why did punk go straight edge? what was that about?
while the term straight edge does appear to have been invented by ian mackeye (who also invented emo), and very late (the song was written in 1984, years after the development of an anti-drug mentality in the hardcore scene), it didn't start anything but rather reflected something that already existed. there are earlier examples of jello biafra (too drunk to fuck, drug me) and roughly contemporary examples of henry rollins (drinking and driving) that are pushing broadly anti-drug messaging, and i believe that, like most things in the anarcho-punk tradition, the issue ultimately goes back to crass, who were known to reject drug use when performing, at least.
why, though?
these are the lyrics to a dead kennedys song from 1985/86 that gets the point across:
What's ripped us apart even more than drugs
Are the thieves and the goddamn liars
Ripping people off when they share their stuff
When someone falls are there any friends?
Harder-core-than-thou for a year or two
Then it's time to get a real job
Others stay home, it's no fun to go out
When the gigs are wrecked by gangs and thugs
When the thugs form bands, look who gets record deals
From New York metal labels looking to scam
Who sign the most racist, queer-bashing bands they can find
To make a buck revving kids up for war
....
That farty old rock and roll attitude's back
It's competition, man, we wanna break big
Who needs friends when the money's good?
That's right, the '70s are back
Cock-rock metal's like a bad laxative
It just don't move me, you know?
The music so okay when there's more ideas than solos
Do we really need the attitude too?
Shedding thin skin too quickly
As a fan it disappoints me
Same stupid sexist lyrıcs
Or is Satan all you can think of?
....
The more things change, the more they stay the same
We can't grow if we won't criticize ourselves
The '60s weren't all failure, it's the '70s that stunk
As the clock ticks, we dig the same hole
Music scenes ain't real life, they won't get rid of the bomb
Won't eliminate rape or bring down the banks
Any kind of real change takes more time and work
Than changing channels on a TV set
So why are we so eager to please, peer pressure decrees
So eager to please, peer pressure decrees
Make the same old mistakes again and again
Chickenshit conformist like your parents
===
what's the key line there?
Any kind of real change takes more time and work
Than changing channels on a TV set
the reason that punks attempted to clean up the rock scene is that they were social activists. they looked at the promising movements that came out of the 60s and fizzled out in the 70s and concluded that the reason that it all fell apart was the drug use. in order to reclaim rock music as a political vehicle to institute radical left-wing social change, they decided they were going to have to get the drugs down, first.
and, they mostly all knew that the drugs were coming in from the government as a placation tactic. as social activists, they watched the agents come in and drug up their foot soldiers, making them useless in the fight. and, yeah - that pissed them off.
so, what they were trying to do was take these thousands of kids at the rock concerts and turn them into an anarchist revolutionary force, a kind of industrial reserve army composed of lumpenproletariat; they wanted them to stop getting drunk and moshing at shows and go out and burn down a bank, instead. here's another gem from jello:
Punk ain't no religious cult
Punk means thinking for yourself
You ain't hardcore 'cause you spike your hair
When a jock still lives inside your head
Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks, fuck off!
Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks, fuck off!
If you've come to fight, get outta here
You ain't no better than the bouncers
We ain't trying to be police
When you ape the cops it ain't anarchy
Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks, fuck off!
Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks, fuck off!
Ten guys jump one, what a man
You fight each other, the police state wins
Stab your backs when you trash our halls
Trash a bank if you've got real balls
You still think swastikas look cool
The real Nazis run your schools
They're coaches, businessmen and cops
In a real fourth Reich you'll be the first to go
Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks, fuck off!
Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks, fuck off!
You'll be the first to go
You'll be the first to go
You'll be the first to go
Unless you think
==
that's right - trash a bank. but, put the beer down first - you'll do more damage if you're in control of yourself, and understand what you're doing.
that was the point; that was what it was about.
were they right?
well, i think that a lot of these people, who were much younger then than i am now, were maybe looking at the 60s with some flower-covered glasses; the 60s were vicious, people were getting the shit beaten out of them left and right, and nothing much really came out of it, in the end. was it the drugs that ended the movement? i think there's an argument that it got suppressed the old fashioned way. nixon didn't accidentally win, in the end; nixon won the hippie vote. there was more than drug use underlying the failure, although i'm sure it didn't really help much.
i think the idea that the 70s were such a period of stagnation and reversion is a better argument, though. disco was notorious for being an escape from reality. in that context, jello and the bunch of them were trying to hold up that mirror, to shock people into seeing that their decadence was leading to things like climate change and an eventual nuclear war. that came out of the situationist movement, and is ultimately a type of agitprop.
when punk went mainstream in the 90s, a lot of this kind of evaporated. you can hear remnants of straight-edge messaging in a number of the popular 90s punk-pop bands (offspring, bad religion, propaghandi, nofx, fugazi, etc), but the truth is that when the money started coming in they almost all fell into it, and we're now a generation removed from any memory of it.
so, what is with the narrative at wikipedia? well, that's the narrative you'll read in the history of music sociology course, that teaches you about the centrality of vivanne westwood to punk culture. in this absolute whitewashing of history, punk was not a social movement trying to rip the system down but just a fashion movement, about jewelry. and, there was a promoter named malcolm mclaren that created some fake bands, too, but it's the jewelry that's of historical significance.
that is, they're trying to write it out of history - because they realize that, unlike the hippies, the punks were actually a legit threat to the existing order, if they could have ever got the kids to put down the beer and succeeded in organizing them to fight. jewelry, and kids getting fucked up on airplane glue, are far less threatening topics.
even in the sense that that was true, the punk movement began with crass, and the hardcore scene (as centered mostly in california) was the actual real punk scene, not what happened in the uk with the sex pistols. it was in california that hardcore punk became what we call punk rock, today. there was always a dramatic disconnect between these punk-as-fashion types and the punk-as-movement types, and it manifested itself in the journalism; the punk-as-fashion types were mostly arts students with money, largely english, wrote most of the articles in the mainstream press and eventually ended up morphing into new wave fans, while the punk-as-movement types were mostly working class and self-taught, centered themselves mostly in america, fought hard to control their own means of production and produced their own writing by self-distributing zines and pamphlets, like early labour activists.
so, this idea that straight-edge culture was some kind of conservative backlash....it sounds like what the cia would tell you before they sell you lsd. and, it's probably close to the actual truth of it.
it was a reaction by labour activists trying to generate an actual movement.
what do i think about this today?
well, i'm not sure there are posts about this here, but i have mentioned repeatedly that my moderate embrace of decadence is mostly a function of a lack of activity on the ground. yes, i see the race riots; that's not useful to me. the people are useful, but the messaging needs dramatic altering before the movement becomes revolutionary. i need something class based, that's focused on more important concerns, like climate change and ... . if i show up at the anti-nuclear protest, and it's three white guys smoking a joint and listening to marley, i'd might as well hit the show and have a beer, instead - i'm not getting anywhere when there's no interest on the ground.
if i saw a movement develop, i'd be the first to put the beer down and get to work in building it. right now, it's not there. so, what's the point?
i hope that helps a little in understanding what that was about.
here's some tunes:
1979:
1980:
1981:
1984:
1985:
1986: