“Entertainment!” It Sells.

Connecting Celebrity-Hungry Politicians and Gnarly Punk Rockers

In a colorful and anecdote-filled account, Kevin Mattson tells the story of American culture and politics in the early 1980s through the lens of punk music. His book captures the musicians, writers, artists, and fans who helped make the local punk scene take root across the country. For them, punk became an opportunity to forge new relationships, provoke intellectual debates, and create a culture, as Mattson puts it, “that they controlled and defended against those seeking profit” (57). At a time in which greed was celebrated as good, individuals across the country used punk to reject such dominant capitalist sensibilities. Mattson impressively excavates evidence found in zines—the homemade magazines that were popular in the punk movement and published in cities, rural areas, college towns, and suburbs—to recount how a new generation of youth created “not just a ‘world’ but a consciousness” as they developed “their own culture, and they realized that required discipline and self-management” (95).

Mattson situates his study as a transition from memory to history, and indeed, his personal connection to the punk rock scene combines with his training as a historian to capture a slice of American youth culture that is often only briefly mentioned in scholarship on the Reagan era. He recalls his own participation in a group called Positive Force, and how “the group saw connections between the music being produced and the growing political awareness about a president who lived in a bubble of entertainment, who referenced Hollywood films to justify his policies” (xiv). The book tackles both issues—the punk music community and Ronald Reagan—and offers an in-depth study how the former was influenced by the latter. However, Mattson misses an opportunity to explore the deeper cultural and political significance of these connections and what it meant that entertainment itself became a way to critique consumerism and celebrity politics. 

We’re Not Here to Entertain expands the small but growing historical scholarship on the Reagan era in key ways. First, it builds on another important work on the cultural politics of the era published over a decade ago by Bradford Martin in The Other Eighties.[1] Both Martin and Mattson’s subtitles convey a similar argument about the need for historians to rethink the popular memory of the decade: Martin’s A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan and Mattson’s Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the REAL CULTURE WAR of 1980s America each contend that what “really” happened during the time period has been overshadowed by Ronald Reagan’s presidency. The books also argue that liberal, left-wing, and radical people did not retreat when conservatives came into political power and “yuppies” captured media headlines; rather, they took on new forms of activism deeply rooted in cultural politics.  Mattson expands on Martin’s work, uncovering how individuals opposed advertising and corporate entertainment industries that were growing in size and power as well as the president who encouraged their expansion and, indeed, depended on it for his own political fortunes.

Importantly, this work adds more nuance in how we think about the “culture wars.” Andrew Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America convincingly shows how politicians and activists debated—and scored political points from—cultural issues, notably academic curriculum, school prayer, abortion, and music.[2] Mattson shifts the focus to explore how alternative music communities engaged in a battle for the attention of younger Americans, with concrete consequences for individuals and artists involved in the punk rock scene. For example, by studying fan zines, Matteson shows how networks developed to disseminate information, advertise new albums, and share analysis about current events, all of which helped to turn music and punk practices into a political critique. This book argues that the culture wars of the 1980s were not just a partisan battle in which individuals joined one side or the other. Rather, it contends, individuals struggled to create their own forms of engagement that, in turn, remade the very configurations of American political culture.

We’re not here to entertain also demonstrates how the punk rock milieu of the 1980s became central to youth experiences as punks used alternative modes of entertainment to rejected Reagan, conservatism, and the broader entertainment-political industrial complex. Individuals in the punk scene—both fans and artists—condemned the “hip capitalism” of MTV and “Brat Pack” movies as they thirsted to find community and meaningful relationships outside the dominant commercial culture that sought to exploit youth rebellion for economic gain. Yet, as Mattson shows in his fascinating discussion of the punk cash economy, these scenes notably rejected the commercialism of the corporate music industry, but not capitalism itself, as they found ways to develop their own trading networks.

With all of these findings, Mattson’s work also contributes to our understanding of American political culture in ways that expand the historiography of the topic, even as, regrettably, its analysis is clouded by not engaging with insights from these works. Cinema and media studies scholars studying audiences and fandom, and more recently, historians studying the politics driving media consumption and production, have demonstrated how various actors shape entertainment culture with different agendas: fans, producers, artists, business executives, political activists, and others.[3] Likewise, Mattson shows how entertainment culture was created by fans and a range of artists, not merely Hollywood or corporate recording studios, but he pays less attention to a pressing point: how and why “DIY practices, again, fueled a DIY politics” (76). Participants pushed the boundaries of debate through zines, lyrics, poems and concerts, but how, more precisely, did such conversations or economic organizing relate to more policy-oriented political organizing and activities?  Moreover, as the mainstream media regarded punk as a moral threat, Mattson argues that this popular distortion of punk became a way for people to question the mainstream media itself. Stepping away from the punk milieu, however, such concerns about media credibility and bias were in fact pervasive at the time; indeed, the idea of a liberal media bias fueled the very conservative movement that punk saw as its foil.[4]

More significantly, the book neglects to explore the fundamental paradox of the decade: the centrality of entertainment to civic life. This is something at the core of both punk’s appeal and Reagan’s power. While Mattson clearly shows the ways in which punk rejected the actor-in-chief, he glosses over how some of Reagan’s values were the same as those principles underlying the punk rock community. Yes, the punk rock world mocked celebrity politics and Reagan’s use of movies to justify policies, but just as Reagan did, punk rockers also embraced entertainment—music, movies, literature, science fiction, poetry, artwork, and festivals—to generate community bonds, encourage civic activism, and make money. A deeper analysis of how punk fit into and was shaped by the very entertainment political culture its participants criticized would make Mattson’s book not just a re-creation of the punk world, but also a deep exploration of modern American political culture. While he effectively does deliver on his promise to “document [punk’s] anger at a bloated entertainment industry and a president who equated governing with entertaining” (xvi), as an analysis of the 1980s, his research generates more questions than answers.

In short, We’re Not Here to Entertain is a fast-paced (and at times dizzying) exploration of the punk scene that packs in the details without fully advancing an analysis of what these anecdotes reveal about how punk and Reagan both tethered civic engagement to entertainment during the 1980s. Nevertheless, it is a welcome and needed exploration of recent American history. Mattson reminds us that it wasn’t just Reagan and big business who blended the worlds of politics and entertainment and then benefited from such forms of communication and engagement; it was also a disparate group of young punk rockers across the United States. Perhaps that is why the connection between the two—celebrity-hungry politicians and gnarly punk rockers—has become pervasive today in ways that those in the 1980s could not have predicted.