Beyond the Fragmentation Thesis

Punk and the Real Politics of the Culture Wars

Kevin Mattson begins his book with Blondie, a band that, by 1980, had developed a popularity and cache that portended a familiar slide from revolutionary cultural potential to marketable product, able to be bought and sold, sanitized for mass audiences. With such a start, his book seems to be yet another study of “selling out,” of revolt getting co-opted and transformed into style. He notices how critics bemoaned the crossover of early punk acts to mainstream audiences, as with Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” in 1978. That release took Debbie Harry into the role of hocking designer jeans. It symbolized the corporate cooptation of new wave, a more “sanitized ‘punk'” that would define the sound of the Reagan Eighties. Certainly, punks and hardcore kids of the decade engaged in a kind of style war; but the culture wars cut much deeper than these superficial trappings, as Mattson shows, and extended even beyond the anti-Reagan rhetoric of the songs and bands chronicled in We’re Not Here to Entertain. This new generation of punks and hardcore artists shouting protest songs, from the Dead Kennedys singing “Kill the Poor” to the Circle Jerks performing “Paid Vacation,” confronted consumerism and suburbanization, the dehumanizing trends in pop and the music industry, and the follies of the US foreign policy establishment.

Yet, at the core, Mattson’s reframing of the culture wars in his book demonstrates how hardcore and punk of the 1980s revisited artists’ confrontations with the realities of the industrial—and increasingly postindustrial— economy. As Mattson reconstructs how young people confronted new questions of scale and the fuzzy boundaries of public and private, national and local, what emerges from his book without him quite articulating it is a reconsideration of civic space and spaces of protest—or, perhaps, we might say, of the battlefields of the culture wars.

Although Mattson does not explicitly design it this way, one might think of We’re Not Here to Entertain as the reading equivalent of a mixtape. Each chapter is like a 120-minute Maxell. Instead of “Summer Hits 1982,” each chapter covers roughly a year. He starts with the shift from boomer punk in 1978 to a younger set by 1980. Then Mattson moves to the rising tide of DIY and hardcore punks in 1980 and 1981 in the wake of the music industry’s near economic implosion. Hardcore kids such as Washington DC’s Ian MacKaye entered the fray, challenging the spectacle of arena rock and conservative, preppy styles and excesses and instead eschewing the drug-laced culture of rock’s superstars with Straight Edge, which “helped open up a new culture war—one that pitted straight angry kids against decadent rock star excess, passive consumerism, and the great American mellow out” (37). Fighting that culture war also meant creating their own alternatives to it, though these scenes’ inhabitants remained deeply conversant with the era’s political and cultural trends. Indeed, an important subtheme of We’re Not Here to Entertain is the business history of music in relation to the development of do-it-yourself alternatives. As the corporate music industry collapsed, Mattson notes, punks and hardcore kids began to put together not only their own culture, but also their own functioning economy.

By 1982 and 1983 (my favorite mixtape of the bunch), this alternative culture and economy spread across suburban backyards and independent scenes, with zines such as Maximum Rock and Roll setting out to “document scenes across the United States” as well as “connect them to a deeper sense of politics” while also critiquing punk from within (115). By 1984, the movement was increasingly national in scope, sharing across locales a confrontation both with the rise of MTV and corporate pop culture in the 1980s and with the politics of Ronald Reagan’s conduct of the Cold War and his embrace of a callous, shallow materialism at home. Meanwhile, internally punks confronted one another over the presence of participants identifying as skinheads, with their fascist tendencies or outright white supremacist ideologies. Other punks explored philosophical experimentation and themes beneath overt political statements. One thinks of the Minutemen’s touring “econo” approach, in which they celebrated scarcity and subsistence, evoking, Mattson argues, the “‘strenuous life’ that philosopher William James outlined in the early twentieth century—a faith that struggling prompted grace” (94). Punks overtly embraced the aesthetics of modernist literature and art, seeking to carry them forward into the 1980s. Not only did Minuteman Mike Watt pursue William James’ “strenuous life,” but he also experimented with lyrical techniques inspired by James Joyce.

Details such as these come through in the section subheads, which we might think of as the individual “songs” within each chapter’s mixtape. These take the reader into detailed explorations of each chapter’s evidence and its themes. In the chapter on 1984, the mixtape has thirty-three distinct songs by my count! Being punk songs, they are short, translating sometimes into a paragraph or two, such as the paragraph that explores charges of selling out, as when the band Kraut crossed over and played on MTV, seemingly influenced by metal and embracing the sound and look of “dinosaur, arena bands,” according to one zine letter writer. The themes of commercialization, corporate co-optation, and selling out reoccur throughout, but they also function narratively to demonstrate how punks linked together culture, economics, and politics in an oppositional movement.

The book’s somewhat fragmented structure, which I describe as a mixtape approach, itself suggests a core underlying theme of the book itself: fragmentation. Punks were pop culture dropouts, forming their own sometimes isolated networks and markets outside of the mainstream corporate culture industry of the 1980s. Yet their choices of lyrical content, style, and the general direction of their angst eventually transcended the backyard parties and separate spaces they tried to carve out. They were fragmented, yet as Mattson shows, eventually connections emerged. Alienation and isolation paradoxically encouraged connection through punk aesthetics. Ultimately, punks constructed something far bigger and interwoven than anyone at first anticipated or expected.

Perhaps this is why the old punk adage that the best punk itself comes out of economic recession and Republican presidencies seems so apt. Mattson’s analysis supports Daniel Rodgers’ “Age of Fragment” narrative about this time period in US history. American culture was cracking up at its lower levels of cultural and economic activity in punk scenes across the nation. Nonetheless, Mattson’s “culture war from below” (xv) argument also reverses the logic. In his retelling, young punks ultimately rejected fragmentation even as they drew power from their isolated, alternative spaces. They gradually embraced their roles as cultural producers rather than cultural consumers as a core to their rebellion against the political culture and power dynamics that structure their lives and American policy during the 1980s.

In this manner, punks conversed with deeper questions regarding the political economy of their time—neoliberalism, if you will. Their fragmented scenes gained coherence precisely in response to the direction of the broader mainstream US politics and culture, particularly as it increasingly blurred the boundary between public and private life. On the one hand, these punks accepted the privatization of American life that grew from neoliberalism’s market orientation, yet, on the other, they also leveraged, as it were, their private communities to engage in public discussion. These were not dropouts lobbing their verbal bombs from the sidelines of US culture; instead, they were deeply engaged with the politics of their era. Stylized and networked as an alternative, punk sought to recast the nation through its participants’ own perspectives and experiences.

Crucially, punks did this recasting themselves rather than having it done to them by mainstream media, politicians, or institutions. They created public spaces of their own that were, ironically, carved out from the increasingly privatized world of shopping malls, strip malls, suburban developments, and deindustrialized geographies. They explored and created their own countercultures and subcultures, subsisting on the collective status of culture critics and media offshoots. They created new markets, separate markets, and alternative markets, which extended, in many respects, the next phase of countercultural world-building begun in the aftermath of the 1960s hippie counterculture and developed during the 1970s (as detailed by historians such as Joshua Clark Davis[1]).

As such, the story of punk in the 1980s as told by Kevin Mattson ultimately challenges Daniel Rodgers’ narrative of fragmentation, which has increasingly defined the historiography of post-1970s politics and culture. Rodgers and other historians have focused on the turn inward of the counterculture, the shifting business models of broadcast media and radio programming for specific niche demographics, or neoliberal ideas about society as only constituted by individuals not collectives of any sort (most famously asserted by Margaret Thatcher in the UK context). Yet, Mattson’s study reveals how the punk and hardcore movement of the early and mid-1980s pushed against these tendencies. Perhaps Mattson could articulate this intervention more forcefully. Punk worked both locally and nationally (and even globally) at once to critique and to update countercultural developments. Their private lives shifted toward public, collective orientations. They challenged the thesis of fragmentation, and while their movement certainly had its internal contradictions, in many ways punk in the 1980s became a coherent movement.

Therefore, without Mattson ever directly confronting the Age of Fracture thesis, his book raises questions about it. His close study of the 1980s punk underground suggests instead that issues of fragmentation and coherence cannot be sufficiently explained without always considering both the cultural and economic orientations of subcultural movements. By 1983, as Mattson puts it, punks were “forming a network and sense of a movement” that continued to nurture new artists and expression. Even as they advocated dropping out or DIY approaches or other modes of disengagement, punk and its sustainers were very much a part of geopolitical and national political developments, conversant with and responding to dominant narratives, institutions, and hierarchies.

One might say then that fragmentation and coherence were not actually opposed in punk, but rather oddly intertwined. Punk’s democratic vision of culture, born in the quickening pace of neoliberal privatizations of public life, translated into a vision of civic participation. One example was the Positive Force group in Las Vegas. The group took an activist stance and sought to organize punk in public space, but resorted, by 1984, to meeting in malls and casino until it finally acquired a space for all-ages shows. It was then able to host a zine, Civil Disobedience, and rely on the promotional opportunity of the nearby college radio station (209) to publicize its activities. Like Positive Force in Las Vegas, other punk groups and zines shared strategies and worked hard to forge counterpublics out of privatized, fragmented spaces. The work was hard, as well as ultimately susceptible to corporate “greedheads” (291), but they offered a dramatic re-envisioning of the social, cultural, and political fabric of the nation in the 1980s. Even as punks felt separated, they drew precisely upon that sense of separateness to assert an oppositional togetherness.

It is in this frame of commerce, fragmentation, and a newfound sense of connection that the long-running cultural question of authenticity emerges in Mattson’s book—and with it one also notices something else he does not fully address: the religious qualities of this ostensibly secular movement. To be sure, punks engaged with modernist intellectuals and artists, and their new vocabularies of protest and activities drew upon a long trajectory of secular critiques of industrial capitalism and culture; but punks’ contemplation of authenticity also reveals the ways in which they challenged existing institutions and established new ones with the fervor of dissenters and reformers breaking away from the official church. Mattson frames the periodization of punk in the Reagan era as a series of ruptures: of breaking, breaking out, and opening up—going “viral” commercializing, and then retreating—with punks creating purity tests for each other about underground authenticity applied and re-established. These fluctuations appear akin to the roiling forces that defined religious revivals such as the First and Second Great Awakenings and similar movements.

As with religious dissenters of yore, punk participants policed those who “sold out” the values of the subculture for influence and fans or who undermined independence and ownership of the movement from within by trading it for a modicum of influence from without. After the first wave of punk flamed out in the late 1970s, as Mattson contends, DIY resuscitated in basements and empty backyard pools, rejecting “boomer punk” and creating a new discourse. These young punks confronted entrenched power structures: the music industry, commercial radio, arena rock, and even earlier punk efforts. In chronicling the rise of hardcore, Mattson emphasizes how the subgenre offered a physical embodiment of the rejection of arena rock staleness and disempowerment of fans. Slam dancing “combatted the icy, dehumanized feel of arena rock” (13). As a side note, it makes me wonder: if Freaks and Geeks had been allowed to continue, would Judd Apatow, a high school DJ following in hardcore’s wake, have sent the kids to backyard hardcore shows and eschewed the kitted-out drum sets that emulated Rush? Would Lindsay have rejected the Grateful Dead and instead turned to the underground? Which is to say that the internal dynamics of authenticity and the rules of belonging in the 1980s punk subculture became as vital to the “real” culture war Mattson details here as the lyrical content of the music to which they slam-danced. This quasi-religious dimension of punk links Mattson’s topic to other narratives about fragmentation in the 1970s and 1980s in surprising ways. Was punk in the 1980s not entirely unlike its seeming opposite in the Culture Wars: a resurgent evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity that arose with the decline of mainline Protestantism? Was it also not so different from the religiosity of 1960s and 1970s New Age alternative religions and “therapeutic” spiritual practices that many punks claimed to abhor? At key levels, they all share a similar logic: whether punks at an all-ages show or New Right Christians at a mega-church or New Age spiritualists at a yoga retreat center, all of these movements were marked by the quality of being distributed cultural networks arising within mass consumer culture during the post–World War II decades. They all arose within that larger context even as they seemed to oppose it.

These movements were all atomized, but not necessarily fragmented. They were able to assemble into networks even as they rejected mass culture, producing small scenes that then grew and expanded with important national implications. Yet the specific demographics of punk compared to the rise of evangelical fundamentalism or New Age spirituality are also important to note. As Mattson writes, “the scene was populated in large part by white suburban males alienated from preppies and the lingering drug culture” (36). They rejected hippies, preppies (the Blaines of the world, as captured so trenchantly by James Spader in John Hughes’ imperfect-but-memorable film Pretty in Pink). Nonetheless, punk was still part of the sphere of consumption and leisure. The movement had a purpose—one oriented nationally and internationally—and was destined for larger marketplaces and bigger conversations even if punks thought they could somehow avoid those directions. Kids in their basements and backyards rejected “passive consumerism” and the languid turning inward of culture and entertainment in the 1970s, asserting that rock could still have political relevance in live shows, DIY dissemination, lyrical content, and distinctive musicality. But they were nonetheless still operating within late twentieth-century consumer capitalism.

What emerges in We’re Not Here to Entertain is a counter-narrative of the 1980s. The book chronicles the development of a protest movement, one that challenged the intertwined politics and culture of the “Reagan Era,” yielding a “politics of angst” (41) that developed to undermine outwardly celebratory and affluent narratives emerging even before Reagan’s landslide reelection in 1984. And even after that year, when Reagan claimed it was “Morning in America,” this was not the case for punks. Even as they began to experience widespread recognition, many punks continually checked that influence and questioned it, striving to retain their authenticity and oppositionality as their fragmented scene grew more connected.

Mattson’s study sparks further questions. For instance, is his “politics of angst” thesis big enough? By 1985, Mattson argues, punk had been contained again, with only a glimmer of anti-corporate rebels offering hope for a different kind of industry. I might argue that this impulse to construct alternative markets, to connect across geography with the like-minded, not only defines youth culture in an era of media consolidation, but also it more broadly defines how all culture works. The styles and demographics might change, but punks were not alone in envisioning a different communal and civic landscape. For instance, graffiti writers similarly confronted an art world that appreciated their art while also exploiting and reframing its meaning. Underground musical scenes of many genres and communities confronted questions of commercialization. If we zoom out further, Americans of many political and cultural affinities looked to commercial transactions and private spaces for communal, civic belonging, or identity formation. We should resist limiting, as punk’s enemies did, punk to a “mere” style or impulse, and instead see it as part of a longer trajectory of protest and politics within corporate capitalism and the culture industry prior to, during, and after the 1980s. The “real” cultural wars Mattson asserts occurred then were about lyrical content and battles over authenticity, but they extended far beyond those into the very structure and power of cultural creation and production in American life over the course of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. I share Mattson’s embrace of the dark humor and sense of fragility that the movement portended, but while Mattson seems a bit more pessimistic about their persistence after the early 1980s, I maintain more hope that alternative media structures and community building can—and do—persist, especially as we allow more voices to populate our historical reconstructions of dissent in the Reagan Era. Maybe punk is not dead after all. Maybe, as an ongoing cultural approach within consumer capitalism rather than a response to one moment economic recession or decline, it continues.