Refusing to Settle in Subcultural Accounts

Reaching the Multiple Audiences of Punk History

In a seminal essay on 1960s historiography, Rick Perlstein profiled the divergent perspectives of the “tenured radicals” who had lived through the decade alongside a younger wave of scholars for whom the Age of Aquarius constituted history. The contrast exposed tensions. One 1960s veteran admonished a young turk for unconvincing work, drawing the damning conclusion that he “had no experience of a decade that was primarily experiential.”

Mattson’s book focuses on the 1980s, but it too brings into play an opposing, though no less substantial, set of issues inherent in crafting the history of the recent past, namely, how to do justice to an era that falls within the author’s lived experience and in which that author has acted not just as an observer but as a meaningful participant?  We’re Not Here to Entertain strives to take a subcultural movement seriously not only by chronicling punk’s engagement with 1980s political culture, but also by capturing its more “experiential” qualities: the sense of play, of release, and of participating in a DIY culture.

As a historian of the recent past whose work resides at the intersection of politics and cultural expressions, I have grappled with these dilemmas myself and I have a keen interest in how Mattson navigates them. How do historians examine an era they experienced personally, at once stepping back to acknowledge its broad outlines and zooming in to focus its lived immediacies?  Though I remain far from solving this conundrum, I hope to generate dialogue that may clarify its pitfalls and opportunities. This essay seeks to expose some challenges of combining the roles of scholar and participant to illuminate a history within the author’s memory. It also reveals the conviction that I share with Mattson that not only is it necessary to try to wear both hats, but indeed that artificially contorting to conform to the dictates of “distanced” scholarship risks missing valuable insights that only a participant’s keen sensitivity can elicit.  Thus, it’s not scholarly distance that’s so important so much as skillfully mobilizing scholarly tools and methodologies in conjunction with a participant’s heightened sensibilities.

In titling his Preface, “From Memory to History,” Mattson acknowledges his book’s multiple audiences: those who remember and those who were not there. Within the first three paragraphs he manages to stake out large claims for his generation’s meaningful experiences of punk, assessing his own remembrance of early 1980s slam-dancing at DC’s Chancery in tandem with late Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain’s recollection of a show in a Thriftway parking lot. With this gambit, Mattson promises that his narrative holds something of value for readers across the board.  For those with fans’ memories of 1980s punk, his Chancery vignette holds the promise of visceral lived experience and its importance to how we understand the past. It reveals the nuances of punk’s political engagement that mainstream observers overlooked at the time, whether willfully or not. For younger readers, experiencing 1980s punk as history, Mattson offers what museum curators might call an “anchor object” to establish a recognizable punk legacy.

I want to acknowledge that there is doubtless greater conceptual complexity than an audience composed entirely of readers who fall into one of two indelibly defined buckets, one for scholarly purposes and another for general readers. Indeed, sometimes both classifications are embodied in the same reader.  Nevertheless, many of Mattson’s authorial choices clearly target one or the other, and his appeal to fans and general readers has consequences for the style, the analytical strategies, and ultimately the argument of We’re Not Here to Entertain.  In terms of style, this is evident in vivid accounts that evoke punk’s participatory nature, such as Mattson’s description of Fear’s 1981 Saturday Night Live performance, which pierced television’s formulaic expectations through spontaneous play. The value Mattson places on experience resonates in how he lovingly exposes the reader to the language and texture of a comprehensive array of punk zines that collectively convey the sense that the punk scene “can and will happen everywhere” (80-82). But is also apparent in more mundane choices at the level of stylistic conventions of written presentation. Seeking to connect at the level of plain language, the iconic zine MAXIMUMROCKNROLL becomes MRR “from now on” (92) instead of “hereafter.”

Choices such as this offer the reader engagement and a more casual journey through the text, but the fan/scholar tug ‘o’ war in Mattson’s narrative also emerges at critical sites of analysis, as do the tensions between memory and history. After placing himself as a punk scene participant, establishing the backdrop of Reagan conservatism in national politics and analogous cultural developments, and briefly positioning We’re Not Here to Entertain in the decade’s historiography, Mattson turns to his argument in the preface’s final paragraph. He explains his project as trying to integrate the myriad grass-roots practices of the “punk rock world” that might otherwise be dismissed as trivial with its critique of mainstream entertainment, especially the music industry, and with a larger, more serious oppositional critique of Reagan-era hawkish foreign policy and conservative politics. He lists the source material through which he will achieve this integration, leading with the “multifaceted creativity” of zines.  Indeed, Mattson’s tireless unearthing of zines, his passionate exegeses, and his effective use of them to support his thesis represents the book’s distinctive achievement.

Yet he sometimes proves susceptible to soft pedaling the argument that punk really matters, even as his language remains inviting to a reader coming to punk as distant history rather than living memory. As articulated in the preface, much of We’re Not Here to Entertain‘s thesis hangs on an assertion that the book “is a history of a segment of young people making connections between politics and music” (xvi). In arriving at this big idea only in the preface’s final paragraph and not fleshing out the topic’s broader intellectual connections, Mattson seemingly lets his concerns for the general reader win out at a point where scholarly readers would want more robust analytical development and for the author to explain where his book fits into longstanding cultural studies traditions and theories of young people participating in subcultures. One can only infer that this short-circuiting of a more historical examination represents a deliberate stylistic choice to eschew the scholarly enterprise of situating one’s fit to the body of existing scholarly literature on the politics of punk and subcultures more generally.

This choice to prioritize engaging fans and general readers as opposed to venturing deliberatively into the Burkean parlor of scholarly discourse also crops up in Mattson’s treatment of gender in punk. He recounts the Village Voice‘s enthusiastic discovery of Southern California punk in late 1981 with Black Flag at the forefront. The Voice tempered its bullishness with commentary that the scene was “largely male,” an observation that Mattson noted “sounded like a critique.” Here, a cultural studies audience might have expected Mattson to take the time to unpack the long, deep history of feminist critiques of punk, both inside and outside of the academy. The touchstone of this literature was Angela McRobbie’s riposte to Dick Hebdige’s characterization of punk subculture’s “homology,” that is the complementary nature of its stylistic elements. McRobbie memorably pointed out that Hebdige’s formulation constructed punk subculture as largely, if not exclusively male, thereby undercutting its oppositional stance toward the dominant culture. Perhaps not wishing to interrupt the momentum of his narrative of punk ascendancy in the early Reagan era, Mattson does not recapitulate the now canonical McRobbie-Hebdige cultural studies debate or explore how the historical moment intersected with it. Rather, he addresses the issue of gender in punk by inventorying the small minority of women who were involved in the early 1980s. He concludes by conceding, “Still … young, suburban white males dominated, and there were those who critiqued the movement for precisely that” (81), but quickly pivots to a vignette that highlights the collapsing distance between punk’s fans and performers, recalling how Black Flag bassist Chuck Dukowski was encouraged by his interactions with young, suburban (presumably male) “teeny punks.” Mattson’s coverage of this issue represents a missed opportunity for his history to engage more deeply with cultural studies debates that have been influential on both sides of the Atlantic, and which might have something worthwhile to contribute to a usable past for younger readers new to punk and shed greater light on the nuanced gender dynamics of punk for fans for whom the genre’s popular history may have been dominated by musical or fashion aesthetics.

Although Mattson successfully documents punk’s DIY ethos, its “visceral hatred of corporate culture” (290-91), and its virulent opposition to Reagan’s foreign policy, and does so in ways that I believe thoughtfully connect with both fans and scholars of all generations, the arc of We’re Not Here to Entertain also traces a narrative of declension that risks alienating both groups. Mattson’s periodization of punk thematically underscores his Epilogue’s claims that “it felt like a moment passed,” and “if punk didn’t die, something still changed in 1985” (288-89). Specifically, Mattson describes the demise of punk’s cultural and political challenge to the mainstream under the weight of developments such as the rise of a highly commercialized and intellectually vacant MTV, the collapse of countless independent record labels and college radio under economic pressure and personal strain, and the migration of punk luminaries (led by Hüsker Dü) to major labels where edgy political and social commentary mysteriously vaporized.  To Mattson’s credit, he observes that these developments collectively illustrate capitalism’s seemingly limitless capacity to co-opt and incorporate resistance.

But while Mattson makes a legible case for 1985 as a turning point, it may prove unsatisfying for both younger and general readers and scholarly audiences. For the younger readers, there’s too little to latch on to in terms of the case for punk’s ongoing significance. Despite Mattson’s claim about the importance of understanding punk in the 1980s, he seems to provide an unnecessarily truncated “usable past” of punk in his concluding thoughts, lamenting “the shards it left behind” (290). Here, Mattson risks taking the raw materials of experience and memory and adding the weight of scholarly authority to define a periodization of punk that should be subjected to more thoroughgoing intellectual inquiry.  Indeed, We’re Not Here to Entertain’s final passages read more like a eulogy. Alternatively, they might have provided an encouraging acknowledgment that, even in the face of the engulfing, hegemonic corporate entertainment industry during the 1980s, there may still be found some tools in punk’s DIY toolkit for 2020s youth to adapt to forging its own resistance.

Such an acknowledgment would have recognized the wisdom of the Guerrilla Art Action Group’s Jon Hendricks, who observed of the “lessons” of 1960s political art for future generations: “The form each time has to be different.” Certainly, this would have furnished newcomers to punk history with a more hopeful message than “Punk: R.I.P., 1985.”  Then again, scholarly audiences might be inclined to find Mattson’s treatment of post-1985 punk inspired developments a bit dismissive. An alternative narrative might have mobilized numerous counterexamples to frame an argument that punk’s, or post-punk’s, political edge persisted and deepened after 1985 as its audiences expanded. The evidence for this counterargument could have included Sonic Youth’s heightened political engagement after signing to a major label; the Riot Grrrl movement’s signifying of greater opportunity for women and an enhanced feminist consciousness; the early Lollapalooza festivals as forums for the confluence of music and political activism; and Pearl Jam’s lengthy resistance to Ticketmaster’s monopolistic practices.  These trends persisted well after We’re Not Here to Entertain‘s 1985 cut-off date. More sustained, analytical discussion of them would have contributed to a richer intellectual portrait.

Would it have been possible to achieve that portrait and to consider post-1985 punk more seriously, while retaining the fan memories and keen participant-observer’s eye that provide We’re Not Here to Entertain‘s unique “voice”? It’s quite possible that that voice would have had to recede in favor of a more conventional scholarly one since, reading between the lines, the post-1985 period rests outside Mattson’s experiential wheelhouse. But a sensitive and skilled use of oral history and some of the same source materials—after all the Riot Grrrls left behind a rich trove of zines as well—might have constructed a comparable narrative quality and aesthetic for late-stage punk (see Sara Marcus’s 2010 Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution for one of a number of studies that Mattson might have engaged historiographically). These speculations underscore that the bar for scholar-participants seeking to fulfill the needs of these multiple audiences rests perilously high. Mattson deserves praise for managing both to stimulate intellectually and ironically given his title, to entertain.