Minor Threat
Ian MacKaye was a founding member of the early 1980s Washington, DC, punk hardcore bands Teen Idles (1979/80) and Minor Threat (1980-83). He was one of the most important influences on the development of the US hardcore punk underground, and—albeit unwillingly—the instigator of the worldwide straight edge movement. The Minor Threat songs “Straight Edge,” “In My Eyes,” and “Out Of Step” remain the most referenced songs in straight edge communities. Ian continued his musical career with the bands Embrace (1985/86), Fugazi (1987 to present), and The Evens (2001 to present). He co-founded Dischord Records in 1980 and still runs the label out of “Dischord House” in Washington, DC.
Discography:
• Minor Threat, 1981, Dischord Records (EP)
• In My Eyes, 1981, Dischord Records (EP)
• Out of Step, 1983, Dischord Records
• Salad Days, 1985, Dischord Records (EP)
• Live, 1988, Dischord Records (DVD)
• Complete Discography, 1989, Dischord Records
• First Demo Tape, 2001, Dischord Records
That’s not so bad. I mean, it’s not that you are doing anything wrong. It’s just that there exists a certain kind of people who put a claim on history; and this seems to be a particularly acute pathology amongst aging white dudes. It’s like history should somehow be their province. I find this really disturbing. Mostly because I’m a white guy and I’m forty-six and a lot of people ask me about history, and I just don’t want to be another one of them dudes, ‘cause I don’t claim history. That’s also why I don’t read a lot of punk histories, because, having been there, I started to understand how people who write histories—or about histories—ultimately tend to shape them into manageable narratives, and in doing so they pervert or distort the reality. And since I was there, it’d be difficult for me to read these books without going, “That just did not happen that way!”
Image 1.1: Ian MacKaye, São Paulo, 2007 Daigo Oliva
Oh, I don’t mind talking about it. It’s just that I think of it more in terms of being somebody who’s experienced something and is willing to share these experiences. The problem is that within our culture—and when I say our culture, I specifically mean American culture, but I think it extends to Western culture in general—there is a celebrity factor that makes people who are in the public eye appear to be all-important as opposed to those who just do their work and stay on point. There is the classic moment when people say, “Yes, and then punk, or hardcore, or straight edge, or whatever, died.” But it always died when they left the picture or when their band split up. It seems that they are talking about an energy that was contained within them—whereas I see an energy that is a constant ever-flowing river. And this river has always been there, and it always will be there. And what this river ultimately stands for is the free space in which unconventional, unorthodox, contesting, and radical ideas can be presented.
I mainly said that because I was born and raised in Washington, DC, and people obviously associate me with the town and its politics. When you wrote that, I felt that you were perhaps trying to appeal to what you might have thought was my political leaning—like you would say, “Look I don’t want to ask you about straight edge, I want to know more about the political stuff because you are from Washington, DC.” And so I was like, whoa, I don’t know what the political dimension would be in that case? I think a lot of people assume that because I live in Washington I’m really caught up in the kind of politicking in a way, because the White House is here, or the Congress.
However, what I really learned from living in a city in which you have an industry like the government was that the way to navigate these institutions is to never engage with them, and to work on the margins instead; to always work around them. There was a saying amongst the young punks here about how if you went to public schools in Washington, DC, you learned two basic things: one, how to wait in line; and two, never ask for permission because the answer is always no. So the thing to do was: just do it, don’t ask for permission! At some point the authorities would come along and say, “You can’t do that!” but then you just said, “Oh, I didn’t know.” If you had asked them, they would have just said no right away. Mainly because of the bureaucracy and the sludge of the administration. They just didn’t want to do any extra work.
This played a really big part in the development of the punk scene: we didn’t ask, we didn’t get permission, we didn’t get licenses, we didn’t get copyrights, we didn’t get trademarks, we didn’t fill out any forms, we didn’t get lawyers ... We just rented rooms and put on shows, and we never formalized anything with the government whatsoever. We just put on these shows that were completely illegal, but nobody cared, because, essentially, you didn’t give them the opportunity to care.
There is no doubt about that. See, email is a very stupid form of communication and I balked when the word “political” appeared. I don’t know you, I’m not sitting with you, I can’t understand you, I don’t hear the tone of what you are saying. The word “political” is just a difficult word. Many people ask me whether Fugazi is a political band, or Minor Threat ... Well, of course! Every band is political. Everything is political. Every action is political. But I think there are plenty of people who consider themselves political activists and who do not believe that these bands are political because they don’t do this or they don’t do that; like, they don’t go to this particular protest, or they don’t sign this particular petition, or on their liner notes they don’t list this particular organization.
It just depends on what one’s relationship with the word “politics” is. I know that in this country—at least during the last decade, but I would say probably during the last twenty or thirty years—the overarching dominant political party is not the Republican Party or the Democratic Party; it is the “Apathetic Party.” For example, there are many bands that do not want to think about where they play, who they play for, how much they charge, what the arrangements and settings of their shows are, etc. These are people who feel like that’s just not part of their world. This is an example of the politics of apathy.
I guess I would say yes. I mean obviously everything we do—or don’t do—has its effects. There are many ways to illustrate this. For example, for the life of me I cannot understand how bands would submit to playing shows that are limited to people over the age of twenty-one. I find it unconscionable. Today there are a significant number of people playing shows whose love of music goes back to seeing bands like Fugazi when they were fifteen or sixteen years old. However, now that they’re in a band themselves this is somehow no longer relevant. And this is a political action on their part, because what they are saying is: we support the status quo, we support the corporations, and we do it because it’s easier for us, because it’s more convenient for us, and because it’s more lucrative for us. So by not doing anything about this, they are making a very political statement—especially in this day and age when politics are governed by business.
Who are all these people?
Oh, okay. Well, punk, or underground music, or hardcore, or whatever you want to call it, is not singular. I mean, it is essentially a projection of every person. So, for instance, for people who filter things politically it was one thing, while for people who filter things purely through amusement it was another.
In my estimation, the early punk scene, in the late 70s and early 80s, was going through a birthing process, and every time something new is created you have friction. I think that in the early days much energy was being spent on recognizing that we were part of something new, and a lot of us were trying to get our minds around what the hell it was.
Punk rock in the beginning was so many different people who came from so many different places. They were all these outcasts, all these people who just did not fit in for various different reasons. Some people didn’t fit in because they had troubles with their families; some people didn’t fit in because of their sexuality; some didn’t feel normal psychologically; some didn’t feel normal politically. And all these sorts of margin walkers, these people who were outside, joined together and gathered under this new manifestation of the underground. And there was a lot to learn, a lot to take in, and there was also a sense of circling the wagons...
Yes, exactly. You create a position of defense. I think that’s where a lot of the really tough guy posturing, the spiky hair, and the leather jackets came from. It was basically circling the wagons.
The activism came in where, coming out of the late 60s as a child, you felt that the government should never be trusted and that authority should always be questioned. In this sense, I was always interested in activism. The problem was that you had people, certain political activists, who only saw music as a way of raising money for their causes. They only had interest in bands when they played for their fundraisers. I reject that. There are probably some people in music who don’t take politics seriously, but there are certainly many people in politics who don’t take music seriously. But the thing about music and politics is that music was here before politics. Music was here before language. This is no fucking joke!
I know that the big industries have trivialized music in many ways by turning it into entertainment or amusement, but music as a point of gathering is something that goes back all the way to the beginning. So what I was often dealing with when talking to political people was an attitude like, “Well, we don’t really care about your music, as long as you can generate an audience and we can get some money...” I remember with Fugazi, these people would come to us and would want us to play for them, and we’d say, “Okay, we do a $5 door,” and they’d say, “Oh no, we should do a $25 door,” and we’d say, “No, we do a $5 door.” They were unable to appreciate our insistence of having a low door price, but this is activism, this is activism in our own life.
So, yes, even in the very beginning of the underground punk scene, in 1979, 1980, there were people who were just political activists, who really didn’t give a goddamn about the Teen Idles or about Minor Threat. They were just concerned with their own issues. And some of them were a little obsessive. They were kind of—they were almost like a cult. So I think that, in response to that, we—and I mean Minor Threat, SOA, that era of early hardcore bands—moved away from “Politics with a capital P,” like, the formal version of politics. We said, “We’re not interested in your politics, what we are interested in are personal politics; we’re interested in this music, in this community, in this scene.”
At the same time, we did do benefits, but we always demanded that the benefits were actually connected to the shows themselves. Like, we would have a show—and then give away the money we made. For example, we did a number of benefits for the Bad Brains ‘cause they were always getting their stuff stolen. We also did benefits for venues that were getting evicted, or for kids who were getting evicted from their house.
HR from the Bad Brains also had the idea to do a “Rock Against Racism.” There had been these Rock Against Racism shows in England, where the Clash and Sham 69 and those bands played. But HR just saw those events as rock concerts for a lot of white kids. So he said, “Well, we’re gonna do a Rock Against Racism here in DC, but we’re gonna go play in a black neighborhood.” Washington, DC, especially then, was primarily a black town. The majority of the town was black, like 60-70 percent, and there were neighborhoods that were 100 percent black. It was very polarized. So HR organized a couple of Rock Against Racism shows, including one with the Teen Idles, Untouchables, and the Bad Brains. We just played in a housing project. In my mind that certainly counts as political.
Yes. And then by around 1984 things changed. The elders in the DC punk scene began to drift away for various reasons, and the scene was left to these younger kids. There was a lot of senseless violence going on and it was really off-putting. The problem was not limited to DC. Skinheads seemed to be rampant all over the United States. In other towns, there were kids who were trying to battle with skinheads. They wanted to beat them up and chase them out of town. I thought that was just ridiculous. In DC, we decided to just create a new scene instead. That was certainly a political action, too. Not least because a part of creating a new scene created a situation in which we, being in our early twenties, began thinking about the larger world. I believe there was a very natural evolution, which then led to what became known as “Revolution Summer.”
I would say that Revolution Summer was an infusion, a moment when the DC punk scene and its personal politics suddenly merged and dovetailed with formal politics. We got involved in political action. Reagan was in office and the apartheid issue was really big. We were discussing gender issues, environmental issues, diet issues, and so on. It was a time of politicization.
Unfortunately, the name Revolution Summer has caused some false interpretations—which is partly our fault because we came up with it. Some people were like, “Oh, look, they think they are being revolutionary!” But that was not actually what we were thinking. We used the word “revolution,” and it is a very strong word, but it was not to suggest that we were creating a revolution. For us Revolution Summer was all about our immediate community. It really came out of a loss of direction or emphasis.
In 1983, a lot of people were very discouraged. A number of bands, most notably Minor Threat, Faith, and Insurrection, had broken up, and even though there were other bands—good bands: Government Issue, Marginal Man, bands like that—the bands that had been crucial for us, the kids I hung out with, were gone. Especially Faith, who were just an enormously important band—I think a lot of people don’t realize how significant they were. Anyway, 1984 kind of turned into a dark year, and no bands were really forming. Eventually, everyone was like, “Well, we’re gonna do something!”
So we decided to pull something together. First we planned “Good Food October.” The idea was that in October 1984 we were all going to eat good food, we were going to make good music, and we were going to be politically active. But then October came and went. So we set a new target date for the summer, and this time it worked.
One of the most successful was the Punk Percussion Protest, something that I remember being hatched at Dischord House. We initially discussed the idea of putting a band on a truck and driving back and forth in front of the South African embassy to protest apartheid. We gave up on that concept because no one we knew had a truck and we figured that the cops would shut us down immediately. So instead we put word out to as many people as we could that they should come join us near the embassy with any sort of percussion item they might be able to find. We got a lot of people out and it was such a baffler for the police—just a really positive experience. We definitely created enough noise that the people in the embassy knew we were out there. There was a series of creative actions along those lines throughout the summer.
Definitely. It established a new beachhead. A lot of kids at the time felt very discouraged about the violence in the punk scene. There were a lot of kids who felt that they were going to walk away from punk altogether and do something new—goth or heavy metal or whatever the fuck they were going to do. Revolution Summer showed them that there was a possibility to be into punk rock without being into guys stomping on your head. Revolution Summer really showed the possibility of a new underground.
I don’t agree with that. That kind of momentum might not have been celebrated in the same way afterwards, but I know people who have been involved with this stuff for twenty-five years now. It’s true that if you are a collective—even an informal collective like we were—you are able to craft and execute actions that are harder to do once that collective has dissipated. But people continued doing things within Positive Force, for example, which was a sort of confluence of Revolution Summer.
There you go. Many people who came out of that scene went on to do really intense political work.
Well, it depends on what you define as the hardcore scene. Like, whenever Fugazi played throughout the 90s, I would see those people. But if you’re talking about seeing every band that called itself “hardcore” or...
...right, they wouldn’t do that. But we didn’t even do that in 1985. This is a good example of just having different perceptions of politics. Tim Yohannan had a more squared off idea of politics and of political action. Yohannan was a dear friend of mine, I loved and respected the dude, so I’m not saying that he was wrong. But by the mid-80s, he certainly ridiculed us and thought that we were wimpy. That’s how “emo” became a pejorative ... Yohannan really loved the term and he used it all the time to dismiss bands. But, that’s alright. Yohannan just had more of an orthodox idea of what punk was, an idea that ran really contrary to mine. For me, punk has always been the free space.
I think of political action as an exercise, and people should exercise throughout their entire lives. If you believe that the people who are calling the shots should not be trusted, if you believe that power corrupts, then you should always be prepared to protest and to act against those who get too much power. And you must know that you’re not finished even if you put one person out of power or make one aspect of the power structure disappear. You’re never finished! I don’t have this kind of romantic notion about political activism where it’s like, “We go out into the streets and we bring down the government and everything will be fine!” I just don’t think about things like that. I think that political action is a lifelong effort that will manifest in specific ways, depending on where you are and whatever it is that you are doing. It’s the same with punk: I believe that punk doesn’t end with your leather jacket. I imagine my funeral is going to be punk! I’m serious about that.
Let me explain it this way: I’m a parent now. Amy and I had a kid back in May; we have a six-month-old son. When he was first born and I was walking with him, I kept on running into these guys in the neighborhood. Maybe I’ve seen them before, maybe I haven’t, but they are always like, “Hey dude, welcome to the club!” And I’m like, “Wow, what club did I join?” It confused me and I didn’t feel comfortable with it at all. How could something so organic—what is more organic than the birth of a human being?—turn into a “club”? But then suddenly it struck me and I was like, “Wait a minute! I’m a fucking punk!” I’ve always felt like a freak, it’s just that I had never been a parent before. And I realized that these were the same dudes who used to say, “What’s with your hair? Are you a fag?” I’m not saying they are bad guys—they are just normals, they are regulars, they are straights. Me, whatever I do in my life, I’m interested in creative response—and that’s what I call punk. If people don’t agree with me, that’s fine, I don’t care. They can have punk, and they can have it however they want to have it. But I have it my way.
First off, I think those Rock Against Racism shows were highly entertaining for the kids in the projects because they thought it was the most ridiculous thing they had ever seen.
The scene has always been predominantly white and the whiteness of the scene has been an issue from time to time. People have asked me, “Well, if Washington is 70 percent black, how is it that your shows are 90 percent white?” My response is: apparently that’s who wants to come see kids jumping around on stage with a guitar. I don’t know what else to say about that. We never turned people away at the door. I mean, we played shows at the Wilson Center with fifteen bands for three dollars. Three dollars! No one has ever been turned away. The Wilson Center was in a neighborhood that was at the time largely African-American. I don’t know why they didn’t want to come see the shows, probably because they thought it was stupid. For the same reason, a lot of Latino kids don’t come. It’s just not their music. And I find the notion that you should “reach out” and try to get these people involved not very convincing. Why? It seems disrespectful. I mean, these kids are certainly capable of making up their own minds of whether this is something they want to get involved with or not. Again, I don’t think it’s a matter of access. I think it’s just a matter of taste.
Look at the go-go scene. This is a thriving underground music scene in DC. It is almost entirely black. However, I don’t think anybody asks go-go bands, “Well, how come you don’t have a 30 percent white audience?” It is because for many varying reasons these are just different cultures; and I’m talking about real culture, culture that speaks to a certain part of the population. Don’t you think that if culture spoke to everybody, it wouldn’t really be culture anymore? It’d be like network television.
Let me be more specific: for most of the skinhead kids—and they weren’t all skinhead kids, but they were all troubled—the issue was violence. The punk scene was a perfect nest for them. People who have violence and control issues need an environment to exercise these things. The world at large is too scary for them, they need something more immediate and conquerable. Especially since punk had gotten the “nihilistic” and “self-destructive” tag from the media, it drew these people. It made punk perfect for them, and violence was their language. If you spoke to them in violence, then you were only awarding them.
In the early stages of the punk scene I did that. I fought a lot. I operated under a philosophy: bruise the ego and not the body. The idea was that I would never back down from a fight, but I would also never take a brick and smash someone’s head in after I had knocked them down. All I wanted to do was to repel these kids, to stop them by standing up to them. This was how I thought I could reconcile what was essentially a pacifist mindset with punching people.
This violence seemed necessary because I felt that we are under attack. For example, there was a gang in Washington called the Punk Beaters. They were a bunch of redneck guys, jocks, who would go out looking for punks to beat up. So, then we would go with my brother Alec, who was fourteen years old at the time and a very punk-looking kid, to the area where the Punk Beater guys hang out. We would have Alec walk a block ahead of us, and if these guys came to get him, twelve or fifteen of us would take them out. Our idea was to show them that you can’t fuck with the punks like that.
At some point, however, the whole violence thing just turned upon itself. People at shows would get into fights because somebody was wearing a wrong T-shirt or had long hair or just something really absurd like that. This made me realize what a completely pointless, unconstructive activity it was, but, by talking to these kids, I also understood that they had been inspired by my violence. It was like this biblical concept coming true, violence begets violence, and it became very clear to me that this was something I had to stop in my life.
At first it was difficult, and I remember thinking, “How can I stop when I’m always under attack?” I don’t know how many times I would have a car go by and someone would scream, “Fuck you, you fucking punk faggot!” But then I realized that if you do not speak that language, you recognize that they are not talking to you. Let’s say that I’m in Sweden, and a carload with a bunch of guys goes by and they yell something at me in Swedish. I don’t know what they’re saying. As far as I know, they are saying, “I love basketball!” Who knows? So when I’m walking along the street here and some guys go by in a car, and they don’t know me, I don’t know them, but they say, “You’re a fucking punk faggot, fuck you!” then it should have the same effect. They are not talking to me, they don’t know me, and I’m not what they say I am, so they must have confused me with someone else. In short, if you don’t speak the language of violence, you are released from violence. This was a very powerful discovery for me.
The next step was to start bands like Rites of Spring, Embrace, Lunchmeat, Beefeater—bands that were considered very wimpy at the time. We stopped with the aggressive posturing and started playing different kinds of music. This infuriated many kids, because they had no longer a soundtrack for their violence. It was too wimpy for them.
No. Straight edge was already in place in 1979, 1980, it was something that had always been happening and that wasn’t particular to that time. The song “Straight Edge” was a song about the way I lived, about who I was, and about living my life however I wanted.
In the 1970s, I was given a lot of grief of my high school peers and my friends for being straight; I was ridiculed. Then when we got into the punk scene, all these punk rockers ridiculed me. And all the time I just felt like, “Hey, I’m just me!” I didn’t say to anyone that they were stupid for drinking—still they gave me so much shit. The first sort of straight edge song I wrote was probably “I Drink Milk” by the Teen Idles. This was obviously a joke song—“I drink milk, I drink milk, I drink milk”—but the reaction to it was so visceral, and people were like, “We’re gonna tie you up and make you drink a beer!” HR from the Bad Brains always told me that he was going to tie me to a tree and make me smoke pot with him. And I was always struck by this, thinking, “What the fuck is this?” Like, I never said to HR, “I’m gonna tie you to a tree and not let you smoke pot!”
Ultimately, the situation kinda came to a boil in my mind, and I guess eventually I just wrote a more angry song. But I think the beginning of the song is very clear, and I think the first line of the song is the most important: “I’m a person just like you.” And then it continues: “I have better things to do.” That’s the way I looked at it: I had better things to do than just get high, and I was just being straight about it. But it wasn’t like I decided, “Oh, I’m going to be straight,” or “I’m going to be straight edge.” That’s just how I was. It’s just me.
In life, if you decide to forgo something that everybody else does, it gives you a perspective on society that you couldn’t have if you were just engaging. It teaches you a lot about the world. I didn’t do these things because I was trying to be different—apparently, I was different. What I learned was that just to be myself meant to be a freak. And so I wrote a song about being a freak. I’ve said many times before that the biggest influence for the song was the Jimi Hendrix song “If 6 was 9.” At the end of the song, Hendrix says, “I’m the one that’s gonna die when it’s time for me to die/So let me live my life the way I want to.” He was singing about being a freak.
Straight edge was just a declaration for the right to live your life the way you want to. I was not interested in trying to tell people how to do that. I mean, obviously things got pretty crazily perverted over the years.
Of course! Originally, the declaration was two-fold: one point was to say that this is the way I want to live and that you have to respect my way; the second point was not limited to drinking or to taking drugs—it was about being obsessed. I think some people simply missed that.
The big debates really started when “Out of Step” came out. Specifically, the lyric “don’t fuck” seemed to flip people out. You could hear them say, “My god, he’s anti-sex!”
I definitely chose those words carefully, and I stand behind them still. But you’ll notice for instance that the lyric is “Don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t fuck, at least I can fucking think.” So first off, I use a grammatical trick in there: the fourth line modifies the first three. The first three sound like directives or orders: “Don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this.” The fourth line says: “But at least I can fucking think!” Which clearly says that I don’t do these things—but I can think; I may not be like other people, I may not party—but at least I can think, at least I got that. You can even see on the lyrics sheet that the word “I” is put in parentheses, which was a result of long discussions within the band. Some people in the band were very concerned that kids might read the whole thing as a directive, while I was less concerned about it. But that’s part of me, I’m rather unapologetic about stuff. I’m more like, “Fuck it, tough on them!”
Then there is a second thing that’s important in those lyrics. If you look at the words “don’t smoke,” everyone figures I’m talking about smoking cigarettes, or grass, or hash; “don’t drink”—everyone figures I’m talking about alcohol; “don’t fuck”—everyone figures I’m saying, “No sex!” Think about that! Think about the word “drink”: what does “drink” mean? Do you think that people would ever figure, “Oh, he wants people to no longer take any beverages, or any liquids of any sort?” But when the word “fuck” comes on, they cannot understand it the same way. That just blew my mind. What I was clearly discussing was abusive, quest-oriented, manipulative sex. People who were not interested in other people’s feelings, but only in getting off. I saw as a teenager that people’s energies were so squarely caught up in getting laid that a lot of pain and hurt came with that. People were being hurt and damaged and traumatized by other people’s behavior. I knew women who were raped by people who did not care for anything other than getting off. And I just thought that this kind of obsession was not healthy.
So, straight edge, the whole idea, the whole concept was really anti-obsession. If your whole world is committed to this one thing, then clearly it’s not a good situation.
I think American culture is deeply dysfunctional about sexuality. This is probably true for most cultures, but especially for American culture. Our culture is so fucked up on sex. I mean, you might remember this huge uproar about Janet Jackson’s nipple that showed on TV during the Super Bowl some years ago, no matter how imperceptibly. This ridiculous incident caused an unbelievable series of new restrictions. Today, if you have a cussword air on a radio show you might get a half a million dollar fine—for a cussword! What kind of a country are we living in? There is a very dominant right, religious element in this society. You hear people say that America is all about the separation of church and state, the free exercise of religion, etc. That is all bullshit, the conservative component of religion is really powerful. And I think this is why, if you grow up in this culture, there is this idea—also within the punk scene—that sexuality should be transgressive. That’s why you have “sex, drugs and rock’n’roll”—the idea that sex is a rebel act. I mean, come on! Sex is the requirement for the perpetuation of the human race. And yet somehow it’s been relegated to fucking in the streets.
I think because of all this, sex became this sort of rallying point: if you’re rebellious, then you fuck. And I think the problem was that people’s sexual behavior, particularly because of the psychological nature of sexual dysfunction, became very abusive, especially towards women. Women were being treated as targets and conquests. Especially in the early L.A. punk scene, there was a lot of emphasis on scamming. It was really a shock to me to meet punk bands who would come to Washington, hit on all the women and say things like, “Hey, will you give me a blowjob in the bathroom of the club?” How is this different than Led Zeppelin or any of these bands? I thought that we rejected groupie culture and rock’n’roll, that we saw it as a bankrupt approach to music, and that we went beyond the idea that rebelliousness can only manifest in either self-destruction or the exploitation of others. So I couldn’t understand what was going on, and I thought I’d speak out against it. And I got a rise out of people.
I’m pro-sex, I certainly have no problem with sex between people who want to have sex. But I felt that so much energy in our scene was spent on selfish aims, basically on trying to get laid all the time, to the degree where it really compromised our communities.
I also think that the sexual transgression plays a massive role in the consumption of alcohol. People drink to enter into situations that are not necessarily good for them. I feel that people should always be present.
When you have a bunch of kids there is always a sense of what’s cool and what’s not cool. I believe that at the time it wasn’t so much about “becoming straight edge,” it was more about kids being human beings and making choices.
I think what happened at first was that an alternative had been created—a scene that people could get involved with that wasn’t the standard rebel party scene. Of course we were rejected by other kids who thought that we were stupid or made them “feel guilty.” But the idea that we were all totalitarian fundamentalists really had more to do with people’s own issues than with ours.
There was of course also a pragmatic aspect to this, which was that we were deeply invested in the idea of keeping clubs open to punk bands, and we knew that if kids fucked up by getting drunk and smashing the club or whatever, we would lose our space. So in that sense there certainly was pressure, because we were like, “Hey, we’re not fucking around, if you’re going to drink, do it after the show, away from the club, don’t do it anywhere near here!”
But most of the kids involved with the early DC hardcore scene were drinking. Some of my dearest friends were fuck-ups. It certainly wasn’t this weird cult where you’d get slapped if you were seen with a cup of beer in your hand. That is just a fallacy.
No, it was a larger clique. I guess you could call it the “Dischord scene”—you know, the scene first defined by Minor Threat, Faith etc. and then morphing into Rites of Spring, Embrace, Beefeater, that era.
No, most of those kids were drinking too, at least sometimes. The kind of strict straight edge thing didn’t really show up until SS Decontrol. And the policing aspect of it, that just seemed to come out of New York.
Yes. And there were the Connecticut kids, and it kinda dovetailed, there was Gorilla Biscuits, Crucial Youth. It was a scene that I think was aesthetically to some degree influenced by Dischord, musically very much by SS Decontrol, and attitude-wise mostly by the Boston or New England scene.
No. The first time I ever got the idea of a straight edge movement was when I met people who identified as the “bent edge movement.” As far as I’m concerned, there was a countermovement before there was a movement. Minor Threat toured in 1982, and kids would show up in Tucson, Arizona, and say that they were “bent edge;” or kids would come up to us in Dallas, Texas, and say that they were “curved edge.” These were people who were provocateurs, trying to fuck with us—but they essentially defined the straight edge movement.
Maybe in L.A. or Orange County there were people, like America’s Hardcore, who actually identified as such. This would be the origin of a more organic kind of movement: people who say, “Hey, this is weird, there are kids here, and there are kids in Reno, and kids in Boston, and kids in the Midwest, and they are all doing this really cool thing.” However, I think it was always more about punk rock than about straight edge. Like, we were the new American hardcore. You had Johnny Thunders and Sid Vicious and these kinds of people, and now you suddenly had these kids who were making this radical music but were not stumbling around like junkies. That was significant.
So in this sense the “we” I used above means all these kids, The Necros and 7 Seconds and others, and I guess it was a kind of a movement, but, again, it was more of a punk rock movement or a hardcore punk rock movement or a kids’ movement than a straight edge movement—maybe it was straight edge, but we didn’t think of this as a defining element.
There are two different ideas of movements: there is an organic idea of a movement, and then there is a very formal idea of a movement. In the latter case people start to do newsletters and they want you to sign on to something. I’ve never been interested in that. I’m just not a subscriber.
No doubt. Even when the second version of “Out of Step,” which is on a 12-inch, came out, I put a little thing in there saying, “This is not a set of rules!” So, already in 1983, I’m trying to say, “Look, there is no movement here!”
For me, straight edge was never intended to be a movement and I never saw myself as a part of such a movement. However, I want to be really clear: I think that the vast majority of the people who identify as or with straight edge are human beings who try to do the right thing in their lives. The fact that they are even thinking about their behavior, that they are thinking about the effects of their behavior on the world, is, I believe, positive and good. The problem with movements is that they put humans in something akin to a higher calling and then others have to take the backseat. There’s a religious element there. And then you always have people—even if it’s only one percent—who have power issues or, more specifically, violence issues. Essentially, what they are wrestling with is not a conflict about intoxication or drug use or sexuality. It is about power and violence. And if people have this inside of them, they have to get it out. So they go around looking for triggers: things that can set off situations in which they can release this energy. This is why these people run to nationalism, religion, or sports, all these really imaginary things. Like, why would people who live in Texas on one side of some imaginary line have an issue with those who live in Mexico on the other side of that imaginary line? It’s ridiculous. But if you need a trigger for your violence, you need someone who is “the other” and you need a line on the ground that allows you to say, “Okay, if you step over that line, then we’ll beat your ass!” Straight edge was perfect for that if you saw it as a series of directives. And that’s how these people started to see it, as very simple rules: “If you do this or that, then you are stepping over that line, and at that point you’ve waived your rights!” This is something that I saw most clearly articulated in a text handed out by the hardline people.
Yes, they would picket us. They were very dogmatic, and their main issue, as far as I could tell, were animal rights. So at one point I received some information from them, a declaration of sorts. It said that all life was precious, and they laid it all out in detail. And then the text said, “We will educate you about this, and if you do not accept the education, then you have waived your status as a living thing.” That’s basically what it said. I mean it wasn’t quite as crude but it was pretty fucking close. Essentially, they were saying, “We will give you a chance; but if you don’t agree with us, we’re gonna beat your ass!”
I think it’s always interesting to look at where these people go. I would meet these hardline kids, and when I came back to their town a couple of years later I would ask, “What happened to this kid?” And often people would be like, “Oh, he’s selling crack.” They were just gangsters, and if you think about gangsters—gang guys—it’s all about turf; which goes back to the example of the line. I remember once visiting this stupid high school and there was a mural of an eagle on the ground in tile, and I walked across it—I mean, it was on the fucking floor—and I got jacked up by these dudes for stepping on their eagle. That’s what I mean. These are all triggers.
The reason why the people who had issues with violence managed to dominate the whole idea of straight edge was that our cultures are obsessed with violence. The media will always talk about violence. If there is a party—and I use this analogy a lot—and there are thirty people talking, twenty-eight having really fascinating, incredibly illuminating conversations, and two ending up punching each other, all that people will talk about the next day is the fight. I don’t know why. This is just the way we process things. Violent people end up getting an enormous amount of attention. And then kids who have never heard about straight edge will hear about it in the context of violence, and some will be like, “That sounds cool, you punch people out—I’m in!”
The whole idea of straight edge was incredibly maligned by a small amount of people. It became vulnerable because everyone gathered under one tree. This means instant death for everybody when the lightning strike comes. By referring to straight edge as a movement and by identifying with it and by adopting rules or whatever, people allowed themselves to be put into trouble. Because when things start to go wrong, you need to react, and once these guys started beating everybody up, a lot of kids were like, “This is stupid, I need to get out of this situation, I don’t wanna be identified with that!” So then they “stopped being straight edge,” whatever the fuck that means. And then in turn you have internet sites where people out those who “broke their edge.” It’s so ridiculous! This is why I cannot understand that people would want to huddle under the same tree.
I think that there were two reasons why we were picketed. Actually, picketed might be too strong of a word, they came “to talk to us” and give us “a chance to explain ourselves.” One of the reasons was that we were pro-choice. This was a big issue for them. The other one was that we were not more outspoken about our diets. I mean, I’ve been a vegan for twenty-two years now, Joe was a vegan for almost the entire time in Fugazi, and we were all vegetarians. But I guess the hardline people wanted us to make this some kind of an issue. I remember this one time in Memphis a hardline activist confronted us in front of the local health food store. He asked us why we didn’t have any vegan songs. We just totally couldn’t believe the question. Guy finally said, “Well, considering that none of our songs eat meat or dairy or any animal products, I guess they’re all vegan.” It’s just so absurd! I also remember the kid wearing fake leather DocMartens. I always felt that this was absurd too. I mean, I don’t wear leather. But I would never wear anything that looks like leather either. It seems to be completely counterproductive ‘cause the main issue with the leather industry is that it’s fashionable. So if you wear something that looks like leather, what’s the statement that you’re making?
Anyway, I think that a lot of hardline kids felt that there was a war happening. So they were militant, and they felt that we should also be militant. You gotta remember that in the punk scene, or the underground community, the self-cleaning oven is always in place. People’s power is limited to their scope, and it’s like that saying goes: “The people who get hit are the people within arm’s reach.” So, instead of them picketing Aerosmith or whoever, they go to some little punk show and are rough on the people there.
...slapping a beer out of somebody’s hands?
That’s one of the most annoying fucking things. I’ve been told so many times that I slapped a beer out of somebody’s hands. I don’t think I ever did that, not once, and yet it has become part of my legacy. Then there is also the story about me hitting someone with a hammer for blowing pot smoke in my face. This is actually true, but the story is never told correctly: When I was in high school, I was part of a community theater group. We had this club house within the school that was completely underground. People were drinking and getting high, but it was our club house, and so I hung out there too. They always called me “the group conscience.” One day this kid from my school—who was a stoner and a kind of bully—was getting high, while I was building flats. We were teasing each other, we did that a lot. At one point he came over, tapped me on the shoulder, and gave me this look, like, “You got a problem or something?” So I stood up holding the hammer, he blew pot smoke in my face, ran away, and I threw the hammer and it hit him in the leg. So, yes, I literally hit someone with a hammer for blowing pot smoke in my face. However, it’s really different from the idea that most people have. They always see me attacking somebody and putting a hole in their head.
This is precisely the kind of thing that my life is filled with: people have this perception of me that is so inaccurate. It has largely to do with other people’s projections of what my work has been about. But my work has basically always been about peace and love, that’s it. It’s not true when people say, “Ian, you never wrote any love songs.” My songs are all love songs, ultimately. Think about a song like “Filler.” I’m talking about one of my best friends there, and about what he’s been doing to himself and why he got so fucked up. Songs like that are all songs about my passion for connection, and my agony over disconnection.
When I wrote the song “Straight Edge” I wasn’t writing about something new. I wasn’t saying, “Hey, here is a new way to live!” I was talking about the way that people live to begin with. Later I read so much about the “straight edge lifestyle,” and I was confronted with it all the time. There have been so many times when I would read something like, “Ian MacKaye is a practitioner of the straight edge lifestyle.” A few years ago it finally hit me what was so annoying about it: it’s no fucking lifestyle! A lifestyle is something that one chooses. Like, if you choose to live on a beach and go surfing all day, that’s a lifestyle. But being straight is the base, that’s what’s underneath all of this! We’re born that way!
I’ve always thought about life as a straight line, a simple, straight line, on which we are all equal and identical. Everything added to that—like our surroundings, our culture, all these things—that’s what makes us different. But as far as the essence of life goes, we are identical, we are the same thing, all of us. And so, in my mind, when someone starts saying, “So, you live the straight edge lifestyle,” I say, “No. I live life.” And last time I checked, there are three or four necessary components to life: air, water, food, and sex. The sex is there because we must procreate since otherwise we’re out of luck. So, as far as I am concerned, straight edge is just life. I don’t choose to be straight, I choose not to be the other thing. It’s the semantic subtlety that matters here.
Another problem I see associated with the “straight edge lifestyle” is that it becomes a framework for merchandise. “Okay, now I decide to live the straight edge lifestyle. What do I need to buy?” People look for things to signify their lifestyle choices. I cannot believe it when I see straight edge merchandise! It’s just mind-boggling.
Well, I mean, if you want to take it extremely literally, yes. However, obviously I think that there is some merit in talking to you on the telephone, otherwise I wouldn’t do it. I mean, any literal interpretation of what I just said could ask, “So, why are you wearing shoes?” I understand that. But I just want to stress the problems associated with the word “lifestyle.” I think that people use the word for two reasons: either they use it to dismiss something; or they use it to suggest that there is a certain way to be. But what’s the blueprint of the straight edge lifestyle? How do you live that lifestyle? Do you have to go to a particular website? Do you need any particular clothing? I don’t know.
My point is: to live simply and not to buy into any such demands, that is normal. What is perverted is the mainstream understanding of living.
Of course! There was a certain period in my life when I was very angry, when I was really agonizing over things. It made me feel miserable, and I began to question everything: What is the point of all this punk rock? What is the point of me singing? What am I trying to do? Eventually, I realized that the reason I was so angry was because I want people in the world to be well. And I realized that it was a worthwhile project to pursue in my lifetime. But I also understood that I myself needed to be well to do that. So I figured that I would do my best to live a life of wellness. This doesn’t mean that I’m trying to bask in my riches. It means that I’m trying to release myself from the anger and agony. Remember what I said earlier about someone going by in a car and calling me “a fucking asshole”? They are not talking to me—‘cause I’m not a fucking asshole.
There are a lot of things happening in this world that are horrific. But I have no control over this. The day them fucking planes crashed into the buildings here in 2001, I was in Dischord House, right here. People called me to tell me what had happened, so I turned on the TV, I saw the planes crash and immediately turned the TV off, and returned to the book I was reading—a Kurt Vonnegut book, which in fact was a perfect book for that moment. While I sat there reading, I looked out the window, and it was an absolutely crystal clear, gorgeous day. I saw the trees and thought, “These trees don’t give a fuck about what just happened. They don’t care. And they’re going to be here after all this shit is over.”
Humans have been brutalizing each other since the beginning of time. I don’t know why. But there is a certain point where one has to accept that this is a little bit like the weather. You cannot control it, and you cannot understand it. What happened that day was incomprehensible. No matter who did it. Whether it was Al-Qaeda or the US government or someone else. And it will remain incomprehensible, no matter how often you look at it. The only result of looking at something that’s incomprehensibly brutal over and over again is detachment. If you take your hand and you start slapping yourself as hard as you can, it’s going to hurt—but after a while you’ll feel nothing ‘cause that’s the way we survive. We become numb. I don’t think that helps anybody.
So on September 11, after I had finished the book, I sat down and I answered all the mail. Everything was fucked up here—all the bridges were closed, the phones were down, etc.—and it seemed like answering the mail was the best thing to do. I looked at it as a vote for the future. Because I believed that someone would read it—that there would be a September 12.
I guess that’s an illustration of putting into action a philosophy of Live as you desire the world to be! It doesn’t mean to be unaware and not to care. It means to love and to be well and to wish for others to be well too.