top of page
Book Cover.jpg

“a guidebook to a future for people who want it”

Krist Novoselic,
founding member of Nirvana

available in hardcover & ebook

About
Ohio Interview.jpg

about

Kevin Mattson is Connor Study Professor of Contemporary History at Ohio University. His research focuses on the intersection of ideas and politics in the twentieth century. He is on the editorial board of Dissent magazine, and the author and co-editor of many books, including Just Plain Dick, What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?, and, most recently, We’re Not Here to Entertain. His writing has appeared in the American Prospect, the Nation, the New York Times Book Review, Salon, and the Guardian. He has made numerous media appearances, including on NPR, Fox News, C-SPAN, and The Colbert Report.

 

Many remember the 1980s as the era of Ronald Reagan, a conservative decade populated by preppies and yuppies dancing to a soundtrack of electronic synth pop music. In some ways, it was the “MTV generation.” However, the decade also produced some of the most creative works of punk culture, from the music of bands like the Minutemen and the Dead Kennedys to avant-garde visual arts, literature, poetry, and film. In We’re Not Here to Entertain, Kevin Mattson documents what Kurt Cobain once called a “punk rock world”—the all-encompassing hardcore-indie culture that incubated his own talent. Mattson shows just how widespread the movement became—ranging across the nation, from D.C. through Ohio and Minnesota to LA—and how democratic it was due to its commitment to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tactics.

 

Throughout, Mattson puts the movement into a wider context, locating it in a culture war that pitted a blossoming punk scene against the new president. Reagan’s talk about end days and nuclear warfare generated panic; his tax cuts for the rich and simultaneous slashing of school lunch program funding made punks, who saw themselves as underdogs, seethe at his meanness. The anger went deep, since punks saw Reagan as the country’s entertainer-in-chief; his career, from radio to Hollywood and television, synched to the very world punks rejected. Through deep archival research, Mattson reignites the heated debates that punk’s opposition generated in that era—everything from “straight edge” ethics to anarchism to the art of dissent. By reconstructing the world of punk, Mattson demonstrates that it was more than just a style of purple hair and torn jeans. In so doing, he reminds readers of punk’s importance and its challenge to simplistic assumptions about the 1980s as a one-dimensional, conservative epoch.

in the press
other books by author

​“Mattson looks at American punk of the early 1980s through excellent scholarship. His work reveals more than a music scene—which itself produced outstanding bands. He also examines anarchist thought, with roots in the nineteenth century, put into practice by youth creating their own way of life. This is a guidebook to a future for people who want it.”

KRIST NOVOSELIC

Nirvana

My Books
In the press
events
No upcoming events at the moment
Events
Contact
bottom of page