Once during the eighties this punk girl told me about a party. It was a Friday night and I was hanging out on the steps of the Boston Public Library with twenty or thirty other kids, a mixture of goths, skaters, art fags, punks, and misfit-alternatives.
“It’s a straight-edge party,” the girl explained. “No drinking.”
“And you’re going?” I asked, incredulous. Whereas I had only just been speaking to a peer, I suddenly felt like I was plunged into dialogue with one of those Bible kids who came round every now and then trying to lure us to something churchy because we were all wearing crosses and rosaries. The whole point of finally being a teenager was getting to run around Boston drunk: buying a shit-ton of liquor with a phony ID I’d found in the Commons during a Siouxsie show (the girl in the photo had caked-on makeup and bangs obscuring most of her face, that could totally be me!), making out with drunk skaters, getting in crying fights with friends, getting thrown out of the mall for stealing money from the wishing fountain, getting thrown out of the fancy hotels for trying to pee in their bathrooms, running from cops and skinheads—none of these things could happen sober!
“If you’re not going to drink, what are you going to do?” I asked the sober girl, and I think she replied, “You know, hang out, listen to records, eat peanuts.” Did she really say “eat peanuts” or was that something snarky I tossed in while telling my drunken goth friends about the absurd invitation? “Oh, you know, they’re going to hang out and eat peanuts or something.” Straight-edge kids didn’t drink (ridiculous), didn’t smoke (boring), and didn’t have sex. I didn’t have sex either, so the boys of the subculture felt safer for that, though there was something creepily puritanical about them swearing off sex. Having just been ejected from my final Catholic school, ending nine years of continuous Christian education, the straight-edge kids sounded too much like the nuns I was so recently oppressed by, and that was not cool. I liked the big black X’s they drew on the back of their hands with markers, but some straight-edge kids took it to a more disturbing level, carving their identifying insignia into their skin with glass. What’s the point in living so pure if you’re so fucked in the head anyway? I remember thinking. The straight-edge kids were mysteries.
I didn’t have Minor Threat’s titular album on vinyl, I had it on a cassette, and I listened to it when I was in the bathroom, on the boom box that lived on the back of the toilet. It was a dubbed cassette with Minor Threat scrawled on the label, and I don’t remember who made it for me. I often wanted to like punk, because I wanted to be harder than I was, tougher. I liked the rage and strength in some punk music, but ultimately the abrasive discord and the wild machismo of most of it made it feel like the audio equivalent of watching a war movie with no female actresses. I just couldn’t connect. What about Minor Threat made them different?
Honestly, I think their straight-edged-ness had something to do with it. Guys got scary when they were drunk, so knowing they weren’t egging their macho audience on with cries of “Let’s drink some beer!” like local hardcore band Gang Green made them feel safer. When other hardcore bands seemed to be all about smashing your face in with what major/giant/terrifying date-raping menaces they were, there was something humble, almost nerdy, about being a Minor Threat, knowing your limits.
I didn’t know that lead singer Ian MacKaye was a feminist—I didn’t know that I was a feminist—but as I listened to the tape in the bathroom I picked up on the subtle harmonies buried in the chaos, I picked out the political messages in the lyrics, and maybe I picked up something of an ally. In “Filler,” MacKaye rages against a friend who got religion and turned stupid, and guess what? That had happened to my old best friend Anne Marie, who had been a righteous speed-metal girl turning me on to anti-racist Anthrax songs and cynical Megadeth anthems, and had Voivod’s skull logo painted on the back of her motorcycle jacket. Now she was hitchhiking to Amy Grant concerts and holding totally weird, even hurtful beliefs. “You picked up a Bible,” MacKaye accused, “And now you’re gone / You call it religion / You’re full of shit.” I wasn’t capable of telling my old friend exactly what I thought of her switch, which felt like a betrayal, but Ian was.
Many years later, as I recreated my record collection, I found the green album cover silk-screened with the image of a white skinhead guy with his head in his arms, squatting on a stoop. A drunken idiot who can’t get up, on the verge of puking? Or a straight-edge kid overwhelmed by society’s idiocy? I put the record on the turntable, impressed by the weight of the vinyl. It was heavier and thicker than other records, not at all flimsy. The roll of drums that opens “Filler” gave me a shiver.
I love an anthem, I can’t help it. And this album is full of them. “I Don’t Wanna Hear It,” with its chorus of “I don’t want to hear it / Know you’re full of shit” is a great all-purpose fuck-you song, able to be applied to anyone from the Man to your dad to the Pigs to politicians, teachers, or your boyfriend. “Seeing Red” is all about getting fucked with for looking different: “My looks must threaten you / To make you act the way you do.” “Small Man Big Mouth” makes fun of violent short dudes, and “Bottled Violence” makes fun of violent drunk dudes. I think about how sort of radical it was for punk dudes to be calling out violent dudes at all, in the 1980s or even now. I really think my burgeoning feminist consciousness—lots of feelings, not a lot of articulation—felt vindicated by Minor Threat’s lyrics. Ian MacKaye was like a big brother who had my back, something I really could have used back then.
On to the straight-edge anthems. A treatise, “Straight Edge” details all the shit MacKaye is not going to do—including hang out with zombies, pass out at shows, snort coke or speed, smoke pot, pop pills, and sniff glue. “Always gonna keep in touch / Never want to use a crutch / I’ve got the straight edge.”
As a teenage alcoholic, I would cringe when my mother would say things like, “What, you can’t have fun without alcohol?” Because, no, I couldn’t—especially not in my teens, when I found drinking genuinely fun, before the consequences began piling up. I can see the consequences piling up in others around me, folks of my generation who never stopped, or younger people who will have to or else. I came by the straight edge the hard way, but I’m glad that “I’ve got better things to do / Than sit around and smoke dope / ’Cause I know I can cope.”
“In My Eyes” is the strongest straight-edge screed, as the singer gently mocks the justification for using that he hears in the scene: “You like the taste,” “It calms your nerves,” “You want to be different,” then explodes into furious screaming replies: “You just need an excuse,” “You just think it looks cool,” “You just hate yourself.” Harsh take, but he nails the self-delusion inherent in addiction.
“Out of Step (With the World)” is probably my favorite, because I can now totally relate to what it’s like to “Don’t drink / Don’t smoke”—although I do “fuck,” and even Mr. MacKaye has figured out how to work a wife into his ascetic lifestyle. Still, applause for calling out fornication as the real opiate of the masses. “I can’t keep up / I can’t keep up / I can’t keep up / Out of step with the world” goes the chorus, and it’s in this song that he lets in a bit of the sorrow that can come with sobriety, the reality of living a life so different and so mysterious to so many of the people around you. At the end of it all, he consoles himself with “At least I can fucking think.”
And then, with a screeeech like the actual needle going off the actual record, MacKaye’s consciousness tanks with “Guilty of Being White,” a mocking song wherein he tries to weasel his way out of white privilege because, like, slavery happened “a hundred years before I was born.” A lyricist whose work focuses on ripping on clueless dudes, perhaps it was too difficult for MacKaye to climb over his ego to locate his own clueless dude, cop to it, and write a song about it. As a teenager trying to figure out what the fuck was happening with race, this song did not help. I lived in New England, a region that prided itself on being progressive but in fact was horribly racist, in a family that spoke racist slurs at the dinner table, in a subculture (goth) whose beauty standard was literally having the whitest skin you could possibly have. I knew the world was fucked and I wanted to fight it and be on the right side of things, but I was also pea brained and conflict averse. It would be nice to shrug off the legacy of white supremacy as having nothing to do with me; I could feel the allure of that. But the song nagged. The tone is sinister and mean-spirited, and it hasn’t aged well. In a Los Angeles Review of Books essay on the anthology White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race, Sara Jaffe digs into a 1983 Maximum Rocknroll roundtable in which MacKaye doubles down, defending “Guilty of Being White” and his right to deal with people as “individuals, not black and white” and basically whining like a baby that he shouldn’t bear any responsibility for the racist legacy of slavery. Jaffe calls bullshit on “the desire that punk culture could truly be a place where race just doesn’t matter anymore,” asserting that “the problem is that the real first step in ending racism is for people with privilege to recognize the ways in which they benefit from the system, even if they agree that that system is broken.” The work of white people is not only to look inward and ferret out all the ways we have internalized and benefited from white privilege but to continue to do this, every single day for the rest of our lives. Like a sober alcoholic who checks herself daily and is given a reprieve from binge drinking, only a regular, honest evaluation of oneself as a product of white supremacy can help keep white people consistently woke enough to not add further damage. As a rock icon known for his fearlessness in calling out small-mindedness and hypocrisy within punk and mainstream cultures, MacKaye’s defensive inability to check himself is a bummer.
In an earlier version of this essay I all but let MacKaye off the hook for “Guilty of Being White,” guilty as I am of the same white laziness that he continues to suffer from. As woke as I may think I am, my blind spots are wide, they startle and shame when recognized. But it is a white person’s job to feel around for these blind spots, to respond with humility and appreciation if someone does you the perhaps painful favor of calling attention to it. MacKaye, interested, I think, in acting the hero, could really be one if he publicly acknowledged his own white privilege; he’d be role modeling to the gazillions of white punks who worship him. Doing so could possibly heal some of the damage caused by “Guilty,” a piece of propaganda it’s easy to imagine bigoted listeners embracing as an anthem of white pride. I started revisiting this album, and this essay, in the campy spirit that nostalgia engenders, interested in reconsidering straight-edge music in the wake of my sobriety, but the dumpster fire of white privilege—MacKaye’s and my own—has blocked my enjoyment, for the most part. I’m cool with leaving some albums to the past.
A version of this piece was first published on xoJane in 2012.