9/15/2023 0 Comments Punk wars review![]() ![]() Mattson makes the case throughout the book that by creating and producing everything themselves, the US punks of the era “unleashed a culture war from below, one that aimed its sites on the entertainment industry-corporate record labels, FM radio, ‘blockbuster’ movies, eventually MTV” (xv). The punk embrace of DIY that We’re Not Here to Entertain highlights represented a rejection of the dominant mass monoculture and corporatization of the early 1980s. Considering the international scene makes clear that the punk scene in the United States was not unique in its patterns of cultural resistance and reveals how punks abroad contested repression and militarism in their countries and around the world-repression and militarism that hegemonic American power (both before and during the Reagan administration) had often fostered. After reflecting on Mattson’s argument about the relationship between DIY practices and punk political opposition to Reaganite policies in the 1980s, I would like to offer a few thoughts on the “world” or international side of the story. Yet despite the punk rock “world” framing, the book is very much focused on the United States, with some coverage of US foreign relations during the Reagan administration and mention of some well-known U.K. ![]() ![]() In its narrative style as well as its argument, the book captures the diffuse yet interconnected character of what Mattson terms the “Punk Rock World” during the Reagan years, telling the stories of how young people all over the United States started their own bands, venues, and record labels to produce their own music, zines, and other cultural artifacts. The nature and extent of their involvement in their respective punk scenes in Arizona and Massachusetts underscores a key aspect of We’re Not Here to Entertain, which is the centrality of the DIY or “do-it-yourself” ethos to punk in the United States, not just in in the early 1980s but even into the present day. I could not resist sharing, of course, as it is a singularly strange and fun experience to get to tell someone you know that they-a regular and not famous person-have been immortalized in an academic history book for something they did as a teenager (and, in the case of both of these friends, have continued to do into adulthood). I sent one photograph to a friend whose band Mattson had mentioned and another to a different friend whose zine Mattson quoted. In the Reagan Era, International Punk Rock Mattered TooĪt two points while reading Kevin Mattson’s We’re Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America, I had to pause to take a photograph of a page. ![]()
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