thank you.

Ian MacKaye: I think that the idea of straight edge, the song that I wrote, and the way people have related it it, there's some people who have abused it, they've allowed their fundamentalism to interfere with the real message, which in my mind, was that people should be allowed to live their lives the way they want to.


It’s really, deeply, deeply depressing to me that people can’t see this. It’s so obvious. I wrote the song Straight Edge in 1980 and I didn’t drink, I didn’t take drugs. I don’t drink and I don’t take drugs now—I was never kidding around about it at all. But people who heard that song perceived it as a sorta fundamentalist, almost Christian tenet, which it was not. It was a personal choice in my own life about how I wanted to live. What I knew was that I wanted to remember things. I talked to people who had seen Jimi Hendrix play and they couldn’t remember because they were too high. And I thought, I don’t ever want to forget any great band or musician, I don’t want to ever forget any experience that I’ve had in my life, especially not if it’s because of some recreational drug. It seems so crazy to me. So it was really clear to me what I was getting at. I certainly wasn’t trying to form a movement and I certainly wasn’t trying to force other people to live like me. What I was trying to say was I don’t do these things. It’s my life, it’s my choice, don’t give me a hard time about it. Because when I was in high school, I got a lot of grief for these things.