Kevin Mattson Responds

Let a Thousand Upside-Down Peace Signs Bloom

It’s an honor and just plain fun to get such feedback from top-notch scholars. And I begin by first thanking Michael J. Kramer for putting together this symposium. I also begin by admitting that any book someone writes has to be open to criticism and disagreement.

I’ll start by saying a bit about how I came to write the book, even though it’s probably obvious from the opening that I was a participant in the movement on which the book focuses. Which prompts the question one commentator asked: “How to do justice to an era that falls within the author’s lived experience in which that author has acted not just as an observer but as a meaningful participant?”

First, experience matters. I’m reminded of the “imperial historian,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr., explaining his decision to work within the Kennedy White House. Doesn’t such a move imperil the historian’s need to be objective, some of his critics asked. He usually said, well, that he wanted to see firsthand how power operated—and only being inside would let him. My desire in writing this book was to document counter-power and how it sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t foster cultural and political change. Or at least to document how young people came to the world of ideas outside of formal institutions of learning. As more archives about 1980s punk emerged, I realized that being a participant helped me out more than I expected: it provided something of a “bullshit detector,” the sort of insiderism that allows you to make judgments and connections to your own memory and experience.

But if experience can help, so too does distance. I remember when I first thought about writing a book about 1980s punk as a new variety of social criticism—both noirish and humorous at once. It was the beginning of my graduate school education in 1990. During one of those uncomfortable settings—a welcoming picnic for incoming graduate students—my advisor, Christopher Lasch, asked, “So what are you thinking of writing your dissertation on?” I told him my idea and there was a long silence (as there often was when I talked with him). And then he spoke: “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said. Looking back at that moment, I think, well, perhaps he was telling me to ditch a stupid idea, but I took it—or bent it—to mean that I didn’t have enough distance from the time of my experience within the movement. I hope I was right.

If so, the distance helped with something else: a growing interest in the punk counterculture of the 1980s and the building of archives, many of them also put together by participants (like Aaron Cometbus, drummer, zine producer, activist). Without those archives (all are listed in the book’s bibliography), I would not have been able to write the book. Still, it was fun to witness (in a quiet library) a flyer or zine that I created “back in the day,” especially if it jarred my memory.

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OK, so onto the criticisms of the book…

Up front, yes, I intended it to be a work of narrative history, open and accessible to a general readership (some think this is good, others want a more analytical and theoretical approach). Indeed, many of the students in a course I teach, Cultural Rebels in Modern America, encouraged me to write it. I have grown weary of theoretical works and have decided to consciously write in a narrative style, in part because I think we have a responsibility to reach the general public rather than just the professionals among us. I should also point out that it often felt like bringing order to a messy thing, with potential threads zig zagging instead of joining one another. I like very much how one reader compared the book to a “mix tape.”

Some critics have accused me of romanticization (and perhaps this includes nostalgia).  I have, from this perspective a “tendency to romanticize the punk scene and gloss over some of its internal problems.” For sure, I have emphasized the positive factors often ignored back then and now, but to call it romanticization, well, I disagree. The central principle among punks during the 1980s was Do It Yourself (DIY). Grassroots, from-the-bottom-up records, zines, artwork, novels. As much as I tried to push the concept to the center of the book, I also recognized the difficulties and strains that came with it.  The book is full of examples where DIY doesn’t look romantic, but rather a challenge, sometimes a disaster. There were problems with vandalism at shows and issues of insurance and sweating in the back of a van driving yourself to the next show and cops in certain cities ready to shut you down (see 104-5). I’d recommend the documentary Another State of Mind (1984) which documents how a punk tour completely falls apart and descends into nasty verbal battles. DIY could solicit excellent works of music and art—but also, struggle.

Nor is the central political principle of anarchism to be romanticized. Sure, anarchism kept punks away from authoritarian leftist doctrine, like that of Stalinists during the 1930s or the Weather Underground of the late 1960s, but for the most part, especially with figures such as Jello Biafra and Jeff Bale, most punks recognized the impossibility of anarchism serving as a road map to freedom. Their views on human nature didn’t allow them a rosy depiction of a stateless society.

A small quibble here with a point made along the way: I had personal experiences with the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) who often used “front” tactics to try to recruit young punks into their ranks (and whose roots go back to the raucous late 60s). They were Maoists who supported the Shining Path. I also had the privilege (or was it?) of meeting Gary Johnson during the protests I helped organize against Reagan’s second inauguration. And I have to say that there was debate about how much of a role the RCP played in No Business As Usual Day (NBAU). In my own estimation, it would have been too difficult to write about the group’s “front” technique (when organizing the anti-Reagan inauguration festivities, a RCP leader handed me a list of names of participants—like “Fred” was really “Victor” and the like). The RCP had a secrecy that was hard to crack, so I kept that part short. Still, I’m pretty sure punks’ anarchism resisted the RCP’s authoritarian Maoism, but it also left them with a doctrine that seemed impracticable.

One reader rightfully points out how “punkers imagined themselves in a diametrical opposition to the ideas of the 1960s.” Nothing got a young punk riled up like a long haired, “mellow” dude talking up the greatness of the 1960s. I have to say that if I were to revise the book (yikes!), I’d put more emphasis not on the RCP but rather the Diggers and also the protests surrounding not the Chicago Democratic National Convention in 1968, but instead Berkeley’s People’s Park in 1969. I would put more of a straight line between the Diggers’ prefigurative politics (feeding homeless kids and organizing “Death of Hippie” events) and 1980s punk rock. Again, anarchist politics were nicely anti-authoritarian in a similar manner. At the same timem in my humble opinion, they were ultimately unworkable, in both the short and long term.

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It’s always a pleasure to hear critics make a point about how they see things from the past reverberating with our own times. I admit to being a presentist, one of those who teaches courses with names like “The History of Now,” but I also think there’s a danger in making analogies. For instance, one critic writes “At its worst, misogyny in the early 1980s punk scene can start to sound like today’s so-called ‘incels.'” First off, I know very little about incels, but as I understand it, they are involuntary in their chastity. Straight Edge, which was most popular in Washington, DC and Boston, was voluntary celibacy (which I doubt everyone pursued). It was a critique of rock stars screwing “groupies” and the sexual liaisons bands like Led Zeppelin had backstage while their drummer banged out an incessant and intolerable twenty-minute drum solo. Straight edge rejected what Ian MacKaye (probably the most articulate espouser of the doctrine) called “‘chalk on your bedpost, as a scorecard” approach to sex or “sports fucking.” I think such an attitude bolstered the critique of “macho” that now I wished I had dealt with in more detail (more later on this).

Another comparison that made me wince was that between punk’s fiery energy and religious exaltation. The rhetorical question goes: “Was punk in the 1980s not entirely unlike its seeming opposition in the Culture Wars: a resurgent evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity that arose with the decline of mainline Protestantism?” I get the point, but it ignores the rejection especially of fundamentalism among most punks. If there’s a second-up figure despised as much as Reagan, it’s certainly Jerry Falwell, leader of the so-called Moral Majority. Biafra (and he was not alone in this) derided what he called “Religious Vomit” and sang, “I am now your Shah today, now I command all of you, now you’re gonna pray in school, and I’ll make sure they’re Christian too.” Punk was too connected to a tradition of anticlericalism to be set alongside Pentecostalism or wealth gospel. To quote Biafra again, “What’s wrong with a mind of my own?” The ethic was think for yourself….

Some see DIY as having bad tendencies. For instance, white supremacists could use the same techniques of independent production and distribution to spread their messages. True, DIY could open the gates to some awful stuff, point well taken, but then there’s also this from another commentator: “Some of Reagan’s values were the same as those principles underlying the punk community.” My eyebrows arched at that, and then came, “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” (my emphasis). When an independent label like Dischord made money off of a record, the dough went to the label, not a limousine or big house. Few believed that punks would generate wealth off their practices. As kids learned how to duplicate a cassette tape and then hand draw its liner notes, or when kids traded tapes and records in the mail, and when bands tried to crash a shopping mall, I’m pretty sure no one expected the skies to open and drop gold. And besides, that wasn’t the point of kids making their own culture.

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And now for those who write off all of this as privileged, white boy, heterosexual, and “masculinist.” By all means, this was a movement largely made up of “privileged” kids: white boys in suburbs who were expected to go to college and have a “nice” family. I find it uplifting that those with privilege rejected what every kid supposedly wanted: a “nice” suburban home, a preppy existence replete with keg parties, and listening to corporate rock.

Some recognized their privilege and questioned the macho culture to which they had a free entry (being bullied at a suburban high school might have helped prompt questions as would the rising divorce rate). Some didn’t recognize their privilege, which was certainly a suggestion of the limits here (again, I wouldn’t characterize the book as a work of romanticism). That’s why I spend some time analyzing a discussion between the lead singer of MDC, Dave Dictor (who identifies as bisexual), with Vic Bondi, the lead singer of Articles of Faith, and the lead singer of Minor Threat, Ian MacKaye. Both Dictor and Bondi condemned MacKaye’s song, “Guilty of Being White.” They charged MacKaye for lacking empathy about others and unable to recognize his white-skin privilege or the history of being “kidnapped out of Africa” and subject to systematic enslavement. MacKaye gave a lame defense of the song’s message and carried a grudge towards MRR, the publication in which the conversation had been transcribed.  As one commentator puts it better than I can: “Social movements are messy, and even the most liberatory are stamped by the oppressive societies they come out of.” I’d add to this that to reduce all of the activities documented here to white privilege misses the debates opened up about social injustice and the like.

And what about young women? Though they often felt unsafe about jumping into a slam pit, two of the intellectual heroes of this story are women who wrote letters about how they hated how corporations marketed anything that sold (including the new wave band, the Knack, who served up pedophilic lyrics) and a young woman who condemned Penelope Spheeris’s movie Suburbia for its “exploitation” of the really existing punk movement (I’ll plug a great book for those who want to learn more about experiences women had in punk scenes at the time: Stacy Russo’s We Were Going to Change the World[1]).

Since I wasn’t writing a memoir but a history, certain anecdotes from my past were left out but now they rush to mind. I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, before the Metro Station arrived in “B-Town” and changed that lazy suburb into a booming metropolis with the largest selection of posh restaurants you could imagine. I was raised by a single mom who suffered from “displaced homemaker” status. It took some effort to go to shows in the heart of Washington DC, not to mention a plethora of shows in suburban basements (I learned how to bum rides from richer kids).

One time, I was walking home late at night after a show and approached a park near my house, where I saw three adults standing and smoking cigarettes. Knowing there was another kid who lived close to the park and who wanted to beat me up (he called me a “punk rock faggot” and I settled on the pejorative “redneck” for him), I changed my path and skirted past the park to a different route. Suddenly the threesome started to sprint towards me. They turned out to be undercover cops: one white guy (who did most of the talking), a young woman, and an African American man. They physically stopped me from proceeding and whipped out their badges. “Why didn’t you walk through the park,” the lead cop asked me. I explained about the kid who wanted to beat me up and they all said, “We’ve got him taken care of,” which sounded ominous. “You’re a druggy aren’t you,” the lead asked me. And just when I was about to explain that I was “straight edge” (at least in terms of drugs), he pointed to an upside-down peace sign I was wearing: “Well you’re wearing a marijuana button.” At this point the black cop, looking embarrassed, said, “That’s not a pot symbol, it’s a peace sign.” They let me go, and I trundled home.

Looking back on the event today, I realize that, in large part, my white privilege got me to safety, but it also stuck with me how cops could abuse their power, based largely in stereotypes they carry with them (drugged-out punks in this case). And I don’t think it was difficult for me later to understand Black Lives Matter and my son’s activism with BLM. Being a punk educated me about things I wouldn’t have confronted if I hadn’t jumped into what I call the “punk rock world.” As I write that, Black Flag’s “Police Story,” itself a song full of hopelessness with its repeated “we can’t win,” rings in my head.

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One final word about a central character in the book: Ronald Reagan. I tried to thread local punk scenes with the activities of the Reagan White House. That’s because Reagan’s political decisions gave inspiration to much of 1980s punk activism. One commentator argues that I overemphasized “the significance of Reagan.”  While I know this is debated especially among presidential historians, I think that with his attacks on government (“the problem”), tax cuts for the wealthy plus domestic cuts (ketchup as a vegetable), and his effort to overcome the “Vietnam Syndrome” by charging up a more aggressive and macho foreign policy (his celebration of Rambo), Reagan’s presidency was transformative (unlike Jimmy Carter’s). I’d say that all adds up to a significant presidency but also one that shaped punk protest and political anger. There’s that Marx adage, “people make their own history but not… under conditions they have chosen….” So it was for punk in the shadow of Reagan.

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In closing, I celebrate the criticisms made here and thank each commentator for taking the time to wade through my book. A few apologies: Yes, I downplayed the importance of international punk, as one commentator pointed out. Other things were not covered and commentators are right that a “sequel” might be needed. To that I say: I’m not the guy for the job but I hope to see a thousand flowers bloom, or at least a few more upside-down peace signs.