“The Recline of Midwestern Civilization”: Midwestern Cultural Identity and Punk Rock in the 1980s

Abstract

“The Recline of Midwestern Civilization”Midwestern Cultural Identity and Punk Rock in the 1980s Johnathan Kyle Williams (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Frontispiece. Poster publicizing a concert featuring Love Tractor, Die Kreuzen, Blind Idiot God, and the Plague at the Meridian Ballroom in the SIUE University Center on the campus of Southern Illinois University–Edwardsville. Courtesy Flickr user køpper, flickr.com/photos/kopper/2267019297. Punk rock songs from the 1980s often angrily screamed the punk movement’s dissent against Ronald Reagan, the decade’s iconic figure. The Milwaukee band Die Kreuzen suggested, however, “instead of just doing ‘fuck Reagan, I hate the government,’” bands should explain themselves in their lyrics so that they relate “on a more personal level.” In a 1983 interview with one of the decade’s leading punk fanzines, Maximum Rock N Roll, the band members emphasized their point by explaining, “It’s not just the fact that Reagan is president, it’s the fact that this country could elect someone like Reagan.”1 Die Kreuzen’s statement presented more than a reflection of passive-aggressive midwestern nice. Instead, the point made by the band revealed an understanding within the punk movement of the cultural changes that Reagan harnessed and shaped during the 1980s. Reagan’s ability to tap into American culture, to signify all that was supposedly American, greatly contributed to his success at defining the decade he has come to represent.2 Punk rock predated Reagan’s presidency, of course, but as Die Kreuzen’s interview indicated, he became a central figure to the punk movement of the 1980s. Reagan inspired band names and songs; his image appeared in punk fanzines; and his policies, political supporters, and jingoistic Cold War rhetoric created what historian Dewar MacLeod describes as an “enemy with a face” which punks targeted to express their frustrations with a changing political order.3 Yet while scholars have acknowledged the connection between Reagan and 1980s punk rock, no studies have examined this relationship as a driving force behind the spread of the punk movement during the decade. By centering President Reagan as a key figure to the punk movement, this article breaks from the firmly entrenched view of [End Page 19] punk as a “subculture” by positioning punk as a counterculture which cut against the late twentieth-century cultural shift that Reagan represented.4 Part of the subcultural perspective’s longevity, in both journalistic and academic writings, has been due to viewing punk rock simply as a musical genre of the 1970s, ignoring its larger cultural significance and endurance. Punk was never a single musical genre, but instead an assortment of musical styles, or rather subgenres, such as “new wave,” “post-punk,” “hardcore,” or “ska.” Studies that have looked beyond the musical characteristics of punk, interrogating its cultural and political aspects, have used the subcultural identification with little to no explanation of the term. Historian Dawson Barrett addresses these two perspectives, acknowledging “the rationale for each, and the evidence of both,” but ultimately arguing that “neither categorization places punk in an appropriate historical context or relates its radical ethos to the broader political Left.” Barrett’s study on two punk collectives in the late 1980s and early 1990s, New York’s ABC No Rio and San Francisco’s 924 Gilman Street, demonstrates how these venues nurtured a direct-action style of politics adopted from the New Left of the previous generation. Beyond these venues, Dawson argues, the punk movement used other “counter-institutions” to create an “elaborate network” that “operated most notably as cultural and economic alternatives to the corporate entertainment industry,” making them “sites of resistance to the privatizing agenda of neo-liberalism.” While Barrett’s work deftly illuminates punk’s opposition to neoliberalism, it does not necessarily offer an alternative to the subcultural perspective. Furthermore, the location of the two venues (New York City and San Francisco) reinforces the idea that punk only existed in large coastal cities.5 Focusing on the punk movement of the 1980s from the perspective of the Midwest, extending from Ohio and the Great Lakes states to Nebraska and the agricultural “heartland,” reveals a greater relationship between the growing punk movement and...

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