![]() Trevor says that the song still resonates today. In 2017, Eighteen Vision released their searing single Oath as a means of solidifying their commitment to being edge, while chastising those who had left the movement. When I hear straight edge referenced in a TV show or a movie it just kind of gives me idiot shivers, where I’m like, ‘Ugh, don’t do that’. I was like, ‘Okay, this has gone too far’. ![]() “That’s the type of shit that would make me not want to be straight edge anymore. “That wrestler, CM Punk, whose whole gimmick was being straight edge, I was just like, ‘That’s so fucking corny’,” says Jeremy. For Jeremy, who has seen straight edge’s appeal extend beyond a relatively parochial presence at hardcore shows in the two decades since he claimed edge, its more overt presence in mainstream culture in recent years isn’t what he feels the movement represents. “I was sort of attracted to the politics but not the aesthetic of the music, not the machismo of it.”Īll three of the musicians became involved in their local hardcore scenes as teenagers and took pride in identifying as straight edge. ![]() “Not long after that, I became vegan and I was listening to a lot of vegan, straight edge, hardcore stuff, like Earth Crisis and things like that,” he says. Going to university was a turning point for him, where he decided to stop drinking after hearing about parties during Freshers’ Week, extolling the excesses of it. Nathan Stephens-Griffin from the Durham pop-punk band Martha claimed edge at 18 in 2004. That’s all it took – I discovered a whole new world, and finally felt not so alone in my way of thinking.” “It wasn’t until I went to a hardcore show and first saw Eighteen Visions that I discovered the straight edge community. “What I was doing was no longer extreme, and I was falling right in line with brainless scum without any of the same values I had,” he says. In 2001, a 17-year-old Trevor Friedrich, who has been the drummer in the straight edge band Eighteen Visions since 2004, decided to become straight edge after drinking and doing drugs as a young teen. ![]() “It wasn’t until I started going to actual hardcore shows that I met anyone else that was straight edge,” says Jeremy, “and that’s when I felt that belonging, for once.” Jeremy Bolm from Touché Amoré became edge at 14 in 1996, after watching an Ozzfest ‘96 VHS tape where an Earth Crisis performance prompted him to buy their Gomorrah’s Season Ends album, the liner notes for which contained information about straight edge. And approaches towards what the movement represents, and the militancy that’s associated with it, are different in 2020. As a movement that developed at hardcore shows throughout the '80s and '90s (where people would have black Xs daubed on their hands, as a way of repurposing the black Xs that were put on the hands of minors at shows so they wouldn’t get served), it is no longer an underground movement. Over 35 years since the straight edge movement gained its name from Minor Threat's 1981 single Straight Edge, the lifestyle still has many adherents who 'claim edge'. ![]()
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