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• #TEEN SUICIDE BAND SLC MAC#

The movement is now popular in cities from Los Angeles to London, spread through the hard-core punk scene and increasingly via Internet chat rooms and underground blogs.Įxperts say that apart from a handful of militant cities, Straight Edge is usually peaceful, and in a published interview, MacKaye decried the violence associated with the scene in Salt Lake. Than sit around and (expletive) my head …Īn “X” – the mark that clubs at the time put on the hands of underage concertgoers who couldn’t drink – became the Straight Edge symbol. MacKaye wrote a song called “Straight Edge,” the lyrics of which include:

#TEEN SUICIDE BAND SLC MAC#

In the 1980s, the affluent suburbs of Washington produced a band called Minor Threat, whose lead singer, Ian Mac Kaye, decried the widespread drinking and drug use of American youths.

“Whether you’re getting hit or hitting other people, it’s fun,” said Lund, whose nose has a visible curve from two breaks suffered at Straight Edge concerts.

It’s an altered state,” said Jordan Lund, a 17-year-old Straight Edge member from North Ogden. When I’m in the (mosh) pit, I don’t remember very much. One was briefly knocked out after being kicked in the head. Some were tossed into benches and flower beds. At a recent concert in a Salt Lake City parking lot headlined by the local band Cherem, dancers punched one another and performed roundhouse kicks. The dance style at Salt Lake’s Straight Edge concerts looks like a mock street fight. Straight Edge attracts kids whose parents may have gotten in trouble with drugs or alcohol, Nelson said, as well as adolescents from upper-middle-class Mormon families who are tired of being harassed for not drinking.īut the world they enter, besides preaching abstinence and environmental consciousness, is also filled with glorified violence and a ritualized ferocity. Just under his uniform’s short sleeves, he still has an elaborate tattoo that reads: “One life. For them to say that it is not is just denial,” he said.Ī nine-year veteran of the Ogden police, the 32-year-old detective was once in Straight Edge himself but got out so he could become a cop. They see blood in the water, and everyone goes after it,” said Detective Jeremy Nelson of the Ogden Police Department’s gang task force. “If you talk to their victims, they describe it as being attacked by a bunch of piranhas. At a punk concert in January 2005 and another at Halloween, bands were beaten by Straight Edge attendees. Some punk bands from other cities refuse to play Salt Lake venues for fear they’ll be attacked. They cite a rising number of brawls in high schools and melees on the streets, sometimes directed at suspected drug dealers or others who don’t share Straight Edge’s values.Īmong the recent incidents linked by police to the movement are a shooting between a Straight Edge gang and a rival early this year a recent beating of two teenagers that may be prosecuted as a hate crime and a car chase in November involving at least 20 Straight Edge members who used baseball bats and a crowbar to destroy a rival’s car.

But there is this certain element – I wish I could pinpoint exactly why it emerged there – but it was very pro-animal rights and very aggressive,” he said.Īfter a crackdown in the run- up to the 2002 Winter Olympics, police say that Straight Edge is again in vogue in cities across Utah. “Most of the kids in Salt Lake, I presume, are completely benign. “Salt Lake is not representative of Straight Edge as a whole, period,” said Ross Haenfler, a professor at the University of Mississippi and author of a book on Straight Edge. In the late 1990s, according to police, members of Straight Edge in the Salt Lake Valley firebombed a McDonald’s, a mink- feed cooperative and a leather- supply store, and committed at least one murder, the beating death of a 15-year-old Latino high schooler with a baseball bat. To its defenders, Straight Edge is a mostly positive movement centered on the hard-core punk music scene, an outlet for creative, sometimes shy kids who are resisting the glorification of drugs and alcohol.īut the Utah version of Straight Edge is controversial even in an underground subculture that, beginning in the 1980s in Washington, D.C., has grown into an international phenomenon.