When teen puritan Ian MacKaye of Washington, DC hardcore band Minor Threat came up with the novel notion that the best way to have fun was by not having fun, little did he know his personal lifestyle preferences had created a movement. His version of Martin Luther’s 99 theses (”I don’t smoke/I don’t drink/I don’t fuck/At least I can fucking think”) wound its monkish way north to Boston, where it was adopted by vocalist Phil “Springa” Springs, guitarist/lyricist Al Barile, and the rest of the boys in SS Decontrol.
There’s nothing wrong with straightedge as a way of life—it’s not for me, perhaps because I don’t wear a tall black hat with a buckle on it—but SS Decontrol and the droogies in their notoriously fist-happy “Boston Crew” more or less decided that everyone on the local hardcore scene should abide by straightedge rules. This did not make them fun to be around—puritans never are. And this goes double for puritans with violent tendencies.
Various people have gone on record saying different things about SS Decontrol and its crew’s treatment of apostates—knocking beers out of people’s hands was a more benign expression of their conduct—but I for one wouldn’t have wanted to find out. True believers can be very dangerous people, and god only knows what they would have done with Samuel Adams’ “Your cousin from Boston” guy.
To give SSD their due, they were an above average metal-riveted hardcore band—they were brutal and aggressive if not particularly tight, and their songs were better than many of those by the 7,000 or so other hardcore bands at the time. What they lacked was subtlety—they didn’t have the distinctive personality of bands like Bad Brains, Black Flag, and the Circle Jerks (to name just a few), and Springa’s belligerent bellow didn’t stand out from the hardcore pack.
And their lyrics lacked brains—if abstinence was supposed to increase your IQ, you wouldn’t know it by listening to their lyrics. And they had straightedge on the brain. While MacKaye had more on his mind than preaching against the evils of sex, drugs, and Marlboro Reds, three of the six songs on SSD’s sophomore LP, 1983’s Get It Away are virulent straightedge screeds. And two of the others are insular war chants of interest only to the Boston Crew. In short, unless you’re a Beantowner of straightedge bent, I have a hard time understanding why you’d pay money you could use to buy a six-pack and some Trojans for Get It Away.
Opener “Glue” is a bummer because I thought it was going to be a hilarious diatribe against huffing the stuff. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered it’s a call for crew unity that takes lyrical minimalism to the extreme. “Gotta stick together” repeats Springa four times, before closing shop with “Like glue like crew.” It’s not that bad a sing-along, I suppose—it’s hard to forget the words, even when sober—but “Sex Bomb” or “TV Party” it ain’t. “Forced Down My Throat” is a diatribe against kids driven to drink by peer pressure, and makes it clear that alcohol is an insidious gateway drug to–gasp—marijuana. Oh, and I love the song’s final couplet (“Fuck off you I ain’t no waste/Why drink that when I just can’t stand the taste”). It appears to suggest that had Springa liked the taste he would as of this moment be an official member of Alcoholic’s Anonymous.
“Get It Away” addresses a concern that was on every hardcore kid’s mind–the horrors of cigarette smoke. “Leave your odor on my clothes,” sings Springa, who is also out of sorts because some second-hand smoker failed to ask permission before lighting up. Now cleanliness is next to Godliness, and it’s always nice to be polite, but Springa comes off sounding like Miss Manners. And the lack of a sense of humor (which extends to every song on the album) doesn’t help. In the best of all possible words SSD (and just about every other straightedge band for that matter) would have taken Jonathan Richman’s “I’m Straight” as a template. Instead their treatment of the subject was about as joyless as a good witch burning, and utterly off-putting to anyone who looked to hardcore, as I did, for laughs.
The subject of “Under the Influence” is self-evident, and I love the way Springa makes your enjoying a beer proof you’re the victim of some insidious CIA mind control experiment. And how drinking a beer isn’t the real you. I always remained the same person while drunk, and it didn’t stop me from thinking. Admittedly I mostly thought about smoking, drinking, and fucking mind you, but a guy has to think about something. And so far as CIA mind control experiments go, we owe The Agency’s MK-Ultra program our eternal thanks for helping to bring LSD to the hippies of the world.
“Nothing Done” may be a song of few words but at least its message is a universal one; Springa goes from asking what you’ll do when they come for you” (who that “you” are is never specified, unfortunately) to a surprisingly intelligent twist: “Nothing said nothing done/When you’re not the one/You just watch.” “Xclaim” is more tribalism, a song about brotherhood, solidarity, and hatred of clubs where you can buy demon alcohol until—for god’s sake have these club owners no shame—four in the morning. Oh, and Springa also lauds Beantown for not being all fashion conscious like the scene in New York City, which is why you never caught a member of the Boston Crew wearing a chic ensemble of a leopard duster and Chelsea boots.
Their sometimes violent intolerance of kids breaking the straightedge rules made SS Decontrol the Taliban of the hardcore scene, and badge-holding officers of its Morality Police. Which is why I despise them; the last thing the world needs is more cops. I loved hardcore for its anarchy, which bands like SS Decontrol ditched in favor of an orthodoxy that would have made Cotton Mather proud.
Punk on punk aggro was generally good clean fun. Treating an innocent kid holding a beer like shit most definitely wasn’t. Straightedge is all well and fine until its adherents decide to impose its ethos on innocent bystanders. And don’t even get me started on that “don’t fuck” part of hardcore’s equivalent of the ten commandments. Never once have I seen a commercial where someone cracks an egg into a sizzling frying pan to the accompaniment of a voice saying, “This is your brain on sex.”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D-
