As we near the end of Women's History Month, we're doing things a little differently with today's Echoes.
As we near the end of Women's History Month, we're doing things a little differently with today's Echoes.
Though it was a massively polarizing movement, you can’t say straight edge didn’t have a lasting impact. It’s one of a handful of rock genres that’s distinguished solely by extra-musical criteria (see also: riot grrrl, queercore, Christian rock)—any given straight edge band sounds like any other hardcore music of its era, but it was set apart by an *ethos* expressed in the lyrics and lifestyle choices of its practitioners rather than any discernible musical difference, and you hardly needed to be an initiate to know what that ethos was: avoidance of drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, and sex. Brought into existence by and named for a song by Minor Threat—literally a 45 second laundry list of behaviors of which that band’s vocalist Ian MacKaye disapproved—the straight edge movement blew up in the early- and mid-‘80s, and depending on where you stood, either offered an exemplar and support system for clean living to hard luck kids who may otherwise have been lost to substance abuse, or offered a gang-like milieu from which holier-than-thou meathead boys could violently act out against people who weren’t like them. Obviously, Minor Threat never intended to spark an...
