Taking A Spin Round Mattson’s History of Punk in the Reagan Years

Great Music Has Often Been Based On Limited Thinking; Can the Same Be Said For Great Scenes, Great Politics?

I came to this history of punk in the Reagan years as a contemporary of Kevin Mattson’s in age, musical fanship, and scholarly training, yet also with key differences: I was a college radio DJ and then an alternative weekly critic, not a punk scenester, and I learned through experiences studying with Leon Litwack and Lawrence Levine at UC Berkeley that I chafed against history that wasn’t drenched in theory. The opening of an obituary of sorts that I wrote for Spin’s July, 1998 issue (Dave Matthews on the cover) conveys my layer of remove:

Tim Yohannon, self-described tyrant of the eternal punk zine Maximum Rocknroll, used to keep a bench at the MRR house in San Francisco filled with mounds of artists’ photos sent in over the years. The images, one indistinguishable from the other, came from the countless “scene reports” and features on no-account bands MRR had run to honor the invocation “DIY.” Yohannon didn’t believe in creating stars of any sort—fine—but how punk was this, you had to wonder, thousands of yobs rebelling in precisely the same way? Still, there was a glory to it, to how many foot soldiers had stomped in the punk army.[1]

Reading this decades later, I’m struck by the words half explained with quotation marks and context: zine, scene report, DIY, yobs. From a New York media stance, cultural capital was your neoliberal, non-collective responsibility to obtain. Heroes were exiles from the hardcore scene, bands like Green Day and Bikini Kill who were standouts in negating negation, worth scrutiny for their feats of interpretation and bricolage like a thorny screed from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Now, I’d probably lead with the feel of those MRR issues: cheap paper tightly compacted, basic graphics inking your hand, yet for those reasons almost irreducible. Shitworkers, the volunteers proudly called themselves. They still do.

If I’m more sympathetic to orthodoxy and self-policing scenes than I used to be, I still bring my critic’s training into any historiography. Here’s a book whose cover juxtaposes two apparent opposites, Ronald Reagan and Bay Area hardcore icon Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys. There are blurbs on the back from Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic, Mudhoney’s Mark Arm, Articles of Faith’s Vic Biondi, former MRR co-editor turned academic Jeffrey Bale, and the author of a book in the 33 1/3 series on a Dead Kennedys album. These are all men, probably all white men. And while they’re on a spectrum of mainstream, underground, and university affiliation, intellectually they’re of a mindset. Punk equals noise equals grassroots opposition, with perhaps a slight caveat about aesthetes—like Arm’s blurb citing Savage Republic, if you’re very much in the know. That’s limited thinking. Yet great music has often been based off of limited thinking.  Can the same be said for great scenes, great politics?

The structure of Mattson’s book recapitulates this potentially heuristic reductivism. He takes on a year or two at a time through long, documentary chapters that range from the post-punk late 1970s to the onset of “alternative” rock in 1985, puts a good range of material into the same conversation: zines and scenes the US over, literary versions like cyberpunk, and the constant temptation of mainstreaming—MTV, new wave synth pop, Madonna, major labels. In the work of other authors, this same temporal sequencing has been used to represent striking cultural diversity. Will Hermes’s Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, looking at New York City music subcultures in the deindustrializing wreckage of the 1970s, makes punk a shared railroad apartment with disco, salsa, minimalism, and much besides. Michaelangelo Matos’s Can’t Slow Down, centered on pop in 1984, puts more into those three letters than you would imagine: here, a continuum (much like a critic’s best-of, counting albums and singles, in the Village Voice poll that year would have offered) connects MTV favorites to indie rock, world beat, hybrid radio formats, etc.[2]

None of that is allowed in We’re Not Here to Entertain. Instead, there’s the “icy, dehumanized feel of arena rock” (13), Warhol at Reagan’s inauguration because he “fawned over wealth” (38), the Voice blasted as “never a fan of much 1980s punk” (78), the “lame” film Valley Girl (144) and youth film director John Hughes, “reported to be a Republican” (182): how else could Hughes possibly like Spandau Ballet? Critics and scholars who have spent decades working through punk, post-punk, new wave, and alternative rock as an ongoing aesthetic argument with social implications are either ignored or marginalized (a good sidebar to this review would fill in the gap for instances where we’re told that “the Village Voice wrote,” turn to the citation and still can’t say who the actual author was. Citational politics!). A generation ago, in his book Dancing in the Distraction Factory, the much-mourned cultural studies scholar Andrew Goodwin offered a great reading of Madonna’s MTV video “Material Girl,” pushing back against claims about its staunch feminism but finding multiple meanings in the layers it presented: singer and star text, underlying song as its own statement, video drama of an actress filming a musical scene while being courted off-screen by its director.[3] Mattson only values the title words and musical parody sequence, since they let him equate Madonna, yuppies, and Ronald Reagan; he relegates the multiplicity Goodwin (uncited) observed to an endnote dismissing it as “a sort of ‘postmodern,’ shape-shifting feel” (361).

Still, that endnote is there—Mattson is too good an historian to skip it and he positively revels in the archive of zine writing that he has unearthed. He’s definitely interested in clashing ideas, cultural wrinkles, and the politics of stylistic choices, even if his choices of what matters are different than mine would have been. I now need to check out Pittsburgh punk film Debt Begins at Twenty. I either never knew or forgot Mudhoney singer Mark Arm’s connection to the zine Punk Lust. Loved the detail about Die Kreuzen, a Midwest band, warning their scene about a bad local promoter. Appreciated the attention given to schisms, like how didactic punk agitator and producer-musician Steve Albini and Hüsker Dü singer Bob Mould found MDC (Millions of Dead Cops), leaders in the deathly strident three-initial hardcore band subgenre.

Honestly, it’s worth thinking about one of the distinctions Mattson makes, from his grassroots-obsessed critical position: “DIY’s democratic base of distinction—that anyone could create their own culture—now turned into subjective claims of authenticity” (277). Keir Keightley would call this “modernist authenticity,” music that, to critics and aesthetes, felt genuine because it felt new.[4] Mattson’s joy in seeing punk rendered accessible enough to attract kids in Iowa or Anchorage is no less justifiable as something to value. He concedes, in places, that a lot of this became “white suburban males alienated from preppies” (36). What he doesn’t quite ever concede is that, if you open the door to valuing third-rate music as a grassroots form, you might just as well value music that took punk’s spirit of DIY into other realms—like disco becoming house music in those 1980s; or like hip-hop, which makes a surprise appearance finally, around page 255, only to be dismissed: “rap moved to mainstream success.” In the Matos book, Beastie Boy Michael Diamond (Mike D) says: “American hardcore became too much the same. It was almost like a uniform—you had a leather jacket and blue jeans and what we always liked about punk rock was that things were always changing and always different.” Rapping felt like a punk move to them.[5]

These days, reports Brooklyn Vegan (the hipster music discovery blog whose program I sometimes listen to through subscription to Sirius XM, on channel Sirius XMU, as in university), even what’s left of MRR questions the whiteness of punk identity.[6] Shouldn’t Mattson? After all, when South African divestment protests raged on my campus in 1985-6, we knew to bring in Run-D.M.C. to headline the benefit show because hip-hop was the key anti-Reagan music, not Minor Threat. Even the local kids preferred the apolitical but attitudinal skateboard-scene faves Misfits.

Still, we can agree that Minor Threat were a great band, with great values and influence, enough to forgive Ian MacKaye for “Guilty of Being White.” And what about Mattson’s ultimate heroes, the Dead Kennedys? On college radio, they were the kind of band we got a lot of phone requests for from high school listeners, alongside Suicidal Tendencies and Sid Vicious covering “My Way,” because their rebelliousness was a kind of gateway version of punk. I wound up disdaining them the way I was learning to disdain my 12-year-old self for loving Frank Zappa one year in summer camp, or my high school self for thinking that Pete Seeger had more folk purity than Andy Warhol: read enough postmodern theory in the 1980s and the only lines that mattered were the ones you could read between.

That epistemological shrug took me, eventually, to Spin, compromised from the start: Bob Guccione, Jr., funded at first by his dad’s Penthouse money, sought a Gen X version of Rolling Stone. If major labels could sign punk bands, if college radio stations could call in their heavy rotation lists to trade journals, maybe there was a niche for post-postpunk in the Reagan years. To Mattson, “Reading Spin was like watching MTV, with short stories about bands whizzing by one after the other (next to loads of advertisements).” Specifically: “The jumble was the message” (266). To Spin, the Dead Kennedys were just not good enough to compete in that jumble: in the Spin Alternative Record Guide I edited circa 1995, Gina Arnold wrote of Biafra: “his band’s music, alas, has proved less durable than his unimpeachable values,” and told the story of Biafra being attacked in 1994 at the punk venue 924 Gilman Street, his leg broken by ideologues blasting him as a “rich rock star.”[7]

I heard the Dead Kennedys, “Kill the Poor” I think it was, the other month, in my personal version of Mattson’s jumble, as part of a Korean or Japanese film about materialism and youth ennui, can’t remember the title unfortunately. There was something there, though, something I had dismissed. Mattson develops what it was because he takes them seriously, as Robert Cantwell did Seeger in his (admittedly more culturally nuanced) study of the folk revival, When We Were Good.[8] Long before Apple and Google seized San Francisco, yet just in time to give Rock Against Reagan some anthems and even the scene compilation Let Them Eat Jellybeans!, the DK’s were a force. They didn’t change the world, exactly, but neither did those of us who used punk to accrue jobs that let us keep living in the post-industrial cities that punk, in the Mike D sense of the concept, was helping gentrify. We’ll never resolve these debates. All these years later, I’m glad to see strong work documenting every side of the argument.