“Take your time/ Try not to forget/ We never will/ We’re just a minor threat…”
Minor Threat is the first band I listened to in my foray into punk and hardcore, after thoroughly plumbing Dead Kennedys. While I enjoyed DKs’ more surf-tinged sound and smarter lyrics, there’s something about Minor Threat’s music that appealed to me on a lizard brain level – and still does, for the most part. Listening to the first slate of their songs, you can hear this kind of tidal push and pull between moments of relative quiet and explosive activity. This tidal motion is probably most noticeable on songs like “In My Eyes” and “Bottled Violence.” Some songs are more “pure hardcore fury” than others, but there’s not a moment on the first two EPs in Minor Threat’s discography that really takes a break, aside from one of the two covers the band did, “Stepping Stone.” Even on that song, Ian MacKaye yells and screams his way through the Monkees lyrics.
While Teen Idles wrote the first straight-edge song, “I Drink Milk,” straight-edge itself wouldn’t be given a proper identity until Minor Threat. The song “Straight Edge” sits at the end of side A of the “Minor Threat” EP and establishes the straight-edge ethos in just 46 seconds, with 16 lines of verse and five screamed chorus lines:
I’m a person just like you
But I’ve got better things to do
Than sit around and fuck my head
Hang out with the living dead
Snort white shit up my nose
Pass out at the shows
I don’t even think about speed
That’s something I just don’t need
.
I’ve got the straight edge
.
I’m a person just like you
But I’ve got better things to do
Than sit around and smoke dope
‘Cause I know that I can cope
Laugh at the thought of eating ‘ludes
Laugh at the thought of sniffing glue
Always gonna keep in touch
Never want to use a crutch
.
I’ve got the straight edge
I’ve got the straight edge
I’ve got the straight edge
I’ve got the straight edge
Does the song read like a goofy “DARE to say no to drugs” campaign? Maybe. But people – fans and haters alike – took the band at their word. Whether they were just some snooty prudes trying to bring youth group energy to an otherwise anarchic and freewheeling punk scene or genuinely trying to present an alternative to what they saw as a situation that was ruining their friends’ lives, Minor Threat inadvertently set the tone for hardcore over the next 30 years or so. You can trace a direct line from them to hardcore movements like Youth Crew, XVX (vegan edge), Hardline, Krishna Consciousness, and eventually (unfortunately) the nazi-infused “Hate Edge.”
I don’t think Minor Threat or Ian MacKaye individually could see the impact their music would have on people, given the fact that they were part of a larger and more dynamic scene including State of Alert, Government Issue, Bad Brains, The Faith (which featured MacKaye’s brother, Alec, on vocals) and Youth Brigade. For the most part, it’s an understandable position for a 19-year-old in the early 1980s to take. But I think this same provincial ignorance kept the band from seeing the knock-on effects of their most, uh, _controversial_song: “Guilty of Being White.”
To say MacKaye or the rest of the band didn’t really have a good understanding of racism as a structural thing would be an understatement. MacKaye’s justification1 – even years later – for writing the song was that he did so from the position of a white minority high school student in a Black-majority city and school system, something which rings hollow given the full text of the song’s lyrics and the closeness with which they align with white supremacist talking points.
I’m sorry
For something that I didn’t do
Lynched somebody
But I don’t know who
You blame me for slavery
A hundred years before I was born
.
Guilty of being white
Guilty of being white
Guilty of being white
Guilty of being white
.
Oh, I’m sorry
For something that I didn’t do
Lynched somebody
But I don’t know who
You blame me for slavery
A hundred years before I was born
.
Guilty of being white
Guilty of being white
Guilty of being white
Guilty of being white
.
I’m a convict (Guilty!)
Of a racist crime (Guilty!)
I’ve only served (Guilty!)
Nineteen years of my time
I mean, these are pretty bad regardless of the context or intent, right? What makes it worse is that MacKaye waffled back and forth between justifying his lyrics and claiming that he couldn’t know that his music would make it into the hands of nazi fucks elsewhere. By 1981, punk was just starting to build its international distro networks; this was an intentional construction with the explicit goal of spreading punk as far and wide as possible. Hindsight might be 20/20 but it still feels exceptionally wild to hear someone go “well I thought nobody else would listen outside of my tiny context” and probably mean it. There are other examples of MacKaye and Minor Threat writing dumb lyrics as dumb teens, but these take the crown for the worst.
This isn’t to cancel MacKaye; the song is the song and it has its own legacy, and as far as it goes MacKaye’s subsequent work I think stands well enough on its own. But this couldn’t be ignored, especially since straight-edge itself ended up evolving into more than one explicitly reactionary offshoot of itself.
Minor Threat’s first two EPs are, for better or worse, establishing works in the larger punk canon, but they’re by no means (jfc) the band’s best work. In the next post: the Out of Step LP and the coming sonic [r]evolution [summer].
- “I stand by all my lyrics,” MacKaye said in an interview well over a decade ago. “But I know that when I wrote ‘Guilty of Being White’ I grew up in Washington, D.C., which is a Black-majority city, and I went to the public schools here, and I know that when I wrote that song, I was writing an antiracist song, because I was singing a song about being a minority. In my junior high school, I was one of 10% white kids. In my senior high school I was one of 25% white kids. And I know when I wrote that song I was saying, ‘I’m only guilty of being white. Don’t judge me for the color of my skin.’ It’s antiracist, so clear. How could I know that some, like, nationalist Nazi guy in Poland would listen to that song fifteen years later and then say to me, like ‘It is so good you speak for the white man.’ How could I know?“