KEVIN MATTSON

Kevin Mattson is Connor Study Professor of Contemporary History at Ohio University and faculty associate with the Contemporary History Institute.  His work explores the broad intersections between ideas and politics in 20th century America.  He is author of numerous books, including Just Plain Dick: Richard Nixon’s Checkers Speech and the “Rocking, Socking” Election of 1952 (2012), available as audio CD; “What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?”: Jimmy Carter, America’s Malaise, and the Speech that Should have Changed the Country (2009); Rebels All!: A Short History of the Conservative Mind in Postwar America(2008), winner of a Choice “Outstanding Academic Title” Award; Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century (2006); and When America Was Great:The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism (2004, 1st edition, 2006, 2nd edition).  He has co-written and co-edited numerous other books, and his articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Nation, The American Prospect, Chronicle of Higher Education, Salon.com, and other publications.  He has appeared on numerous talk radio shows as well as Fox News, NPR, C-Span Book TV, and the Colbert Report.  He is an affiliated scholar at the Center for American Progress; active in the American Association of University Professors (AAUP); and on the editorial board of Dissent magazine.

His next book, We Are Not Here to Entertain, on the punk movement and the politics of Reagan, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

We’re Not here to entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the real culture war of 1980s America

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.

PRAISE FOR JUST PLAIN DICK

“Mattson’s excellent book is a timely companion to the current election season. The question is: Who’s playing Nixon?” – Kirkus

“Ohio University professor Mattson looks back at Nixon as a whistle-stop ‘political salesman’ in this panoramic exploration of egghead politics, Hollywood films, television culture, and op-ed press buzz.” – Publishers Weekly