15 years from when I was first kicked in the head by it, what am I to make of all the righteous fury of Minor Threat? The most immediate aspect of the album at this stage of my life (30’s, kids, general cynicism) is its youthfulness, its bright-eyed belief in a personal code of conduct as a means for social change, as though by maintaining one’s conscious facilities, avoiding drugs, alcohol, etc. one could rise above the commercialized morass that we all seem to be trapped in and that shapes us in ways far more insidious than most of us would be willing to admit. “Well,” I think as I grin and bob my head to the impetuous indignation of Filler, “don’t I carry that belief with me in some sense, even today?” Maybe this band has had a deeper influence than I’d have at first thought. But anyone who’s had a beer knocked out of their hand at a hardcore show by some meathead with X tattoos will see the fallout of the posturing militancy engendered by the straight-edge movement, regardless of the ire such an action would doubtless inspire in its so-called founder. Straight Edge very protestant somehow, in outlook, execution and ultimate fallout, in spite of Mackaye’s explicit stance against organized religion. Perhaps its unsurprising, given the Mackaye brothers’ Episcopalian roots, that the fruit borne by Ian’s new ethos should be closer to what he was trying to get away from than he intended. But also, perhaps Mackaye’s failure to create a community free from the factionalism and chauvinism of any other social group speaks less to Mackaye’s personal philosophy than to the nature of ideology and factions.
So then, questions of social movements, religions, moral norms and the philosophical kernels contained in the idea that spilling a dude’s beer and ruining his evening is the morally upright and desirable thing to do start swirling and I begin to forget that this album is more than just a documentation of a certain mindset, it’s a brash, vital, youthful expression
of that mindset, that these furious blasts of bouncing, melodic, unembellished sloganeering embody that idea that Mackaye was trying to live up to. So, if we look at it as such, as a piece of art reflective of a certain spirit, it’s absolutely vital, for its sincerity if nothing else. Each furious, 4 chord riff, shouted rallying cry, pounding, straightforward punk beat manifests that philosophy, an expression of a devastatingly simple ethos, expressed, by necessity, as elementally and earnestly as possible. Its very simplicity could only be a product of its youthfulness, and it would be easy, with the calcified cynicism of age and experience, to sneer at the naivety of the central conceit of straight edge and punk rock as a concept, but when I watch those grainy videos of a basement show in which Mackaye leads the crowd in a belted out rendition of “Happy Birthday” for the benefit of an audience member, I remember my own time in the punk scene, that sense of hope that there could be a little world, a subculture, a community free from the pull and sway of a society in which we exist merely as profit generators and media consumers. It’s a sense of hope that I’m ultimately grateful for, and a sense of hope that has continued throughout my life, first in the church, then in the punk scene and the commune, and then back in the church, and although all have at various points disappointed in some way, it’s a hope that has become constitutive of who I am. And for that, I’ll always be grateful, at least in part, to Mackaye and company.
