ?– Violência & Sobrevivência

Colombia
Imagen – …Y Ahora Qué?

I.R.A. ?– Barquizidio

Chile
Pinochet Boys ?– ?La Música del General

Mexico
Massacre 68 ?– ¡No Estamos Conformes!

Atoxxxico ?– Punks De Mierda

Herejia ?– Resistir Al Sistema

Argentina
Los Violadores ?– Guerra Total

Attaque 77 – Yo Te Amo