Don’t Call Us Posers

Beyond White, Straight, Suburban Punk Histories

Cis-gendered, white, straight men in punk scenes love the word “poser.” They have especially directed the putdown toward femmes, girls, people of color, and women whose presence and fandom become subject to standards of punk authenticity meant to ostracize them. Measured against an invisible and impossible rubric of cool, “posers” oddly become outsiders in a subculture whose entire ethos is supposed to celebrate transgression. My own experiences as a Chicana punk in Southern California suggest that Kevin Mattson’s book We’re Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, THE REAL CULTURE WAR of 1980s America utterly misses this dynamic. By failing to attend to a more sophisticated intersectional analysis of race, class, and gender, books about punk scenes in suburbia such as this one do a disservice to punk’s continued relevance to contemporary movements for social justice such as Black Lives Matter or #MeToo. These books not only miss the empirical richness of punk rock, but they also make punk history unrelatable to queer, trans, and readers of color.[1] This is unfortunate because all punk memoirs about suburban life are invaluable archives. Yet, “poser” punk histories which critically analyze anti-blackness, racial covenants, redlining, and other forms of systemic racism—all of which are intrinsic to the creation of suburbia—remain obscured in academic literature about punk. Mattson’s book comes dangerously close to implying that just because a neighborhood and its punk scene was white, that scene’s history is exempt from attention to race. Maybe that is exactly what it needs.

Poserism has become a way to keep women, people of color, femmes, and queer people on the periphery in order to maintain a binary of those who are inauthentic punks as posers, women, femmes, queer, transgendered, or peoples of color and those who are authentic as white/cis-gendered men. Through a “poserist” framework, I engage with Mattson’s text by calling forth the intergenerational trauma of punk gatekeeping as part of a longer list of “isms” particular to musically inclined subcultures where sexism and homophobia meet at the crux of “cool.”^[2] The concept of “poserism” helps us redirect Mattson’s masculinist argument that US punk during the 1980s arose from a social panic among men about the possible return to military conscription after the Vietnam War led to, instead, an analysis of how anti-blackness operates within suburban punk narratives.[3] In this essay, I briefly discuss the problematics of suburban boredom outlined in Mattson’s chapter, “Teeny Punks: Pioneer Your Own Culture! (1980-1981),” by linking the anti-black origins of white suburbia to punk in the 1980s. I then trace how poserism operates intergenerationally and functions to normalize the erasure of certain people who are left out of history–– especially ones that supposedly “sold out.”

White Boredom and Anti-Blackness

In the chapter “Teeny Punks: Pioneer Your Own Culture! (1980-1981),” Mattson recounts punk in suburbia arising within a hot bed of divorce, high suicide rates for white boys, and middle-class boredom. This, he argues, then fueled the rapid growth of punk bands and culture throughout the US during the early 1980s. Mattson refers to the “suburban despair” of “the suburban landscape transform[ing] young people into passive consumers, with comfort hiding a great deal of anxiety” and the sterility of suburban life rife with low wages and dull labor (66). While providing a backdrop to a very particular part of white life, this class analysis of suburban life is very “Moynihanist” in nature. Mattson’s connection to punk flourishing has to do with the inability for the heteronormative nuclear family to sustain itself, an argument that is deeply rooted in a critique of emasculation and blackness as outlined in the infamous 1964 Moynihan Report.[4] The ability to feel boredom, mourn low wages, outwardly challenge homophobia, and grieve a two-parent household are signifiers of white privilege that only exist in the aftermath of black displacement and disenfranchisement during the 1960s.[5]

Mattson’s focus on the twinned qualities of “comfort” and “sterility” in suburban life situates punk as an individual response to dissatisfaction within and about mainstream society that mimics the marginality of 1980s QTPOC punks without any of the material conditions or systemic oppression. Rather than acknowledging how suburban whiteness has historically benefited from decades of segregation and racism, which created suburbia in the first place, Mattson misses black and other people of color altogether, not to mention queer contributions to punk. The analysis echoes the language of gentrification, in which once all the black people are purportedly gone, it becomes the norm to discuss what once was as if it had always been sterile and white.

Poserism and Erasure

In his essay “Guilty of Not Being White: On the Visibility and Othering of Black Punk” Marcus Clayton evocatively conveys the erasure of black voices from punk rock. As he writes:

Black voices in punk, just like black lives within humanity, are not a mutation, and they certainly are not an addendum to a musical genre that revels in the ideas of rebellion, systematic change, and a dismantling of hierarchy. In a world where a genre like punk—a genre filled with anger over systematic injustices—is created after a decade rife with racial tensions and civil rights movements, it is laughable to think of punk without a black presence.[6]

Unlike Mattson, Clayton articulates an analysis of punk and black identity that renders them symbiotic rather than disconnected. He argues that a history of punk absent of black influences or participation makes such a history colorblind in the most problematic of ways. This aligns with zinester Daisy Salinas’ call to decolonize punk in order to provide a better account of race, gender, and anti-blackness in punk across generations. She writes in response to the dozens of Instragram messages she continues to receive about the violences that occurs within punk scenes, “It broke my heart to yet again be reminded that with everything else we suffer through for being Black, Indigenous, people of color, women, queer, trans, nonbinary, disabled, fat, working class, etc., we then by the same token have to suffer through this bullshit in a subculture MEANT to free us.”[7] While Mattson’s history does note aspects of 1980s punk and print culture that relate to the broader politics of inequality and injustice—a fear of military takeover, the decline of social services, and the problems of punk commercialization—future white academic punk memoirs and histories should strive to be more transformative by expanding their focus beyond white participants alone.

White punk histories with first-person accounts should express an urgency to be more precise and accurate about conversations of gender. This surface’s in Mattson’s treatment of women in the punk scene in particular as sell outs. From the reference to Patti Smith calling it quits to become a “wife and mother” (1) to Debby Harry somehow singlehandedly commercializing Blondie as new-wave “nightclub chic” with her “bleached blonde hair and heavily mascara-ed face” (5), We’re Not Here to Entertain reveals the author’s anemic interest in addressing punk women as musicians outside their gender roles and appearance.

If a diverse scene is not what Mattson remembers or chronicles in his book, my hope is that contemporary scholars—and contemporary punks themselves—take what they need from Mattson’s book to repurpose his claims and dig deeper into the history of punk in relation to a broader sense of the Reagan Era. They might debate the ongoing historical and metaphorical erasure in white-centric punk histories by exploring punk in relation to the War on Drugs; feminist punk bands from the 1980s and 90s beyond the rise of Riot Grrl; the cultural impact of Michael Jackson on black communities (a topic Mattson utterly dismisses by treating Jackson as a pop culture parallel to Ronald Reagan); the loss of queer and black life during the AIDS epidemic; and punk memoirs by Chicana women such as Alice Bag (Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, A Chicana Punk Story) and Michelle Cruz Gonzales (The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band). Situating punk within these other stories more fully would make We’re Not Here To Entertain a fantastic portal rather than a catch-all hybrid memoir-history book.

At times, the pressure put on books about punk, including Mattson’s, to be all encompassing, accurate, and inclusive can be a tall order. Any punk book will be met with criticisms regardless of the stories it tells. This is very likely due to people’s preferences as to what kinds of stories they agree with and which perspectives make them feel seen. However, as academics with punk backgrounds writing about punk culture, there is a responsibility to unearth the social issues that created and continued to inform punk’s survival. For Mattson, a straight, white story dominates his take on punk and the “real” culture wars of the 1980s, with issues of “selling out” moving to the center of the tale. If we divest from this poserist attitude toward the very communities that created punk to begin with, whole other important histories begin to resound and come into view.