Kevin Mattson

"After the blast, Kurt Cobain's body slumped. Next to his corpse lay a piece of paper with his last words. At the time the bullet seared his head, Cobain was a rock star, his grizzled face graced the covers of slick music industry magazines, his songs received mainstream radio play, his band Nirvana performed in huge arenas. But he had been thinking an awful lot about what he called the "punk rock world" that saved his life during his teen years and that he had subsequently abandoned for stardom. He first encountered this world in the summer of 1983, at a free show the Melvins held in a Thriftway parking lot. After hearing the guttural sounds and watching kids dance by slamming against one another, he ran home and wrote in his journal: "This was what I was looking for," underlined twice. As he dove into this world, he recognized its blistering music played in odd venues, but also a wider array of creativity, like self-made zines, poetry, fiction, movies, artwork on flyers and record jackets, and even politics. This too: how all of these things opened up spaces for ideas and arguments. Now in his suicide note he reflected on his "punk rock 101 courses," where he learned "ethics involved with independence and the embracement of your community."2 There are people who can recount where they were when Cobain's suicide became news. I was in Ithaca, NY, finishing up my dissertation... but my mind immediately hurled backwards to growing up in Washington, D.C.'s "metropolitan area" (euphemism for suburban sprawl). I started to remember the first time I entered this "punk rock world." Around a year or two before Cobain went to the Thriftway parking lot, I opened the doors of the Chancery, a small club in Washington, D.C., and witnessed a tiny little stage, maybe a foot and a half off the ground. Suddenly, a small kid about my age (fifteen), his hair bleached into a shade of white that glowed in the lights, jumped up. I remember it being brighter than expected (unlike my earlier, wee-boy experiences in darkened, cavernous arenas where bands like Kiss or Cheap Trick would play to me and thousands of stoned audience members). This kid with the blond hair might have said something, I don't remember, what I recall is that his band broke into the fastest, most vicious sounding music I had ever heard. Suddenly bodies started flying through the air, young men (mostly) propelling themselves off the ground into the space between one another, flailing their arms, skin smacking skin. Control was lost, for when a body moved in one direction, another body collided into its path. When someone fell over, another would pick him up. The bodies got pushed onto the stage, making it hard to differentiate performer from audience member. At one moment it appeared the singer had been tackled by a clump of kids, and he seemed to smile. Sometimes, I could even make out what the fifteen-year old was shouting, especially, "I'm going to make their society bleed!" Overwhelmed, I rushed outside to clear my head"--

Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America

We're Not Here to Entertain

Patrick Kavanagh

Benjamin Johnson

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement

Steal this University

The thinkers and writers who crafted a new American liberal tradition in a conservative era are profiled in this history that traces the intellectual journey of such towering figures as John Kenneth Galbraith, Reinhold Niebuhr, Thurgood Marshall, C. Vann Woodward, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism

When America was Great

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-about 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.

Do you ever wonder why conservative pundits drop the word “faggot” or talk about killing and then Christianizing Muslims abroad? Do you wonder why the right’s spokespeople seem so confrontational, rude, and over-the-top recently? Does it seem strange that conservative books have such apocalyptic titles? Do you marvel at why conservative writers trumpeted the “rebel” qualities of George W. Bush just a few years back? There is no doubt that the style of the political right today is tough, brash, and by many accounts, not very conservative sounding. After all, isn’t conservatism supposed to be about maintaining standards, upholding civility, and frowning upon rebellion? Historian Kevin Mattson explains the apparent contradictions of the party in this fresh examination of the postwar conservative mind. Examining a big cast of characters that includes William F. Buckley, Whittaker Chambers, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Kevin Phillips, David Brooks, and others, Mattson shows how right-wing intellectuals have always, but in different ways, played to the populist and rowdy tendencies in America’s political culture. He boldly compares the conservative intellectual movement to the radical utopians among the New Left of the 1960s and he explains how conservatism has ingested central features of American culture, including a distrust of sophistication and intellectualism and a love of popular culture, sensation, shock, and celebrity. Both a work of history and political criticism, Rebels All! shows how the conservative mind made itself appealing, but also points to its endemic problems. Mattson’s conclusion outlines how a recast liberalism should respond to the conservative ascendancy that has marked our politics for the last thirty years.

Rebels All! A Short History of the Conservative Mind in Postwar America

Rebels All!

Born in 1966&‚ a generation removed from the counterculture&‚ Kevin Mattson came of political age in the conservative Reagan era. In an effort to understand contemporary political ambivalence and the plight of radicalism today&‚ Mattson looks back to the ideas that informed the protest&‚ social movements&‚ and activism of the 1960s. To accomplish its historical reconstruction&‚ the book combines traditional intellectual biography&—including thorough archival research&—with social history to examine a group of intellectuals whose thinking was crucial in the formulation of New Left political theory. These include C. Wright Mills&‚ the popular radical sociologist; Paul Goodman&‚ a practicing Gestalt therapist and anarcho-pacifist; William Appleman Williams&‚ the historian and famed critic of &"American empire&"; Arnold Kaufman&‚ a &"radical liberal&" who deeply influenced the thinking of the SDS. The book discusses not only their ideas&‚ but also their practices&‚ from writing pamphlets and arranging television debates to forming left-leaning think tanks and organizing teach-ins protesting the Vietnam War. Mattson argues that it is this political engagement balanced with a commitment to truth-telling that is lacking in our own age of postmodern acquiescence. Challenging the standard interpretation of the New Left as inherently in conflict with liberalis&‚ Mattson depicts their relationship as more complicated&‚ pointing to possibilities for a radical liberalism today. Intellectual and social historians&‚ as well as general readers either fascinated by the 1960s protest movements or actively seeking an alternative to our contemporary political malais&‚ will embrace Mattson&’s book and its promise to shed new light on a time period known for both its intriguing conflicts and its enduring consequences.

Kevin Mattson

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