Punk vs Reagan

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In music, ubiquity breeds misunderstanding. The minute any genre breaks into the mainstream, its gestures and aesthetics become diluted, mass-marketed. The meaning that gave them urgency is boiled away. An insurgent scene, full of rebellion and creativity, is suddenly not so rebellious anymore, and far less creative.

These questions apply to virtually any artistic community over the last century, but they seem particularly contentious when punk is brought up. Nobody can deny the transformative impact punk rock has had on culture, evident in everything from couture fashion to the fact that Green Day continues to sell millions of records, with a hit Broadway show to their name, too.

On the other hand, no other milieu contains so many stubbornly crusading for purity, against the boogeyman of “the sellout.” Even the basic definition of “selling out” can spark intractable debates, further confusing the general perception of what punk’s values are and why they even matter. To most Americans, punk is about style over substance. Green hair, torn clothes, fast guitars.

This is truly tragic. Not only did underground punk — particularly of the late 1970s and early ’80s – have a huge impact on that wide pantheon of “indie rock,” but according to writer Kevin Mattson, it was for a short time a dynamic counterculture, testing the boundaries of a quickly conservatizing country.

In We’re Not Here to Entertain, Mattson paints a picture of 1980s punk as musically diverse, experimental, intellectually curious, and motivated by a growing need for some sort of radical change.

The zines, many of them little more than xeroxed pamphlets, play an essential role in Mattson’s narrative. The book’s subtitle is “Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America.”

Reagan’s wrinkled, smiling visage peers out from countless album covers and flyers from the era, often with blood pouring from his mouth or mushroom clouds in the background. He was indeed a loathsome figure. But it wasn’t just Reagan who punks hated. Through a countercultural lens, he becomes the avatar for everything that made the 1980s a dismal era, worthy of rage and opposition wherever possible.

Punk was a scene in which youth were able to discover and shape their own identities in a world that viewed them as disposable.
No prior president had so effectively wielded the auratic power of mass media like Ronald Reagan. Sure, his acting was third-rate, but decades of film experience gave him an understanding of how fanfare and spectacle can blur the lines between commerce, politics, morality, and repression.

Mattson was a young punk himself during the 1980s. He describes the effect that this collapse of the political and cultural had on the psyches and outlooks of young people attracted to the scene:

For a young man in the 1980s, including myself, Reagan seemed scary, more a source of fear, his bully pulpit channeling war-thumping movies like Red Dawn and Rambo and the chants of “USA! USA!” heard during the summer Olympics of 1984.

As Mattson recounts, record labels experienced their own “crisis of overproduction” in the late 1970s.

Only the advent of MTV, which dramatically changed the way we conceived of music, turned this crisis around. The possibilities of cross-branding, of deepened commodification, were endless. Reagan himself participated, most notably when he invited Michael Jackson to the White House, just as Pepsi was releasing its commercials featuring the iconic pop star.

This analysis is significant. Virtually every book on punk and hard core takes the political content of the genres’ anti-corporate stance as a given, making the mistake of assuming what needs to be explained.

Young punks were regular fixtures in some of the era’s most significant social movements, albeit often confined to the margins within them. Many organized against Reagan’s interventions in Central America via the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. Others participated in mass demonstrations for nuclear disarmament. Still, others were involved in housing and squatters’ rights.

For all its dislike of hippies, punk was a receptacle for radical politics and utopian experiments the same way the former counterculture had been in the 1960s. Yes, the co-optation of peace and love had been cemented by the time of Reagan. Calls to “mellow out” in the face of Armageddon were rightly skewered throughout punk. But as Mattson writes, plenty of punk’s elders had been involved in the militant activism of the 1960s, too.

The barter of zines and cassettes wasn’t just because kids were broke. It mirrored the ethics of potlatch and circumvented the record industry. Putting on a show in a squat or abandoned warehouse was often a conscious attempt at reimagining urban space for something other than commerce. As for the music itself, its confrontational sound wasn’t just about provocation, but about pushing people out of passivity and into changing history.

Why recount all this? Why revive and reexamine this history? Because it is forgotten in the first place. Just as surrealism can be used to sell deodorant, punk can be the soundtrack of cellphone sales, and we got here somehow.

By 1986, Black Flag had broken up after years of their experiments with metal and free jazz had alienated much of their fan base. In ’85 it was the Minutemen who met their demise after singer and guitarist D. Boon unexpectedly died in a car accident. Hüsker Dü soldiered on until 1988. They released more albums, including the masterful Candy Apple Grey, but the fact that they did so on major labels is in Mattson’s view further proof that punk as a social movement had hit the skids. The music industry rebounded by the middle of the decade — its representatives had become savvier, its marketing sneakier and more insidious. A great many punk bands felt pressure to appear on MTV, sign to major labels, twist their sound in distinctly “non-punk” directions.

After Reagan’s second victory in 1984, it became more common to see shows invaded by Nazi punks and skinheads. A new generation of hard-core bands adopted outwardly macho, misogynistic postures, often with a dose of lunkheaded patriotism mixed in.

It’s somewhat baffling then that there is no mention of the Dead Kennedys’ fate. In late 1985, San Francisco police raided front man Jello Biafra’s home and the office of their record label, Alternative Tentacles (also run by Biafra).

This was in the context of an increasing focus in Washington on the content of music. Tipper Gore and Susan Baker had founded the Parents Music Resource Center earlier in the year, and in August the Senate had held its infamous hearings on “offensive content in music.”

Biafra and label general manager Michael Bonanno were charged with distributing harmful material to minors. Their three-week trial in August of 1987 ended in a hung jury in favor of acquittal. It was a victory, but a Pyrrhic one. Alternative Tentacles was nearly bankrupted, and the overall burden contributed to the breakup of the Dead Kennedys the previous year. This was the first time in American history that an artist had been prosecuted over the content of an album.

There is another matter unaddressed in the book, far trickier to untangle. Mattson paints some other genres as thoroughly more corporate than punk was in these years, in particular synthpop, heavy metal, and punk’s old nemesis, disco. Executives and A&R departments found them far easier to market.

Disco in the late 1970s was one of the few artistic spaces that featured women, people of color, and the LGBT community taking leading artistic roles. Synthpop, too (at least its more serious iterations), provided the space for critique and alterity, albeit far more mediated than in punk. Devo, mentioned by some in the book as pinnacle MTV sellouts, is a band whose entire aesthetic is built around parody of American consumerism.