Could somebody please explain the term “straightedge” to me?
I always assumed the term was attributed to the abstaining lifestyle.
Apparently there are many types of “straightedge” and some tend to take the thing to a different level.
Take for example this livejournal i stumbled across: http://www.livejournal.com/users/xasholex/
what the hell is she talking about?
They cant all be like this, right?
Straightedge, in that context, is a “hardcore” punk scene which emphasizes a sort of “body as a temple” ethic – no drugs, no alcohol, and no casual sex (the three X’s). The term is said to have been coined by Minor Threat, a band.
The only way I’ve ever heard it used is pertaining to rulers and such, for getting a straight edge in Geometry class.
Learn something new every day, I suppose.
ohh, and to add and clarify:
no offense to anyone meant.
total respect for everyone and their views.
i just thought it was odd to be… hrm. angry, punky, but clean.
thats a rather neat thought.
I’m just still not thrilled with people that scream
“Look at me! i’m different”
No matter who they are.
Straightedge is a subset of punk that emphasises being drug, cigarette and alcohol free. Some people extend that basic ethos to include self-imposed restrictions on sex, food, consumerism etc. It’s a obviously a very idealistic movement, and most people involved are hoping that the youth of the world can turn away from distractions and destruction and start thinking about positive change. I think most people would be surprised to see how political, meaningful, hopeful and smart punk rock can be.
Like any punk movement, the people involved vary widely. Punk has always been a place of misfits, but in modern times it gets pretty intellectual.Sometimes this means you have passionate well-spoken and thoughtful people. Sometimes this means you get fifteen-year-old kids saying they are more hardcore than anyone else because they don’t use soap made with beeswax like all the rest of the sheeple in Amerikkka.
I think punk rock movements in general remember that we were all fifteen once- angry, lost, bored, and desperate for something to believe in. Punk rock doesn’t reject this- it looks at what it can do with all this energy. So yeah, your going to run in to some pretty rediculous people who can only talk about what rare records they have and how everyone is imitating punk rock nowdays (a complaint that dates back, I’m pretty sure, to the genesis of punk…eventually the kids figure out that punk rock has always been and alway will be co-opted, mainstreamed, corpratized and occasionally rocketed up to “trendy” status and stop worrying about it). And straightedge- a particularly extreme type of punk rock- attracts a bit more of the fanatics and a lot of people that see the world in black-and-white. But no, not all straightedgers are like the girl your linked to. I’d venture that most arn’t.
-Sven, who was once a fifteen year old punk rocker herself.
As the philosopher Meatloaf once said, “Two out of three ain’t bad.”
I knew a guy in highschool back in the mid-90s that discovered the straightedge movement and so desperately wanted to be a part of it that he immediately went out and tattooed a big fat X on the back of each hand. Before the scabs were even healed he had given up on the whole thing because he just couldn’t quit smoking. Last time I saw him he was 25 years old, covered in arm, hand, and neck tattoos, and complaining through his multiple lip and septum piercings that he just couldn’t find a decent job. The luck of some people!
Wow kids are still sXe? Cool. I feel old having thought that, having grown up all the way back in the 90s.
I was friends with a guy like Cisco knew, too. Huge X’s on his elbows (ouch!) then he decided that being high was more fun than being cool.
Straight edge people write (or tattoo) X or XXX on their hands, which originally came from the fact that bars do this to underage people who can’t drink. Now it’s a symbol for the movement. sXe is another shorthand for straight edge, and you can usually tell if someone is online because they wrap X’s around their screenname or email (e.g. xrkmasex2x or xCecilAdamsx). Even some bands put x’s around their name to signify that all the members are edge.
Unfortunately, for most people sXe is a fad even though they swear otherwise. I have a friend who was straightedge for many years and got tattoos and everything. He even had XXX tattooed on his lip. Like most of the people I know that were sXe, he isn’t anymore.
Straightedge isn’t just punk anymore, now most of the bands are a lot heavier and more metal sounding. Also in recent years violence has been one thing that some don’t abstain from. In some areas male straighteders have formed into groups almost like gangs, and they generally go looking for fights. That certainly doesn’t apply to every single straight edge person, but it has become a sensitive subject nowadays.
When I bought my first Minor Threat album back during the Reagan Administration—I still have all the vinyl they ever released—I had never seen triple-X associated w/ hardcore punk. I always thought it was “hardcore” punk because it was hardcore in a similar sense to hardcore vs. softcore porn. Green Day and Blink 182 would qualify as softcore punk (if they qualify as punk at all).
Straight-edge hardcore, as I understood it, was an abbreviation of straight-edge hardcore punk rock. Punk being a subset of rock, hardcore being a subset of punk rock, and straight edge being a subset of hardcore punk rock.
That journal is pretty funny.
I’m individual! But I always wear my uniform!
I’m totally straight edge!
Everyone I know is straigt edge!
Don’t make fun of straight edge people!
X many Xs X
Although I have to admit that any movement that creates a band called Death by Stereo can’t be all bad. Anyone heard of them? What are they like?
My brother was one for a time. The abstinences didn’t include violence however, they all still went out for good ol’ traditional boot-stompings, but targeted other non-straightedge punk and skin groups. IMO, they were just another group with shallow ideologies justifying their ignorant extremism.
No way! Hardcore was hardcore, sXe was always a subgenre. It started with the Washington DC bands, primarily Minor Threat. The key songs I suppose would be “Straight Edge,” “Out of Step” and “Bottled Violence.” These were indeed radical ideas to introduce to the punk scene in the early 80s. The idea was originally that you kept your head “straight” in order to be more effective in society in promoting social change, but like every other belief system in drifted into the means becoming the end.
For a while there in the 80s every single punk band interview included the “Do you guys have the edge?” question! I have to say it was always surprsing to hear the level of which the non-edge people would respect the edge people as a personal choice, even when they thinking “I want a beer and some hot sweaty fun!”
As the 80s went on, the focus moved to NYC & the metal sounding bands like Sick of It All and Judge… I think this is when a lot of the “jock mentality” lunkheadedness came in, but there are always more than enough cool people to offset that.
I can remember seeing on a music blog a few months ago that someone posted a comic strip from c. 1912 that pushed abstinance from liquor with one character asserting he had a “straight edge,” suggesting the term predates Minor Threat by almost a century. Anyone else see that?
As has been mentioned, the straight edge movement was spearheaded by Minor Threat. Their song “Straight Edge” appeared on their 1981 self-titled EP.
On their 1989 album Older…(Budweiser), Gang Green included a song titled “Why Should You”, the main theme of which is that they just wanted to be left to drink their beer in peace. So it appears that the straight edge movement had become pretty prominent by then.
Subgenre of what? DC hardcore was certainly distinct in and of itself, with Minor Threat being the flagship, so to speak, and straight-edge certainly meant no intoxicants, inter alia; however if straight-edge was was distinct from hardcore, what does “straight-edge hardcore” mean? I’ve always understood it in such a manner that Fear and Minor Threat are both hardcore punk, while Minor Threat is also straight-edge. Kind of like all dobermans are dogs, but not all dogs are dobermans.
When I was in highschool there was a thing that was like the “sXe” except that there was an “h” in the upper part of the “X” and a “c” in the lower part of the “X,” signifying “straight-edge hardcore.” FWIW, it seemed to be fairly novel in Detroit. I’ve never heard of straight-edge as being distinct from hardcore.
IME, the main problem with the ‘straightedge’ movement is that they’re all trying to be punk, indiviual, into not conforming, etc.
Yet they endlessly harrass anyone who disagrees with them and…yep, criticizes us normal folk for having the nerve to imbibe in bodily pleasures. Hypocrites.
Yes, we are all exactly the same. Every one of us looks, thinks, and acts the exact same way. Thank you for clearing that up: Obviously, my PROMs must need to be reburned, 'cause my programming’s off.
:rolleyes:
Of punk rock, period. Hardcore is a musical style. Remember that in '81 there was still an admixture of poppier punk bands, the political hardcore bands, goth, plain old weirdness (Butthole Surfers for example), even sorta New Wave-y bands. Most “scenes” weren’t large enough in most cities for these bands to play different venues, and the different punk subgenres were still communicating. You might have 3 to 5 very different types of bands on the same bill.
Take the other biggest DC hardcore band at the time, Bad Brains: hardcore punk but not sXe. Heck, they’re Rastas and like their ganja… and became basically a reggae band.
AFAIK, all the 80s sXe bands were hardcore (in other words, they sounded like Minor Threat as opposed to Agent Orange or Crass or The Sun City Girls), but only some hardcore bands were sXe. Later in the 80s DC was cranking out a number of sensitive sXe bands, especially on the Dischord label, that no longer sounded like hardcore bands exactly. This would include Fugazi, Ian MacKaye’s main project after Minor Threat broke up.
Oops…sorry, js_africanus, I seem to have misread your post. We’re saying the same thing. Never mind…
If one straight edge band sounds like hardcore, and another doesn’t at all, on what basis can you say they play the same style of music?