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Straight edge movement
Ever heard about this cultural facit supposedly becoming apart of many youths these days? (From the article below:)
"Straight edge, straightedge, or straight-edge - also known as XXX or sXe - is an obscure youth movement that combines abstinence from drugs, alcohol and cigarettes with hard-core punk rock. Straight-edgers might look countercultural, but their values mirror those of a more uptight mainstream. It's The Terminator meets Miss Manners.
Straight edge grew out of the punk-rock era of the mid-1980s. It's on the upswing again thanks to Gen Y'ers, who are turning to abstinence in response to their hyper-sexualized and drug-addled world. Many are college students like Matt Cryan, a West Paterson resident who became straight edge in high school after witnessing the excesses around him."
You can't always judge a punk by his cover
QUOTE:
Sunday, February 6, 2005
By CANDY J. COOPER
STAFF WRITER
If all the history and strangeness of an underground youth culture could be captured in one man, Rick Healey might be the guy.
Lunging half-naked on the stage of a Montclair cafe, he bellows his songs as if possessed. His dreadlocks swing down a torso marbled in tattoos. His band is loud enough to rattle teeth.
But while Healey plays with gusto to his teenage fans, his outer scariness belies an inner sweetie pie. Tough-guy body, church-lady soul, Healey combines the yin and yang of a movement known as "straight edge."
"I don't do drugs. I don't drink. I don't smoke. I'm not sleeping around," says the 34-year-old Healey, who grew up in Paterson and now travels the world playing in clubs from Pittsburgh to Paris to Argentina and Japan.
Straight edge, straightedge, or straight-edge - also known as XXX or sXe - is an obscure youth movement that combines abstinence from drugs, alcohol and cigarettes with hard-core punk rock. Straight-edgers might look countercultural, but their values mirror those of a more uptight mainstream. It's The Terminator meets Miss Manners.
Straight edge grew out of the punk-rock era of the mid-1980s. It's on the upswing again thanks to Gen Y'ers, who are turning to abstinence in response to their hyper-sexualized and drug-addled world. Many are college students like Matt Cryan, a West Paterson resident who became straight edge in high school after witnessing the excesses around him.
"I'd always see stuff around," he says. "People who had problems and my parents smoked cigarettes. I always thought it was disgusting and wondered why they did it. I decided I didn't need it."
Followers share a disdain for drugs and drink and a love of music that sounds to the uninitiated like guitar chords mixed with the screech and crunch of a bus crash. They shun tobacco and promiscuous sex. Beyond that, they are a varied lot. Some are peacenik vegans. Others are environmentalists, Christian, gay or some combination therein. And then there are a handful of militants who have attacked fraternity boys drinking beer.
In Europe a few months back, a follower tried to fight Healey because he'd heard gossip that the singer had been drinking at a show. "I'm straight for myself, not to win anybody's approval," Healey says. "But a lot of kids use straight edge as a violent thing."
It's unclear how many straight-edgers there are, but numerous Web sites promote the scene - in Croatia, Stockholm, Salt Lake City and Syracuse. In New Jersey, straight-edge bands play at Connections in Passaic, the Starland Ballroom in Sayreville, the Hamilton Street Cafe in Bound Brook and the Cricket Club in Irvington, as well as in garages from Garfield to Wayne.
"Jersey's got one of the biggest, most active scenes in the country," says Alex Franklin, a local tattoo artist who's been living on the straight edge since the 1980s. "I've watched it go from pockets of kids on the East Coast to blowing up nationwide and eventually internationally. It's an American cultural phenomenon."
And it comes with its own souvenirs. Healey's hard-core band, "25 Ta Life," offers straight-edge T-shirts and other products with messages such as "Kill Your Local Drug Dealer" and "Friendship, Loyalty, Commitment."
'Walking billboard'
At a Little Falls diner on a recent Friday night, Jason Klein shows off his extensive tattoos, which hew to an animal-rights theme - one is of animals in a slaughterhouse.
"I love being a walking billboard for my beliefs," says the Wallington resident, who works for an engineering firm. He is wearing vegan shoes - made without leather - and a black hat that shouts "Vegan Supremacy."
Klein orders a Coke without ice. He accepts caffeine but avoids artificial sweeteners, and there is not much on the menu he can eat. After 11 years on the straight edge, Klein is militant when it comes to those who "break edge," people who profess abstinence one day and have a cocktail the next.
"To me they're dead," says Klein, 31. "I don't talk to them anymore. It's something I'm really hard-core into and when someone is really into being straight edge and then the next day they have a beer, it makes what I do have less value."
Several years ago, Klein protested at a New Jersey concert because the lead singer had dropped his straight-edge beliefs - this after profiting as a straight-edge band. Klein stood in front of the stage during the concert with signs that said "I Hope You Overdose And Die" and "Hope Your Fans Turn Their Backs On You Like You Did The Animals."
"The bass player tried to kick the sign away," he says. It ended in a brawl.
Patrick Sheridan is similarly forceful, so much so that he's planning a straight-edge wedding to a straight-edge college student. "I would leave my fiancée if she sold out," he says. "She would do the same."
A husky 30-year-old body piercer from Weehawken who has the word "drug" tattooed on one wrist and "free" on the other, Sheridan not only doesn't drink or do drugs, he even avoids aspirin, chicken Marsala and rum cake.
"I'm against anything mind-altering or out-of-control with the body," says Sheridan, who plays guitar in a hard-core band, "Nothing Left To Mourn" - straight edge except for the tobacco-using drummer.
Across from him, Franklin orders a cheeseburger and explains how he has recently become a born-again Christian. The religious faction of the straight-edge movement is surging, he says, noting clubs in Pennsylvania where swearing has been banned.
Matt Cryan appears at the table with his girlfriend. The two college students wear no visible tattoos, no straight-edge clothing, and it is hard to imagine either wielding a sign or throwing a punch. They are the plainer vanilla version, the younger version, of the movement. Sara Rogers and Cryan are part of burgeoning straight-edge crowds on their respective campuses at Rutgers and Montclair State universities.
Rogers likes the music at straight-edge clubs, where she met Cryan. But it's the message of abstinence from drinking, drugs and one-night stands that has kept her true to the cause.
"Every other male member of my family pretty much" has had problems with alcohol, she says. A cousin died of a drug overdose. "I just wouldn't want that to happen with my life," she says.
The two don't flaunt their beliefs.
"If somebody asks me if I have a cigarette or want a drink, I'll say, 'I'm straight edge,'Ÿ" says Cryan, a fine arts major. "But I don't preach it. I won't walk in somewhere and tell people aggressively who I am."
Straight-edge anthem
Straight edge owes its existence to a straight-laced, music-loving skateboarder who grew tired of being ridiculed for avoiding drugs.
It was Washington, D.C., in the 1970s and it seemed to Ian MacKaye that he was the only one not drinking and smoking pot. MacKaye channeled his anger into his hard-core music. He formed a band called the Slinkees and wrote songs about abstinence, such as "I Drink Milk."
"I don't care what people say, I drink milk every day," the lyrics went. Another, about Deadheads, or pot-smoking Grateful Dead followers, made fun of their boring personalities.
He was an anomaly - a straight-laced punk rocker - according to his account in "All Ages: Reflections on Straight Edge."
The Slinkees became the Teen Idles, and at a West Coast concert, a nightclub put an "X" on the band members' wrists to signify their underage status so bartenders would know not to serve them. The X's eventually became the straight-edge symbol, either "XXX" or "sXe."
In one song, MacKaye gave the movement an anthem and a name:
"I'm a person just like you/But I've got better things to do/Than sit around and f--- up my head/hang around with the living dead/Snort white s--- up my nose/pass out at the shows/I don't even think about speed or weed/That's just something I don't need ... I've got straight edge."
In the late 1990s, straight edge took a violent turn. In Salt Lake City, members pushing for animal rights were accused of planting pipe bombs at a fur company and setting fire to a McDonald's. Others beat up fraternity members for drinking.
On Halloween night in 1998, two Utah straight-edgers beat and stabbed to death a 15-year-old boy during a gang fight. Federal authorities became so concerned about the attacks that they put straight-edgers, along with other groups involved in domestic terrorism, on a list of people to watch closely during the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City.
Today, the militancy is mostly reserved for members who break edge. One Internet site, howsyouredge.com, lists 1,608 once straight-edge devotees from El Salvador to Norway who have allegedly taken up smoking, drinking or drugs.
Forty-four New Jersey residents are "outed" on the site. One angry submission claims that a teen named Tim brought the anti-drug DARE program to a New Jersey high school this year, then took up drinking and drugs. Sean was in a militant straight-edge band in New Jersey and "now smokes weed," according to another. And Matt fell off the edge on cooking wine, another writer complains. One entry names a teen who gave up the lifestyle to join a sorority.
"With the Internet, there are always rumors," Healey says.
But the Internet has also helped connect straight-edgers on discussion boards and sites where visitors may find T-shirts, tattoo designs, band reviews and concert schedules. The sites also now cater to straight-edge women and girls, vegetarians, Krishnas, pacifists and promoters of racial diversity.
Danielle, a 14-year-old from North Bergen, can sometimes be found on straightedge.com.
A Catholic who opposes abortion, Danielle said she didn't know about the movement until she saw a friend wearing a straight-edge hat with three black X's across the bill.
"I said, 'Dude, you've got pornographic X's on your head' and he said, 'No, no, no' and explained the straight-edge theory. I'd already been like that for a year and a half."
Finding his own path
Healey roars lyrics that might work as well for Reader's Digest as his tattooed fans.
"Try and remain positive/Keep your head on straight/Can't change the cards I've been dealt in life/But I'll make the best of what I've got," he sings in "Refocus Turn It Around."
If any of Healey's lyrics sound autobiographical, there's a reason. He's done some "dumb things," made some "very poor choices," he says.
"I was into a lot of stuff once, and I'm not proud of it," he says. "I got locked up for a while. Crack cocaine, heroin. Everything kind of fell apart. Me and my life."
He found solace in music, gravitating toward punk and heavy metal, then hard-core and straight edge. His band and the message of straight edge "gave me something to believe in," he says.
"When you're young it's a tough time. All the cool kids were doing drugs, and for me here was a place where you could be straight and accepted," he says.
As his band gained in popularity around the world, he began to feel a responsibility to the 14- to 20-year-olds who had begun to look up to him.
"Success for me is helping the younger kids, so they don't have to go through what I went through," he says.
"For me I'm just trying to be happy in life, and straight edge has definitely given me that," he says. "I think it's helped and guided so many kids in a good direction."
He tilts his chin up. The tattoos that cover 90 percent of his body scroll up his neck, revealing a flaming heart and a banner across it that reads "Choose My Own Path." His path, seemingly that of a madman, leads to a Boy Scout heart.
* * *
No-drug regimen
Straight edge dictates no absolute rules of conduct, but most followers listen to hard-core punk music and avoid:
# Alcohol
# Illegal drugs
# Tobacco
# Promiscuous sex
Many who identify themselves as straight edge might also avoid:
# Prescription drugs unless medically urgent
# Over-the-counter drugs
# Caffeine
# Sugar
# Meat
# Dairy
Some straight-edgers object strongly to those who abandon the lifestyle. They might:
# Expose anyone who "breaks edge" on an Internet message board
# Physically attack someone who abandons straight edge
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02-17-2005, 03:32 AM
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