“Out of Step with the World”: The Construction of Cultural Boundaries in the Early Years of Straight Edge, 1979–1983 *thesis introduction*

Sternly scanning the crowd and shaking his head in contempt, professional wrestler CM Punk points his finger and scolds the audience: “I tried. I tried so very hard to empathize with all of your weaknesses.”[1] “I implored every single one of you,” he continues, “to just say no.”[2] Filmed in anticipation of Punk’s battle against Jeff Hardy for the world heavyweight championship, this 2009 promo establishes Punk as the match’s “heel.” Heels are the villains of professional wrestling — characters designed to provoke the crowd’s contempt.[3] CM Punk relentlessly berates the audience, and the more he speaks, the louder the crowd boos: “The reality is, none of you have the strength to be straight edge.”[4]

CM Punk’s straight edge identity defined his persona as a professional wrestler; he rose to fame branded as “The Straight Edge Superstar.”[5] Straight edge has come to mean many different things to many different people, but sociologist Ross Haenfler gives us a starting point for understanding the movement with his definition of straight edge as a “clean living” movement in which members reject alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drugs.[6] In many cases, straight-edgers also abstain from casual sex, avoid caffeine, and advocate for animal rights. Some even reject prescription pills. Claiming straight edge identity requires a lifetime commitment, and just taking one sip of alcohol is considered “breaking edge” — a betrayal of the straight edge community. Straight edge originally emerged out of the hardcore punk culture of the early 1980s, and some straight edge adherents maintain that connecting with punk is a prerequisite for claiming straight edge identity. In a video called “How To Be Straight Edge” published by STRAIGHTEDGEWORLDWIDE, an online hub of the international straight edge community, the narrator places punk at the center of straight edge identity: “Plenty of people can be sober, but only a punk can be straight edge.”[7]

In her book Professional Wrestling: Sports and Spectacle, Sharon Mazer observes that academic studies of professional wrestling across a range of different theoretical orientations all analyze the performance of wrestling as an allegory for social dynamics existing beyond the ring. Some studies interpret professional wrestling as a form of theater, and others examine it as a ritual of contemporary folk culture, but virtually all studies of professional wrestling conceptualize the performance as a reflection of the public’s “desire for a nonambiguous moral order where virtue may not always prevail, but it is easily recognizable and always worth cheering.”[8] In CM Punk’s promo, the wrestler uses his straight edge identity to define this moral order, and designate himself as the match’s “bad guy.”

CM Punk’s straight edge shtick made him famous for antagonizing audiences. The WWE even includes CM Punk in their list of “Top 50 villains in wrestling history.”[9] CM Punk’s overblown performance of straight edge may exaggerate the ideology to absurdity,[10] but it also dramatizes the way that straight edge culture worked to distinguish itself from mainstream culture throughout the 1980s, raising important questions about the straight edge movement. How did straight edge become such a culturally resonant image? What are the values behind straight edge’s absolutist commitment to sobriety? As a movement that spurns drug use and originated in the early 1980s, how does straight edge relate to the war on drugs and efforts like Nancy Regan’s “Just Say No” campaign? How is CM Punk able to paint himself as an intimidating villain while parroting the same values that programs like D.A.R.E. brought into middle school classrooms in the mid-1980s?[11] Why is the straight edge ideology so effective in alienating CM Punk from his audience, and how does straight edge understand itself in relation to broader society?

Overview of Straight Edge History

CM Punk’s performance of straight edge identity largely draws from a cultural image of the violent hyper-masculine straight edge enforcer that emerged out of sensationalist media coverage of the movement in the late 1990s.[12] According to Sociologist Robert T. Wood, most Americans remained completely oblivious to straight edge culture until this point, when a string of violent acts committed in the name of straight edge brought the movement mass media attention.[13] These acts were primarily perpetrated by an extremist faction of the straight edge movement identified as “hardline.” Hardline straight edgers endorse vandalizing bar-goers’ vehicles in order to eliminate any risk of drunk driving, fighting drinkers and drug users who attend straight edge shows, and breaking into private establishments to free captive animals.[14] Chronicling the aftermath of a hardline straight edge raid on a mink farm and a related bombing of a fur breeders’ cooperative in 1998, a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times writes, “What’s Straight Edge? That’s what everyone in Utah wants to know as federal agents and state and local police chase its local followers from one fur farm raid, arson or bloody melee to another.”[15] These incidents and others like them earned straight edge official registration as a gang in some particularly active hardline areas, including Salt Lake City, Utah, and Reno, Nevada.[16] Hardline straight edgers were featured on a 1997 Fox News segment, a 1997 episode of Rolanda,[17] and a 1999 ABC News 20/20 investigation, helping this extremist image of straight edge to eclipse the movement’s association with the hardcore punk bands of the early 1980s in the national imagination.[18] A 2008 National Geographic television special that focused on militant straight edge hardliners in Boston and in the suburbs of Nevada worked to solidify this understanding of straight edge and keep the image alive ten years after the initial media hysteria around hardline.[19]

Though CM Punk’s demeanor primarily reflects this militant moment in straight edge history, his use of straight edge iconography — especially the thick black Xs on the back of his hands — traces a direct line of influence back to the earliest days of straight edge. Straight edge was born out of the Washington D.C. hardcore punk scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Ian MacKaye, front-person of the seminal D.C. hardcore band Minor Threat, is often identified as the “founder” and “spiritual father” of the movement.[20] MacKaye’s early band The Teen Idles popularized the black X as a prideful symbol of youth and sobriety, and the Minor Threat song “Straight Edge” coined the term that gave the movement its name.[21] In addition to jumpstarting straight edge culture, Minor Threat is considered one of the definitive hardcore punk bands. Hardcore punk emerged in the early 1980s, drawing stylistically from the punk rock of the mid- to late-1970s.[22] With the rise of underground music and DIY touring, hardcore punk bands pollinated the nation, spreading their sound, and the straight edge ideology along with it. Though straight edge bands admired the stylistic innovations of the generation of punks that preceded them, the straight edgers resented punk rock’s culture of excess and idolization of sex and drugs. Bands like SS Decontrol[23] and DYS from Boston were some of the first self-identified straight edge groups. They embraced a more “strict” and “militant” brand of straight edge, actively working to push the ideology onto others, a step further than Minor Threat was willing to take their beliefs.[24] Beth Lahickey groups Minor Threat, DYS, and SSD together as the first wave of straight edge. The second wave of straight edge, commonly referred to as “youth crew,” took the Boston scene’s militant posturing a step further, adding an element of “policing.” [25] This cohort included bands like Youth of Today, Gorilla Biscuits, and Bold.[26] Third wave straight edge bands like Earth Crisis and hardline straight edge factions took this kind of ideological and behavioral policing to an even greater extreme, often endorsing violence. CM Punk’s performance of straight edge identity largely reflects the radical and violent straight edgers that drew significant media attention in the late 1990s, but it also highlights some of the ways that straight edgers worked distinguish themselves from the mainstream since the movement’s inception.

Scholarship on Straight Edge

Ross Haenfler’s 2006 book Straight Edge: Hardcore Punk, Clean Living Youth, and Social Change includes a helpful breakdown of the history of subculture studies, orienting the reader to the field and offering some important terms and definitions. Subcultural studies originally emerged to challenge psychological explanations of juvenile delinquency, which understood illegal and socially transgressive behavior to be rooted in individuals’ personal failings. Early subcultural theorists who came to be identified as the Chicago School instead proposed that subcultures respond to social problems: “Subcultures are not necessarily groups of ‘bad kids’…They emerge in resistance to dominant culture, challenging blocked economic opportunities, lack of social mobility, alienation, adult authority, and the banality of suburban life.”[27]

In the 1960s, scholars at The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham reexamined the structure of subcultures in an effort to explain the rise of groups like the Teddy Boys, Skinheads, Mods, and Rockers in post-World War II Britain.[28] These thinkers focused on subcultures’ symbolic demonstrations of resistance to mainstream society through styles, music, and rituals.[29] According to the Birmingham School, “Subcultures [infuse] everything with meaning,” and a given subculture’s actions and stylistic conventions can be analyzed to gain insight into that culture’s objection to and rebellion against “hegemonic society.”[30] Dick Hebdige’s influential 1979 book Subculture: The Meaning of Style argues that members of a given subculture observe and react to contradictions between the values and norms of mainstream society and their own lived experience by externalizing this tension and leveraging stylistic and cultural choices as symbols of resistance.[31]

In his book, Straight Edge Youth: Complexity and Contradictions of a Subculture, Robert T. Wood draws from the work of subcultural theorist David Matza. Matza’s scholarship focuses on connections between subcultures and the hegemonic cultures they exist within. Critical of the way that previous theories of subculture exaggerate the separation between “deviant” and “conventional” cultures, Matza points out that subcultures necessarily exist within the context of mainstream societies, and therefore “cannot be entirely isolated or autonomous.” [32] Throughout his study of straight edge, Robert T. Wood repeatedly returns to Matza’s idea that subcultures are constantly “encircled and permeated by conventional cultural agents,” which lend these subcultures “latent cultural support.”[33] Working from Matza’s acknowledgement of inherent connections between subcultures and the cultures that surround them, Wood argues that the “cultural boundaries” of straight edge are constructed “in relation to external cultural agents and environments.”[34]

Wood also emphasizes Fine and Kleinman’s interactionist theory of subculture. This framework rejects the possibility of a “stable” and “coherent” subculture, instead arguing that youth culture is fundamentally “fluid” and “heterogeneous.”[35] This variability is a result of “the fact that [subcultures] are composed of human beings, all of whom perceive and experience the social world in subjectively different ways.”[36] Fine and Kleinman reason that subcultures continually negotiate subcultural meaning in order to produce socially constructed realities.[37] This means that subcultures’ norms and values are always changing, and that these conventions are actively created and constantly modified. More recent approaches to understanding subcultures, including club culture, post-subculture, neo-tribal, and scene theories question subcultures’ ability to provide any sort of meaningful resistance to mainstream society.[38]

Within the confines of this history of subcultural studies and the vocabulary that has been developed through it, Ross Haenfler wrestles with the question of how to classify straight edge. Haenfler maintains that straight edge fits neatly within traditional definitions of subculture and, more specifically, youth subculture. Straight edge is a social subgroup that is defined through its values, norms, culture, and rituals, and it therefore qualifies as a subculture.[39] Youth is an important theme running through hardcore punk culture broadly, and straight edge culture specifically. Citing bands like Youth of Today, Youth Brigade, and the Adolescents to name just a few, Gerfried Ambrosch observes that many hardcore punk band names reference youth. The two bands that this thesis focuses on, The Teen Idles and Minor Threat, both pun on ideas of youth in their band names, and emphasize youthful themes in their music. Boston’s SS Decontrol is one of the first straight edge groups who worked to spread the ideology and foster an explicitly straight edge scene, and their influential 1982 debut album is titled The Kids Will Have Their Say. These products of hardcore and straight edge culture suggest that the cultures are preoccupied with the idea of youth. Additionally, hardcore punk and straight edge were created by young people, and the straight edge community continues to be primarily populated by young people. About twenty-five years after the birth of straight edge, sociologists J. Patrick Williams and Heith Copes observed that the founding generation of straight edge had aged, but straight edge still primarily existed as a youth culture, with most members falling between thirteen and twenty-five years of age.[40] As a collective of young people that shares a relatively consistent set of values, norms, culture, and rituals, straight edge can be defined as a youth subculture.

More uncertain, however, is the question of whether or not straight edge should be classified as a social movement. Traditionally, social movements are understood to be more formally organized and more politically oriented than subcultures. Social movements operate through clearly defined structures, and pursue a specific political goal.[41] By this definition, straight edge cannot be called a social movement. Straight edge is a diffuse collective with no formal system of membership or centralized organization.[42] Haenfler argues, however, that subcultures and social movements both have the potential to effect meaningful change, writing, “Non-structured, culture-based social movements may ultimately mount equally significant social challenges as do more formal, organized bureaucratic movements.” [43] Observing that straight edge operates both through a defined ideology, and through cultural tools of resistance, Haenfler suggests that straight edge “[straddles] the conceptual boundary between subculture and movement.”[44] Based on this argument, Haenfler labels straight edge as a “new social movement.”[45]

I will not work from the traditional definitions of social movements and subcultures, and I do not plan to use the term “new social movement.” I worry that these kinds of definitions draw arbitrary lines between political challenges and extra-institutional resistance. It seems to me that focusing on the task of classification risks ignoring some of the subtleties of straight edge culture that could be better discussed by considering straight edge in its specific cultural context. I would rather focus on the specific forces that shaped the rise of straight edge than on trying to figure out how to group it with other collectives that emerged from different historical moments. I will work from a statement Haenfler makes that acknowledges the variability of different social movements and leaves more room to consider straight edge’s nuances:

In fact, the structural composition of social movements forms a continuum, with one extreme being fully bureaucratized, formal social movement organizations and the other being very diffuse movements devoid of any formal structure. The former tends to focus on institutional and political change while the latter emphasizes cultural and lifestyle-based change. Both qualify as movements in the sense they are collective preferences for social change.[46]

Based on this argument, I will refer to straight edge both as a subculture and as a social movement. I understand straight edge as a social group that shapes its boundaries according to certain values, norms, styles, and rituals. With a membership that is united by cultural tastes and by an ideology that is driven by a vision of social change, straight edge qualifies both as a youth subculture and a social movement.

Why study straight edge?

Some scholars dismiss straight edge as a failed movement. They argue that straight edge had minimal lasting musical, cultural, or political impact, and ultimately amounted to little more than a cheap excuse for self-righteous tough guys to vent aggression. In his article, “Straight, Narrow and Dull: The Failure of Protest in Straight Edge Rock ’n’ Roll,” Steve Hamelman condemns straight edge’s anti-drug “chest-beating” as definitively un-punk.[47] He goes as far as to say that straight edge “[falls] on its face as protest music,” and that “the subgenre simply doesn’t matter.”[48] He writes, “After all the raging and fighting and ranting and browbeating, perhaps the cruelest irony about straight edge is that its efforts may be in vain.”[49] In Hamelman’s eyes, straight edge’s impact on the music that came after and the social realities of its time was not notable enough to warrant our time and attention.

Though I disagree with Hamelman’s assessment of straight edge’s influence and I am personally more persuaded by Ross Haenfler’s awe at the growth of the movement,[50] I do not think it’s important to make this kind of value judgement regarding straight edge’s legacy. Even if it were true that straight edge had no impact beyond the early 1980s and failed to accomplish its cultural goals, I would argue that straight edge’s “effect of mobilizing a latent sentiment shared by a critical mass in the American punk subculture” of the early 1980s, inspiring a community of people to adopt a sense of collective identity and base lifestyles choices around that identity, is reason enough to take straight edge culture and its history seriously.[51] Even if Hamelman is right to say that straight edge’s “ranting and browbeating” was “in vain,” that doesn’t mean that this ranting and browbeating can’t give us insight into the nature of punk rebellion and the way that subcultures interact with broader social structures.

Straight edge has received comparatively little scholarly attention. Most of the academic research on the subculture focuses on describing its general beliefs, classifying it sociologically, or attempting to judge its success as a social movement. These studies tend to paint with overly broad brush strokes, generalizing a belief system that is the subject of heated debate within the community. They seem to overlook that straight edge contains a wealth of ideological and cultural contradictions, has evolved meaningfully over time, and may even be heterogeneous at any one moment. Past studies also rarely spend enough time discussing the music that serves, and always has served, as the straight edge ideology’s primary cultural vehicle.[52] With this thesis, I aim to contextualize the rise of straight edge, paying close attention to the cultural forces that shaped the way the ideology spread. Much of the existing writing about straight edge fails to acknowledge that aspects of the culture were already in place before it received a name in 1981. Recognizing that Minor Threat’s song “Straight Edge” did not create straight edge culture, but instead articulated its values in a way that gave it form and helped it spread, I will consider The Teen Idles’ music, which outlines the values of a sober community as it was beginning to evolve into a more defined culture.

Thesis Overview

Focusing on a subculture’s early years as a time when its values and tastes are particularly flexible and constantly negotiated and modified, this thesis considers the way that straight edge operated within mainstream culture in the years between the formation of the Teen Idles and the final breakup of Minor Threat (1979–1983). My first chapter investigates the history and music of The Teen Idles. The Teen Idles were Ian MacKaye’s first consistent band, and their work traces some of the values and perspectives that would become important to the definition and spread of straight edge culture. My second chapter discusses the history and music of Minor Threat, the first band in which Ian MacKaye had broad creative control. Minor Threat encapsulated the sound of hardcore punk, and their song “Straight Edge” coined the term that gave shape to an existing sober community, facilitating a social movement that continues to inspire new adherents today.

Taking straight edge as a case study and tracing the history of its origin, I hope to gain insight into the way that youth subcultures understand themselves in relation to mainstream society. I will argue that straight edge’s efforts to distinguish itself from both mainstream culture and dominant punk rock culture highlight the way that subcultures play an active role in shaping the image of mainstream society that they rebel against. Straight edgers understood themselves to be “punker than punk,” and they proclaimed sobriety to be the true embodiment of punk’s rebellious anti-establishment spirit. They first articulated this social critique, however, in the early 1980s, a time when the government was ramping up the War on Drugs and leaning into anti-drug rhetoric. This forced straight edge into an uncomfortable contradiction. How could straight edge claim to be the ultimate anti-establishment subculture at the same time that the political establishment was dedicating itself to some of straight edge’s core values? In trying to distance itself from mainstream culture, straight edge redefines the dichotomy of mainstream and punk along a new plane, constructing an image of the mainstream that is conducive to their rebellion against it. This idea challenges common narratives of punk history and sociological theories that understand youth subcultures as primarily reactionary forces. My research suggests that in addition to reacting to external cultural agents, subcultures can also actively work to shape the boundaries of the “mainstream.”

[1] Logan, CM Punk — Straight Edge Speech, 0:07–0:21.

[2] Logan, 0:22–0:28.

[3] Anka, “A History of Heels in Wrestling and Beyond”; Wong, “The Secret Language of Pro Wrestling, Decoded.”

[4] Logan, CM Punk — Straight Edge Speech, 1:38–1:45.

[5] “CM Punk: Bio.”

[6] Haenfler, Straight Edge: Hardcore Punk, Clean Living Youth, and Social Change, 36.

[7] STRAIGHTEDGEWORLDWIDE Media, How To Be Straight Edge, 0:45–0:48.

[8] Mazer, Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle, 8.

[9] “Top 50 Villains in Wrestling History.”

[10] He goes on to attack anybody who has ever tried marijuana, exclaiming, “The vast majority of everybody here in this arena is a criminal.” He rails against prescription pills, and saves “the best poison for last,” taking a comically extreme stance on alcohol: “In my book, if you even take one drink, you’re an alcoholic.”

[11] “The History of D.A.R.E.”

[12] Kuhn, Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge, and Radical Politics, 39.

[13] Wood, Straightedge Youth: Complexity and Contradictions of a Subculture, 11.

[14] Foster, “Don’t Smoke, Don’t Drink, Don’t Fuck,” 100–101.

[15] Sahagun, “The Twisted World of a ‘Straight Edge’ Gang.”

[16] Sahagun.

[17] Rolanda was a talk show hosted by Rolanda Watts from 1994 to 1997 that often pitted guests against each other and allowed audience members to ask questions and comment on the guests’ conflict. This episode featured a group of hardline straight edgers opposite a group who they dismiss as “sell-outs,” former straight edgers who grew disenchanted with the movement and abandoned the title.

[18] Salt Lake City Straight Edge Fox News 97 №2; Straight Edge On Fox News; M., Straight Edge on Rolanda TV Show; Foster, “Don’t Smoke, Don’t Drink, Don’t Fuck,” 102.

[19] Smith, Inside Straight Edge (NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC).

[20] Irwin, “The Straight Edge Subculture,” 366; Ambrosch, The Poetry of Punk: The Meaning Behind Punk Rock and Hardcore Lyrics, 148.

[21] As I will discuss more later in this paper, Ian MacKaye understands straight edge as a proclamation of personal values, and disproves of the concept of a straight edge movement. In a telephone conversation, MacKaye told me that at 57 years old, he has still never tried drugs or alcohol, but he does not identify as straight edge.

[22] Throughout my thesis, I will refer to the genre of punk originating in the mid-1970s that was defined by bands like the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, and the Clash as “punk” and “punk rock.” I will refer to the genre of punk originating in the late 1970s and in the early 1980s that was defined by bands like Bad Brains, Black Flag, and Minor Threat as “hardcore” and “hardcore punk.” This follows the way that the two genres are commonly identified, though I understand that the labels can be hard to distinguish.

[23] SS Decontrol is also sometimes referred to as SSD or Society System Decontrol.

[24] Flipside, “Minor Threat”; Kuhn, Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge, and Radical Politics, 37.

[25] Kuhn, Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge, and Radical Politics, 37.

[26] Kuhn, 37.

[27] Haenfler, Straight Edge: Hardcore Punk, Clean Living Youth, and Social Change, 33.

[28] Haenfler, “What Is a Subculture?”

[29] Wood, Straightedge Youth: Complexity and Contradictions of a Subculture, 19.

[30] Haenfler, Straight Edge: Hardcore Punk, Clean Living Youth, and Social Change, 33.

[31] Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style; Wood, Straightedge Youth: Complexity and Contradictions of a Subculture, 93. Hebdige’s book was originally published by Methuen and Co. Ltd in 1979, and later reprinted by Routledge in 1988. Summarizing Hebdige’s commentary on the punk culture of the mid- to late-1970s, Wood writes that the subculture’s style “embodied the conflict between the ideal of consumerism and the reality of rising unemployment and economic austerity among British youth.” The menacing and grotesque aesthetics of punk music and fashion, as well as the subculture’s inclination toward nihilism represented “something of a dramatization of this conflicting state of affairs.”

[32] Wood, Straightedge Youth: Complexity and Contradictions of a Subculture, 16.

[33] Wood, 16.

[34] Wood, 93.

[35] Haenfler, Straight Edge: Hardcore Punk, Clean Living Youth, and Social Change, 34.

[36] Wood, Straightedge Youth: Complexity and Contradictions of a Subculture, 20.

[37] Wood, 20.

[38] Haenfler, Straight Edge: Hardcore Punk, Clean Living Youth, and Social Change, 34.

[39] Haenfler, 33. In this context, the word “ritual” means a repeated activity that is connected to one’s membership in a subculture. For straight edge, attending hardcore punk shows is one of the most important communal rituals.

[40] Williams and Copes, ““How Edge Are You?,” 69–70.

[41] Haenfler, Straight Edge: Hardcore Punk, Clean Living Youth, and Social Change, 60.

[42] Haenfler, 63.

[43] Haenfler, 60.

[44] Haenfler, 60.

[45] Haenfler, 60.

[46] Haenfler, 62.

[47] Hamelman, “Straight, Narrow and Dull: The Failure of Protest in Straight Edge Rock ’n’ Roll,” 203.

[48] Hamelman, 192, 202.

[49] Hamelman, 203.

[50] Haenfler, Straight Edge: Hardcore Punk, Clean Living Youth, and Social Change, 188. Haenfler writes, “I don’t think any of the original DC sXe kids could have imagined what sXe would eventually become, or even that it would still be around twenty-five years after its modest beginnings. Tens of thousands of kids from countries around the world have passed through the sXe ranks, assuring the movement’s place in the history of youth subcultures.”

[51] Wood, Straightedge Youth: Complexity and Contradictions of a Subculture, 8.

[52] Haenfler, Straight Edge: Hardcore Punk, Clean Living Youth, and Social Change, 9.