25 years of being out of step.

Some reflections on a lifetime under the influence of Minor Threat.

Hello and welcome to REPLY ALT, the first, best, and only newsletter about music. Yesterday actually marked three years since I launched this thing and I decided to celebrate by slacking off for the last several months. Whoops! Sorry. I’ve been busy working on some pretty huge projects that will all start getting announced over the next few weeks. You’re skeptical. You’re wondering what could possibly be so important that it’s cost weeks of precious newsletter writing time. But I assure you if I told you what they were you would say oh wow yeah goddamn that’s pretty big Dan okay carry on then. 

Anyway, I’ve been feeling nostalgic lately, as I occasionally do. What can I say. You hit a certain age and start to take stock of how many years you’ve been enjoying the things you enjoy. So I wrote about finding Minor Threat as a teenager, possibly the most influential discovery of my life.

BEFORE

Who was I before I found Minor Threat? It’s hard to recall. How does one go about remembering the way they thought before having their brain fundamentally rearranged? How do you put yourself in the mind of a past self? Here’s what I do remember, though. I remember being curious. I remember wanting to know what I didn’t know. I remember needing something new.

Let’s start in 1992. I was nine years old. Nine is a weird, transitional age. Not yet a teenager but no longer a little kid. I was on the verge of becoming my own person and was eager to get there. I abandoned the music I grew up on—Michael Jackson, the Beach Boys—and went in search of something else. I wasn’t just looking for the music I could listen to but the person I could become. I was looking for a new personality.

Most of what I found were hippie leftovers from my parents’ generation. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin. The entire Woodstock lineup, essentially. This is far and away the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever publicly admitted, but I once lit a candle and listened to the Doors’ L.A. Woman. I tried on these albums for a while and enjoyed them enough, but they never felt like mine. They felt like an older person’s version of culture. A peek into a past era of cool. 

But then I turned ten and the thing that happened to millions of other ten-year-olds happened to me. Nirvana. The day I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was the day I discovered the new me. All that 60s stuff was now ancient history. Kurt Cobain gets a lot of credit for kicking off the explosion of alternative music into the mainstream, but in my memory, it all flooded in at once. Pearl Jam, Beastie Boys, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, Rage Against the Machine. It was all on the radio and MTV, and it was all aimed squarely at me. I ripped my jeans and let my hair shag in my face. This was who I was now.

This phase of my musical evolution lasted a couple of years, but after a while the culture being fed to me grew stale too. I started craving an alternative to the alternative. I was drawn to punk, primarily because I didn’t really know what it was. Punk. It seemed like a swear word, and all of its insignia felt just as dangerous. I was attracted to bands like Dead Kennedys and Bad Religion for their names and logos just as much as their music. 

My best friend Justin was with me on this journey into rock exploration. We’d catch glimpses into the underground—Meat Puppets, Bad Brains, Flipper—and trade our discoveries back and forth. A week before our birthdays each year, Justin and I would tell one another, “This is what I want for my birthday.” Sometimes it was a Nerf gun, sometimes it was a Marvel comic. One time it was a remote-controlled DeLorean. Then we’d convince our moms to drive us to the mall to purchase said thing, gift wrap it (maybe), and hand it over on the actual day. No guesswork, no sentimentality. Just results. This is how boys show their appreciation for each other.

For his 14th birthday, Justin said, “I want this CD. Minor Threat, Complete Discography.” That’s a weird name for an album, I thought. I didn’t know what discography meant and forgot it immediately after he said it. But this is what he wanted and I was duty bound to find it.

I’m not sure how he’d heard about Minor Threat. Probably from either a skateboard video or his older brother, our two main sources of alternative music. My mom took me to the mall and I knew the album must be good because none of the stores carried it. Not Sam Goody, not Musicland, not Tape World. Not even Coconuts across the street had it, and they had everything.

Back then there were enough chain stores that they had to come up with clever ways to compete for your business. The Wall had a few policies that set them apart. One of them was that you could listen to any CD you wanted at their listening stations. They’d unwrap the jewel case for you, put it on the CD player, and you’d listen with headphones. And if you didn’t want to buy it, you just told them “No thanks I don’t want to buy it” and walked away.

Another gimmick they had was putting a Wall sticker on the corner of every CD. If your CD got scratched or cracked but had that sticker on it, you could bring it back and they’d replace it, no questions asked. But the sticker was on the plastic wrap, not the CD itself. So a good scam was to hang on to the stickers and if any of your CDs broke you could just slap one on the front and return it. What an easy way to get free CDs. Later, in high school, I’d discover another method of getting free CDs from The Wall which was to have a friend who worked there. This was an interesting policy because you could walk into the store any time during your friend’s shift, choose the CDs you wanted, and walk out of the store without first paying for them. Not sure how they managed to make money on that one.

The Wall would also order any CD in the universe you wanted. If the store didn’t carry the niche, esoteric, weirdo shit you were looking for, you could give them the title, they’d track it down through computer magic, and you’d come back in a week to pick it up. So I got on my tiptoes in front of the register and told the employee: I need you to order me Minor Threat’s Complete Something Something. A week later, he called me and told me to come get it. 

On the drive home I held this thing my friend had requested in my hands. The cover was blood red. It kind of scared me. There was a guy sitting on a step with his head in his hands. He looked sullen and dejected but still threatening. His well worn boots, his freshly shaved head. He looked militaristic. 

Justin unwrapped the CD on his birthday and there was no surprise to it. It was in fact the one he’d requested. Birthday transaction complete. First order of business was asking him to make me a copy of the gift I’d just given him. I busted out a Maxell cassette I just happened to have on me and he copied it. The whole thing fit onto one side. This was my life before Minor Threat.

DURING

Life is a series of influential moments that seem inconsequential at the time. Sometimes they’re small things. You bite into your first mango and suddenly realize holy shit you actually love mangos. Other moments hold more weight. You decide to go to a party and end up meeting your soulmate. Pressing play on my Walkman with that Maxell cassette in it ended up being one of those important ones for me. It set me on a path I’m still walking today. 

The first thing I noticed was the screaming. There are, of course, several hundred deeper and more culturally significant layers to Minor Threat, but I didn’t realize that at the time. I was a 13-year-old boy and the first thing that grabbed me was the screaming. It wasn’t like Nirvana or the Beastie Boys where you’d hear occasional angry outbursts on the microphone. It wasn’t even like Rage Against the Machine, who leaned heavily on it as a tool in their arsenal. The guy in Minor Threat was screaming the entire time. 

I’d never considered this. Screaming as a vocal style. Rage as an instrument. The singer’s voice was forceful but also revealed adolescent vulnerability when it cracked on the high notes. What was this guy so angry about anyway? I didn’t know, but I could still relate to it. There was even a song about screaming. Screaming at a wall. I didn’t need any further explanation beyond that. Made perfect sense to me.

Anger speaks to young, impressionable boys on a primal level. At that age a wave of hormones floods into your body and it feels like the whole world is against you. You are a weapon looking for a target. Historically, this anger has most often been exploited for malevolent purposes. It has been a recruitment tool for right-wing extremists, the military, and various other gatherings of vile pricks. But I like to think that in finding punk rock, I discovered the one outlet that allowed me to convert my rage into a positive force.

Beyond the vocals, the music itself was like a form of screaming. The guitars crunched. Every band on the radio then, from Bush to Silverchair, was using distortion on their guitars. But when played at full volume at 100 miles per hour like Minor Threat, it was less of a sound and more of an assault. And underneath the crackling chords, there was all this other stuff going on. It was looser and sloppier than anything I’d ever heard. The guitar notes squealed and squeaked, the bass rumbled, glass shattered to kick off one of the songs. It was all very layered, way more so than I think the band typically gets credit for, but it was also so scant. Entire musical theses were condensed into 90 seconds or less. A staggering economy of thought. Is it any wonder why most punk fans discover the genre in their attention-decifient teenage years?

I was delighted to learn that Minor Threat was classified as a punk offshoot called “hardcore.” An alternative to an alternative to an alternative? I was in. If “punk” sounded R-rated, “hardcore” sounded NC-17. In fact, I remember my mom once asked what I was listening to. I told her hardcore and she shook her head as if I was mistaken. “Hardcore?” she said in disgust. “No, that’s porn.” Needless to say I loved it even more after that.

Through my first dozen or so listens, there were no lyrics. There were no songs, even. It was just one unbroken stretch of this new visceral sound that infected me. When it was over, I rewound it and went back for more. After I was finally familiar enough to differentiate the tracks, I decided one of my favorites was “12XU.” I didn’t realize it was a cover of a Wire song. I wouldn’t have known who Wire was even if you’d told me. I didn’t know what the lyrics were. I still barely get them, if I’m being honest. I just loved that in the middle of it, there was something clear enough to scream along to.

I brought that song to my bass teacher, a stoner hippie guy with long hair whose nose whistled when he breathed, and told him I wanted to learn it. He told me to slow down. He said maybe we should keep practicing scales or “Polly Wolly Doodle” or whatever. But I didn’t want to play scales and I didn’t want to play “Polly Wolly Doodle.” I wanted to play “12XU.” So I took my bass over to Justin’s basement. He learned it on guitar and I learned it on bass and we played along as best we could. I’m very sure we sucked. I’m sure our notes were wrong and our timing was off. But we got to yell “12XU!” and that was all that mattered.

Now, look. I don’t want to get all mawkish here. I’m hesitant to claim that learning this song was the turning point that instilled a set of DIY principles in my young mind that would map out how I would operate for the rest of my life. All I’m saying is, I wanted to learn to play music like Minor Threat, an adult told me I couldn’t, so my friend and I found a way to fucking do it anyway. Make of that what you will.

AFTER

Once Minor Threat was in my bloodstream, it could never be siphoned out. It became a permanent part of my DNA. The longer I listened to it, the more time I spent considering the messages the band was trying to get across. Eventually an epiphany dawned on me: These guys were not trying to sound tough; they were trying to be anti-tough. It hit me all at once. “Bottled Violence” wasn’t advocating for drunken violence, it was mocking it. “Stand Up” was about banding together with your friends not to look for trouble but to avoid it. “Out of step.” “Flex your head.” Of course! It all made sense. 

I know, I know. It seems so obvious now. There was no subtlety in Minor Threat’s lyrics. They were like a mallet that had “THE POINT” written on it. But while your brain is malleable at 13, you’ve also got a lot to unlearn. Reshaping your mindset requires active work, and I had more than a decade’s worth of traditional thinking to break down, the kind of masculinity drilled into boys’ heads through competitive sports, G.I. Joe action figures, and schoolyard homophobia. I’d always assumed punk was aggressive, but Minor Threat rewired me to consider where I was directing that aggression. Bullying was easy, I learned. Empathy was radical. 

When I got to high school, I found more friends who liked bands like Minor Threat. The song “Straight Edge” was influential on some of them. A few people I knew started describing themselves as straight-edge. They wore patches and buttons on their backpacks with Xs on them. It was like a little club with membership cards. I started going to local shows and there was a weird beef there between the straight-edge kids and the punks who wanted to get fucked up on 40s. None of this made any sense to me. It was a song, not a credo. It was one person expressing their frustration with a societal problem. He never said he wanted anyone to join him or for people to choose sides. Some misguided tough guys would end up following this notion to its most violent end, beating people up for drinking or doing drugs. If wearing a button with an X on it made little sense to me, physically harming another person was an outright alien concept.

I should say, I didn’t drink or do drugs then either. I still don’t. Never have. But I’ve also never felt any interest in labeling myself straight-edge. For me, the song simply planted an idea in my head. It showed me a way to exist in defiance of societal norms and I liked that. I heard it and said, “Yeah, that sounds good. I’ll try that, thanks.” It worked for me. I didn’t need any comrades in this fight. It was a personal choice, just like drinking is a personal choice. If I want to be pedantic, sure, I’ll point out that I think alcohol and tobacco are a means of keeping the working class poor. But again, that’s a personal choice and not, as the band once clarified, “a set of rules.” It’s just a song. A suggestion.

A lot of those ideas Minor Threat planted in me took root and are still a part of who I am today. I’m not one to idolize anyone or worship their words as gospel. Everyone is human and no one is infallible. But the ethos, the energy, and the approach Minor Threat took towards art and life in general have been my North Star, of sorts. Call it a philosophy or a worldview, I guess. It’s probably the closest thing I have to religion.

It hit me recently that I’ve been listening to Minor Threat for 25 years now. Twenty-five years. It hurts my brain to think about it. If their music instantly reshaped 13 years’ worth of conventional thinking, imagine its impact extrapolated over decades. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I would be a wholly different person had I not found them.

Even now when I listen to Minor Threat’s music, I am astounded by how fresh it sounds. That opening chord on “Filler” rings out and I feel 13 all over again. I am very convinced that if you woke me from a ten-year coma, handed me a microphone, and told me to sing “Out of Step,” I could stage-dive off the hospital bed without missing a word. In my opinion, there is no such thing as a casual Minor Threat fan. Either it’s in your blood or it’s not. Which is perhaps why I get such a kick out of this video of Moby needing a lyric sheet to cover “In My Eyes.” A punk sin of the highest order! (I do have to give credit to my boy Jeremy, who needed no such sheet, and even hit the “play it faster” line with the precision of a true lifer.)

I’m also old enough now to have a new sense of empathy for the young musicians who wrote these songs. When I first discovered Minor Threat, I viewed those guys as larger-than-life punk icons. But now, in my thirties, I look back and understand that they were just teenagers themselves, not so far off from me and my friend playing guitar in his basement. The band’s time together was so brief and their output so slim. Just three years and a handful of songs. Yet the members will be tied to this legacy for eternity. Sometimes I remember all the silly things I said and did as a teenager and how it would feel to be bound to them forever. For people to have my teenage words tattooed on them. For countless bands to have formed because of my high school songs. As an adult, I don’t envy those guys.

My shelves have amassed thousands of hardcore records over the years, some more important to me than others. But in my mind, they are all superfluous. I learned everything I needed to know about hardcore through that one Minor Threat tape. The band is a genre onto themselves. The alpha and the omega of hardcore. A force that sparked a lifelong movement. But at the same time, they were just a bunch of teenagers playing some songs. Just a minor threat.

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