I’ve been meaning to write this for over a month. Lots of plans, I had, for what subjects to touch on and I was going to draw a cool cartoon and everything. Instead, you’re getting this. My apologies up front.
Straightedge. Straight edge. The straight edge. Straight edgers. Whatever you call it, say it in front of the wrong person and controversy will be stewed . . . so have a bowl and a piece of bread handy.
Most recently for me it came up at work. A co-worker of mine is into hardcore and asked if I was straightedge.
Yeah. I am.
Ever since I claimed it at around 16 years old, my position on what staightedge actually is and what it entails has changed dramatically. Ask any two people in the world and they will have different answers. I used to be the kind of kid that was totally fine with all my friends drinking and doing whatnot. I was also the kind of kid that wanted to eradicate every beer company off the face of the earth while wearing my Drug Free shirt, depending on when you asked.
See, there’s a balance. If I eradicated every beer company, I’d surely be ridding a lot of unethical business practices and deceptive advertising. But I’d also be getting rid of many homebrewed (pardon the pun) businesses where people put their own work into something that people would enjoy, in the safety of their homes. And if I had no regard whatsoever for inebriation, then I may well be endangering people who got in too deep, or worse yet from personal experience, fake my acceptance to the point where it drove me to a nervous breakdown.
Not good, I tells ya.
Yeah, Karl Buechner went on Geraldo to talk on straightedge. “The discipline calls me to self-liberation.” That’s what I take to heart. I don’t declare straightedge to be a broken record and preach things, to wear clothes with x’s on them, or to sing along to cool songs. It works for me, plain and simple.
I’m sorry if my edge has gone dull and I don’t see the glamour to some one or two word term coined by a person whom, in the 1980’s, declared something as a guideline and nothing more, never intending it to be a lifelong commitment. Excuse me if I don’t see the big deal with a bunch of mediocre bands enclosing their names with two x’s, or slapping one of them right in the middle. That’s not to say that there is any inherent good or bad in the matter. For every person that thinks militance and gang membership is beneficial to bringing back the 18th amendment, there’s someone who heard of straightedge and got into it and had it get them escape from their evils. It all boils down to the person themself.
I have my conviction in my own matters, to make myself better. I have done that for myself in one way, but there’s always room for improvement. And there is no one out there that can disagree with that statement.
Now, the above was the first main part of my diatribe. What straightedge is really was a point when I started brainstorming this, but things change over time. Entropy beckons the universe to dance the dirge of chaos. I wanted to have a cartoon with CM Punk bitching him out for saying “Straightedge means I’m better than you!” and selling it, literally, to a bunch of teenagers who will look for a beer to pop back when Stone Cold gets inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame. (Hopefully by then Gordon Solie will be in, and I can celebrate with some Power Bomb Anthems.)
There is such a marketing around hardcore, coming or going one way or another. CM Punk in the WWE. The WWE making and selling shirts with tattoo designs made for guys that need something to balance out their tribal. Bands being marketed as “hardcore” with none of the spirit, ethos, or sound.
And Nikes.
What. The.
Fuck?
I want to know the, who, what, where, when, why, and how Nike got to be such a big deal in the hardcore community.
Nike: big multinational corporation that has been caught using child labor to turn out mass quantities of overpriced shoes to the unwitting public audience.
Hardcore: a place for people who are angry with the way big multinational corporations run the world to gather, vent their frustrations, and figure out a way to make a difference.
I hate humanity, it’s simple as that. I have no fucking idea of how or why Nike is such a fad in hardcore. I can understand records, because a lot of people in hardcore are nerds and collect things like comic books (yours truly) or shirts, but Nikes are something that, to my belief, epitomize something that is utterly non-hardcore.
I’ll never get it.
I guess that’s the hardcore reality of it all, isn’t it?
May 22nd, 2010 at 3:07 am
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