pwalshj wrote:I was a pseudo straight-edge myself for a few years, but that's only because I decided to not drink and couldn't get laid at a whorehouse convention.

Wait, so I have been straightedge all these years?

Marsupialized wrote:

Boombats wrote:

madmanmunt wrote:Straight edge is a totally American thing isn't it?

Never even heard about it growing up in the UK.

That's because your women's enormous tits are brimming with ale. Lucky babies wouldn't dream of it.

Nice one Boombats

Yes! Excellent.

Probably not too far off the truth. I read somewhere that UK women's tits are the biggest in Europe. And you Americans do breastfeed less, don't you? The whole Straight Edge thing could well have been avoided with more widespread use of the nipple.

lemur68 wrote:Then the bong magically appears in my hand for some reason, and I'm like aw man, I don't want Ian seeing me with this. But when I see him he's acting like a total bro-dog, carrying a six-pack, high-fiving doudes and talking about getting "totally fuckin' trashed."

I like Ian 100 times more now.

itchy mcgoo wrote:I have one pal who is 35(ish) and still straight edge. (Am I supposed to capitalize that? Really?) Vegan, the whole deal. I've known him for 14 years.

The only thing weird to me about it is his need to still identify his choices with a movement. I know plenty of people that abstain from alcohol and the whole bit. They simply say "I'll have a ginger ale." I get needing the joiner badge at 13- 22. I do not get it at 35 with around 20 years of these choices under your belt. It's not a big deal to me. Probably at the level of "hmm, I've never seen so-and-so without his Snap-On tool cap on".

My 32 year old sister is like this. She became vegan around the same time she decided to be a Rastafarian, which incidentally coincided with her starting to date a vegan Rastafarian!! Now I can't stand to go out to eat with her because everything and every topic always circles back to her being a vegan Rastafarian.(it's so much easier to avoid when your friends pull shit like this)

emmanuelle cunt wrote:He lives in Poland so he is yet to meet a person who doesn't drink and is not a recovering alcoholic.

+2

The sweet irony of the whole thing, is Ian discredited the movement right when it became one.

So yeah, I was one of those kooky straight edge kids.

Was much more involved in the "posi" stuff than anything militant. I would wager that people on here might even hate posi kids much more than the militant ones.

I have no straight edge tattoos and never wanted any while I was straight edge. I wasn't "in your face" about it, I just didn't like doing drugs or drinking and though everyone on here seems to hate the music, I liked it. I couldn't stand Eath Crisis though.

Upon enetering college, I realized how silly boiling your lifestyle down to a phrase was. I also discovered that I like beer and barbecue. Further, I also learned that there was more to music than hardcore.

I still like 7 Seconds, Gorilla Biscuits and a few other bands from my high school years.

As a side note, I also knew a lot of the Krishna kids too. Never really joined up with them, but I did get a lot of free meals from them.

Further, there is a picture of me in one of my high school yearbooks with Xs on my hands. Yikes.

vockins wrote:

DNA Concept wrote:I can only remember one of the songs, by some [Belgian] band called Nations on Fire, which featured the lyric "There's a female element/Here in the Belgian scene/Discrimination/Is a thing that we don't need". Jesus.

I think there were a number of Northern European straight edge bands.

In fact, I'm looking at a 10" by a band from the netherlands called manliftingbanner. No spaces in there. Perhaps it's MANLIFTINGBANNER. The 10" is called TEN INCHES THAT SHOOK THE WORLD. They were a communist straight edge band. I don't know why I'm providing those details because obviously everyone reading this has been shaken by this point, fifteen years after this record was released.

Nations on Fire. MANLIFTINGBANNER. Jesus Christ, lighten the fuck up.

Shit, I think those were sold at the same table that I bought Nations on Fire from. A lot of Euro-HC stuff seemed to have very nicely executed typography and graphics, better than North American stuff which relied too much on the "scrawl over repeatedly xeroxed photo with insufficient contrast for the effect to really work" philosophy. Good lesson for me, not to confuse nice design with a record worth buying.

A pal tells me that a few years ago in Victoria, BC there was a band or two made up of Maoists (don't know if they were the real deal or just bullshit), and their fans would show up each with a personal copy of the Little Red Book. They'd hoist them in the air en masse and make various hardcore crowd gestures with them. He came up with the idea that he should form a band dedicated to the philosophy and aphorisms of Ben Franklin, and that the fans should show up holding a copy of Franklin's Autobiography.

The proposed band name? Early to Rise.

I've been clean and sober for close to fourteen years now and I still don't fucking get Straight Edge. There are plenty of good reasons not to take drugs or get drunk, but because it's a youth movement? Lame. I didn't know many folks who were Straight Edge back in the day, but there was a guy I knew who was real serious about it at one time, and the last time my best friend saw him at a show, he was stinking drunk.

Then again, how many of you still hold every belief and enthusiasm you had when you were sixteen? For good or ill, people change. That's life.

BTW, did anyone see the TV documentary on Straight Edge that Thurston Moore narrated? Unintentionally pretty hilarious. I liked the bit where in one city, Straight Edge kids have formed a gang that regularly does battle with Juggalos. Real impressive, kids.

Mark Lansing wrote:in one city, Straight Edge kids have formed a gang that regularly does battle with Juggalos.

We all win that gang war.