Out of Step with the World: Minor Threat and “Normal as Abnormal” Dress in Representation of Alterity and Authenticity
2023; Wiley; Volume: 56; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/jpcu.13198
ISSN1540-5931
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
ResumoPhoto by Glen E. Friedman [E]ven though it seems like Minor Threat looks kind of normal in its clothing, sitting on the front porch on our last record, Salad Days, […] that was shocking. That was kind of revolutionary within the punk scene, to be dressing down. -Jeff Nelson Punk upended music and fashion when it burst onto the popular culture landscape in the mid-1970s. Its provocative visual aesthetic—from album artwork to fanzines to clothing—channeled the scorn, boredom, and desire for change that churned within the subculture's participants. By 1979, certain elements of punk attire that emerged from London and New York, such as vintage clothes, Dr. Martens boots, leather, tartan plaids, metal studs and chains, Converse All Stars, and distressed t-shirts and jeans, became synonymous with the subculture. Washington, DC's punk community surfaced in 1976 with the arrival of the bands Overkill and the Slickee Boys. DC was an outlier in 1970s American punk compared with larger scenes in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, but the city's relatively limited fashion and music industry infrastructure extended the time during which the community's punk style was a freer space to explore. The Slickee Boys' flamboyant farrago and Urban Verbs' muted, arty, prep look equally embodied early DC punk style. If anything, the increasingly rote British punk style was viewed askance by DC's first-wave punks, especially when a surge of new arrivals, most of them teenagers, infiltrated the scene throughout 1979 and 1980. Many of the newcomers—including bands like the Teen Idles and the Untouchables—wore leather jackets, chains, and combat boots, recalling the appearance of British bands they learned about from punk enchiridia like Caroline Coon's book 1988: New Wave Punk Rock Explosion, and album artwork from bands like Generation X and the Clash. The Teen Idles—vocalist Nathan Strejcek, guitarist Geordie Grindle, bassist Ian MacKaye, and drummer Jeff Nelson—quickly carved out a place in the community with their brash, speedy brand of punk. Following a transformative tour of California in the summer of 1980, they played a few shows around DC before disbanding in November. A month later, Dischord Records, a new label that MacKaye and Nelson operated, released the group's debut EP, Minor Disturbance. Dischord would emerge almost immediately as DC punk's flagship record label. More than 40 years later, it remains in business and has issued genre-defining records from bands like Fugazi, Rites of Spring, and Dag Nasty. Minor Threat—MacKaye and Nelson's new band with guitarist Lyle Preslar and bassist Brian Baker—debuted just weeks after the Teen Idles' demise. The differences in their appearance were subtle, but significant and readily apparent, as band members donned fewer stereotypical punk accouterments. Their music was fast and authoritative, while the band's spartan dress aimed to serve notice of their serious approach to punk. Minor Threat would reshape punk and its subgenre, hardcore, during its tumultuous existence through the end of 1983. By that time, they mostly dressed like “average” American teenagers, incorporating nods to skate and punk cultures and wearing thrift store clothing to strategically diverge from the mainstream. Their sartorial simplicity delivered a message matching their music's resolute core, which the understated portrait of the band on the cover of their final EP, Salad Days, indelibly expressed. Few hardcore bands appeared on the front covers of their albums at this point, unless it was in images from a concert performance. Typically, hardcore album artwork featured the band's name emblazoned in large letters across the top of the cover, with a bleak, satirical, or sophomoric image—coffins draped in American flags, disturbing images related to war, horror-themed drawings—underneath to express the band's intentions. For Salad Days, Minor Threat used Glen E. Friedman's black and white photo of the band sitting on a porch, staring directly at the camera, dressed in their everyday clothes. Devoid of text or elaborate staging, the cover's confident message and purpose was clear. Now one of American punk's iconic images, fans continually reaffirm its pop-cultural impact through Internet memes projecting the likes of Bernie Sanders, Black Sabbath, the Beatles, the cast of The Golden Girls, and characters from The Simpsons onto the band's plain but meaningful canvas. Building off the ragged thrift store look that some members of California punk bands like Black Flag and Circle Jerks employed, Minor Threat's de-emphasis on previous punk fashion pushed back against style norms within their subculture, while the band's aggressive music, societal critiques, and pugnacious mien put it at odds with the mainstream culture they were born into. In punk culture, their more “normal” attire rendered them “abnormal” in a community that previously viewed either outré or aggressive styles as a primary way to express authenticity and alterity. For Minor Threat and an increasing number of punks, dressing down represented an authenticity that eschewed excess. When MacKaye sang that he was “out of step with the world” (Minor Threat, 1981), he could just have as easily been referring to punk as he was mainstream society. This article evaluates how a band not known for their clothing style inverted two fashion cycles—mainstream and punk—to create a meaningful impact. Minor Threat rejected the machinery perpetuating visual expressions of mass market trends that flaunted class and lifestyle, as well as punk's packaging through boutiques and the media. Using new interviews and archival research, this article investigates the influences and motivations that drove Minor Threat's aesthetic and its lasting impact on punk, a subculture that has had an osmotic influence on mainstream culture, nearly since its inception. Importantly, punk remains relevant in large part because of its ability to evolve and create new versions of itself. In considering Minor Threat's subtly subversive approach, this article analyzes ways subcultural participants negotiate symbols in commodified goods from all contexts in which they participate. Furthermore, this article documents influential aesthetic aspects of the history of that subcultural scene, adding further insight into the punk lifestyle, songs, and social impact. A number of variables shaped Minor Threat's style, including endemic aspects of DC life, other regional punk and skateboarding subcultures, and mainstream fashion trends. The Teen Idles, the band from which two of Minor Threat's members emerged, were concerned about their visual identity. This manifested through the band's expressions of identity via a raw, but rapidly developing sense of style and in their song lyrics. Band members frequently socialized in the shopping district of DC's wealthy Georgetown neighborhood, where they were exposed to a panorama of styles to rebel against. They were particularly averse to young preppies aspiring to convey wealth and prestige through their attire as well as the new wave scene participants emulating the theatricality and kitsch of popular bands. Some Teen Idles songs criticized wider fashion trends (“Fiorucci Nightmare,” “Sneakers”), whereas others assailed the British punk bands they felt no longer represented them (Teen Idles, 1980). In the late 1970s and 1980s, mainstream America embraced aspirational dressing to exude power, confidence, and status. Women donned power suits, a historically male workplace style, as they entered the workforce in substantial numbers. This, along with the fitness craze of the early 1980s, exemplified the new, purposeful style of dress. Additionally, in 1977 in New York City, the Studio 54 nightclub opened. Studio 54 was an ebulliently creative space and its ostentatious displays of sexualized bodies, patrons' rampant drug use, and designer clothes made it synonymous with the hedonistic disco era. Materials such as metallics, Spandex, and sequins, as well as the work of designers like Halston and Elio Fiorucci, were ubiquitous. Fiorucci and his contemporaries like Calvin Klein and Diane von Furstenberg were credited with the immense popularity of harem pants, leopard wrap dresses, and designer jeans, all of which correlated with the disco era (Reed 72). Fiorucci's eponymous boutique in Georgetown was a repellant sight to the Teen Idles, as they believed those fashions reduced style to an odious, status-based commodity: “I think the designer label stuff just struck us as so weird and just so cult-like,” Nelson said (2021). “Fiorucci nightmare, asshole's dream,” Strejcek sang. “Spend all your money on the fashion machine” (Teen Idles, 1980). While the Teen Idles loathed the mainstream fashion industry, they also often directed their ire at women who, from the band's perspective, viewed aspirational fashion as a method of establishing maturity and desirability. “Fiorucci Nightmare” assumes that the young women it excoriates are “down in Georgetown in a fashion race / for the guys to see how high you rate,” while “Sneakers” implores a teenage girl who is “sixteen going on thirty-two” and whose “cigarette dangles from your painted lips” to, instead, “put on your sneakers and be a kid / Why don't you try and have some fun?” (Teen Idles, 1980) Reflecting on the lyrics decades later, Nelson acknowledged that, despite their constructive intent, “[s]urely, there's some juvenile [and] misogynistic, probably, components of comments in the songs about girls wearing tight pants and trying to get older guys. It's all just a late teenager's view of mainstream society and rebelling against it and seeing it as stupid” (2021). Much of the aspirational social milieu that the Teen Idles criticized was driven by preppies and exemplified by Lisa Birnbach's The Official Preppy Handbook. Published in 1980, the book satirized, but elevated, “a generation of young urban professionals willing to create the illusion associated with preppy upbringing, purchasing clothes that perpetuated their desired lifestyle through a company's brand” (Risinger 27). Preps—students at collegiate preparatory schools along with their higher economic statuses and education lifestyles—and yuppies, flaunted elite sporting wear, and subdued color palettes that evoked corporate executives' corner offices and Ivy League schools' power and privilege. As fashion historian, Jose F. Blanco observed, “[t]he dominant concept here was that personal grooming and other appearance management practices conducive to success and upward mobility were as important as the actual skills needed for a job” (330). The change in mass fashion from the less elitist dress of the late 1960s and 1970s to the aspirational trends in the late 1970s and 1980s promoted varying reactions about style within subcultures. Punk's aesthetic identity is rooted in subcultural and countercultural concepts—a contrarian core of antiauthoritarianism, boundless art, and fervent activism, all striving for authentic expression. Early punks freely explored those themes through fashion, building on design shifts like the pop art of Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Cardin's space-age silhouettes, and Mary Quant's youth-centric miniskirts and plastics. In other subcultures immediately predating punk, there were new stylistic choices such as tie-dye, patched denim, hippie crochet, and glam's scintillant dandyism. Women's and LGBTQ+ movements also critiqued gender roles, a concept with which punk style continually grappled. London designers Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren captured the essence of punk's revolt against mainstream ideals with their distressed fabrics, bondage references, taboo graphics, and by appropriating and emblazoning Situationist-style slogans like “Be reasonable demand the impossible [sic]” onto clothing. Punk style included facial piercings, heavy cosmetics, and exaggerated hairstyles (shaved, spiked, or garishly colored), blending do-it-yourself (DIY) and higher end designs to create iconic ensembles. London style was an expansion of New York's prepunk period, particularly, the transgressive glam stalwarts New York Dolls, and the earliest punk period, which displayed a comparatively subtler and more stripped-down look than would emerge from London (Sklar). The Ramones' uniform, comprised of matching leather jackets, Converse shoes, and distressed jeans exemplified the New York style, as did Richard Hell's ripped t-shirts, safety pins, and choppy hair. By 1980, however, the Teen Idles were skeptical about whether established punk clothing styles genuinely signaled authentic rebellion or subversion anymore. Taking aim at British punk bands whose slogans, they felt, had proved hollow, the group composed “Fleeting Fury,” declaring that “the clothes you wear have lost their sting / So's the fury in the songs you sing (Teen Idles, 1980).” Cracks in the DC punk subculture's unity appeared with the arrival of the second wave in 1979 and 1980. First wave bands like the Slickee Boys and Nurses ardently supported the Teen Idles and other new arrivals, but other participants in the community regarded the younger punks as regressive and loutish. The second-wave punks' congregation in tony Georgetown was further evidence for some first wavers that the newcomers were privileged dilettantes or, as some dismissed them, “Georgetown Punks.” The second wave embraced the insult, chanting the tag at concerts to proudly proclaim their presence. “[W]e took Wite-Out and we put the letter “G” on the back of our boots and we wrote a G on our jackets,” MacKaye recalled. “[W]e're like, ‘Yeah, we're fuckin’ Georgetown punks'” (MacKaye, “Interview,” 2018). This response continued subcultural traditions of inverting language and style to subvert, express pride, and gain ownership over one's identity (Galinsky et al.), an act of redefinition at the heart of the punk subculture (Rombes 199). This form of inversion became a characteristic of Minor Threat's ongoing identity development. The June 1980 issue of Descenes, one of the DC scene's primary fanzines, needled the Teen Idles in a concert review. Writer Mary Levey 1 used yet another deprecating nickname–“teeny punks”—to describe the Teen Idles and their friends, conveying the general disrelish some first wavers felt. Levey opined that the younger punks' pack mentality “makes their number seem greater and keeps out the sad truth that ‘punk’ modes of dress and behavior have been ‘out’ in London and New York for about two years.” To her, the new arrivals were “behind the times,” imitators, instead of innovators. “Undeterred, they emulate the British working-class punks down to the last snarl,” she wrote. “Maybe that's why it's hard to take them seriously” (Levey 1980). MacKaye and his friends read the review and stung by the criticism, used it as motivation. “I think we took it as a challenge,” he recalled. “All right, here we go” (MacKaye, “Interview,” 2018). Throughout early 1980, the Teen Idles performed around DC frequently, wearing leather jackets dotted with colorful badges bearing the faces of the Sex Pistols' Johnny Rotten or local rockabilly musician Tex Rubinowitz, weathered jeans, and either leather boots or well-worn Converse Chuck Taylor All Stars. Nelson also wore a military coat that he plucked from the trash outside the German legation (Nelson), after which he détourned the coat with studs, badges, and a patch bearing an inverted cross (Nedorostek and Pappalardo). Like the band's leather jackets, the military coat evoked working-class masculinity that the band drew upon and experimented with as they established their punk identities (Maskell 186). However, the alterations the band made to the garments broadcast their disruptive ambitions. The Teen Idles' style reflected their music, a ragged rumble that stood out among the new wavers and the art crowd but had not fully found its unique voice. The DC band Bad Brains was among the first to transform punk rock into hardcore punk through radically faster tempos and vocal delivery, profoundly influencing the Teen Idles (Pearson 13). Bad Brains, along with the Slickee Boys, Black Market Baby, Trenchmouth, and a few others were among the few bands in the DC scene that the Teen Idles felt had not drifted too far into new wave music. Intrigued by American punk's new California vanguard and the hardcore sounds developing there, the Teen Idles ventured cross-country by bus to perform a handful of concerts in August 1980. The journey informed the band's appearance, sound, and perspectives on identity and violence for the remaining months they played together. Personal differences between band members, however, led the Teen Idles to disband, with their final concert occurring on November 6, 1980. When MacKaye and Nelson's new band, Minor Threat, debuted at a house show in DC on December 13, their appearances had undergone a subtle but undeniable shift. Meanwhile, the DC rivalry between some first and second wavers from earlier in 1980 had essentially fizzled. “By the time Minor Threat came along […] it was irrelevant to me,” MacKaye recalled (“Interview,” 2018). While the Teen Idles were once accused of presenting a regressive punk style, Minor Threat's dually contrary approach—challenging the necessity of punk's characteristic visuals while simultaneously incorporating mainstream apparel and retooling it to suit their own identities—would broaden the meaning and impact of punk style. This qualitative study relies on data collected through IRB-approved semi-structured in-person or videoconference interviews with members of Minor Threat, regional music scene participants, and fashion merchandising professionals. Interviews were transcribed and manually coded for themes. The content was supported by reviewing archival materials in the University of Maryland's Special Collections in Performing Arts and the DC Public Library punk archive, which both include fanzines, fliers, oral history interviews, and other materials used to investigate the background and aesthetics of the period. Members of the Teen Idles and Minor Threat were in their mid-to-late teens, an age range synonymous with growth and experimentation, which engendered the swift evolution that surged through the band members' identities. While many of their peers embraced punk to rebel against their families, both MacKaye's and Nelson's parents supported their transition. “I had no desire to shock my parents and piss them off,” Nelson recalled. “I had to put up with a certain amount of eye rolling from my Dad—I probably had a mohawk or, at least, very spiky, bleached blonde hair and boots. [My mother] loved her son [and] was proud to be with him” (Nelson, “Interview,” 2021). MacKaye's parents let him and his friends use their house as an informal hub. “[W]hen we first got into punk rock, most people who were into punk rock, their parents were not too keen on it,” MacKaye remembered. His teenage home at 3819 Beecher Street NW, which remains Dischord Records' mailing address, “was really kind of a safe hang [and] kids were always congregating here” (Weiss 25). MacKaye spent part of his youth in California, where he connected with its thriving skateboarding culture. He initially considered skateboarding and punk “completely incompatible.” As he wrote in 2014, “[m]any of the skaters I knew outside of my clique had no time for punk, and the few punks I was getting to know appeared to think that riding around on a skateboard was ridiculous” (“Untitled essay”). Nelson noted that MacKaye's prepunk, California-influenced appearance—“big beach ball of hair, board shorts, just very ‘70s looking”—evolved abruptly when punk became his passion (2021). MacKaye had his hair cut short and packed away his board shorts. However, his dedication to skating never wavered. “I saw a connection,” MacKaye wrote. “Skating had taught me how to redefine the world around me and thus was perfect training for punk” (“Untitled essay”). Two of MacKaye and Nelson's peers at DC's Woodrow Wilson High School also helped galvanize the pair's turn to punk. Danny Ingram and Nathan Strejcek were long-haired Aerosmith fans who had grown bored with mainstream rock music. After a friend introduced them to a slate of British punk records, the pair were exhilarated by the subculture's music and style. One day, MacKaye looked out the classroom window and was shocked to see Strejcek's transformation. “[I saw] a guy walking [with] short, bright pink hair and crazy buttons all over and I'm like ‘who the fuck is that?’” MacKaye remembered. “He cut off his ass-length hair. He just went so hardcore” (MacKaye, “Interview,” 2020). Later in 1979, MacKaye and Nelson had joined up with vocalist Strejcek, and guitarist Geordie Grindle, to form the Teen Idles. While Strejcek's transformation had been stunning, the audience's style at MacKaye and Nelson's first punk show had an even greater impact on them. The concert occurred on February 3, 1979 at Georgetown University's Hall of Nations and featured the New York City psychobilly band the Cramps, with an opening set by DC's Urban Verbs. “There were so many freakazoids […] so many wild looking people” MacKaye explained. “Kim Kane from the Slickee Boys was there, who just looked incredible. […] There was people that looked like junkies, people that looked like drag queens, and the Bad Brains guys were there. No one knew who they were. They were just crazy with […] bleach handprints all over their black clothes” (“Interview,” 2020). Kane's attire usually featured a collision of bold stripes, psychedelic colors, and wild movement, all of which complemented his distinctive facial hair. Both he and Bad Brains offered emerging punks lessons on the possibilities of creative expression and identity declaration through style. MacKaye and Nelson, who previously avoided standing out at Wilson High to avoid bullies, now understood the value of being seen. “[Dr. Know of Bad Brains] used to wear a surgical gown and blood all down the front and wore a mask and […] walk through Georgetown,” MacKaye recalled as he spoke about the impact Bad Brains had on him. “[T]hey were the scariest motherfuckers you ever saw” (Brookman and Lukshides 13). The Cramps' electric performance and their audience's transgressive dress led MacKaye to make his own aesthetic statement: “The next day—I had hair down to my shoulders—I just cut my hair off” (“Interview,” 2020). For MacKaye and Nelson, the Cramps' approach to subversion exemplified their authenticity. “That was the show where we decided we had to be in bands,” Nelson recalled (2021). As the Teen Idles developed, they wore clothing that projected their notions of otherness, masculinity, and rebellion onto themselves. “In the early punk scene, it was really clear that we wanted to distinguish ourselves from the mainstream. That was super imperative,” MacKaye declared (“Interview,” 2020). The teenage friends embraced their new sartorial freedom and the expanding possibilities of where they could obtain clothes, combing through bins of secondhand t-shirts or leather jackets at the Classic Clothing warehouse in Northeast DC in search of the right garment. “It was an adventure to go there, to venture into that part of DC which was, you know, entirely Black,” Nelson said (2021). The teens obtained spiked bracelets during illuminating treks to the Leather Rack, a boutique within a downtown gay men's leather bar called the Eagle. The effort that went into obtaining garments and accessories was integral to a punk's authenticity, according to MacKaye and his friends. “Punk in a bottle or in a box was not what we were about,” he emphasized (“Interview,” 2020). The group's approach put them at odds with those who shopped at boutiques like Georgetown's Commander Salamander. Wendy Ezrailson (a.k.a. Wendy Red) owned the punk style boutique from 1977 through 2010 and remembers it as “such a popular store, I can't even tell you” (Ezrailson 2018). The market for the clothing and accessories at Commander Salamander included everyone from participants of various subcultures—often suburbanites who wanted hard-to-find hair dyes and lacy tights—to the tourists who frequented DC's wealthy shopping areas (Sklar et al.). Questions within punk circles regarding whether or not to shop at prepackaged punk boutiques sparked debates that continue to this day (Sklar and Donahue). The Teen Idles' punk evolution was apparent by the summer of 1980, but the band's trip to California was particularly momentous. Their awareness of the distant, but inspiring, subculture grew through reading California fanzines like Slash, Flipside, and Damage, which offered coverage of a new strain of punk, characterized by bravado and menace. The Teen Idles were joined on the trip by their friends Henry Garfield2 and Mark Sullivan, and all were jolted by the harder side of punk life that they witnessed in California. They endured police harassment and encountered ferocious punks who beat down anyone who crossed them (Azerrad 125). When the DC punks attended a concert featuring the leading hardcore bands Dead Kennedys and Circle Jerks at San Francisco's Mabuhay Gardens, they were stunned by both the advances in musical creativity and the crowd's barbarity. MacKaye later proclaimed that the Circle Jerks' set was “fucking amazing. I mean, incredible!” (“Interview,” 2020). Nelson described the Teen Idles as “[a]lready pretty punked out” (2021) before the tour, but the band returned home from the trip with a harder edge, flaunting new flourishes of style and a willingness to physically confront people who mocked and threatened them on the DC streets. MacKaye acknowledged that the group returned to DC with “a lot of attitude. […] There'd been fights before we got to L.A., but when we came back, we went crazy and started fighting all the time” (Blush 136). Among the noticeable style additions were those influenced by the H.B.'s, a group of punks from Huntington Beach, California whose numbers included skateboarding icon, Tony Alva. “Their style was so intense,” MacKaye remembered. “They wore engineer boots and straight-leg jeans […] and bandanas around their boots, which was a real signifier. […] They would jump into the audience with their spurs on (MacKaye 2014).” Some of the symbols on their clothing referenced the region's Latino street gangs (Franco 2007). MacKaye recalled that people had told him stories about some Huntington Beach punks bleaching their hair white and then rubbing carbon paper on it to give it a “purplish” hue. “They were fucking mind blowing,” he declared (“Interview,” 2020). The California punks also introduced the H.B. Strut, a dance trumpeting their masculinity and fraternity that dared anyone to challenge them. Participants furiously ran and skipped in a circle around the pit, arms flailing and bodies colliding, while those uninterested in the physicality were forced to move out of the way. The H.B. Strut minimized more inclusive punk dancing, like pogoing or the rag doll. As Nelson observed, “the women generally all get pushed out towards the edges and stay in the back of the room” (2021) and the California punks' new dance was not conducive to drapey dresses, bondage straps, high-heeled shoes, or other fanciful garbs. Like the second-wave DC punks, the H.B.'s were often rebuked by their predecessors in the Los Angeles area punk scene. Don Bolles of the Germs, one of L.A. punk's founding bands, cracked that the behavior of new punks made concerts “like being at a Nuremberg rally with all these football jocks.” Similarly, Billy Zoom of L.A. punk pioneers, X, complained that “the suburban beach hardcore thing ruined a good scene that we had all worked so hard to create” (Spitz and Mullen 222). Because their punk scene predecessors had also criticized them, the Teen Idles undoubtedly saw themselves in the H.B.'s; however, the reflection was a fun house mirror image. “In our shows and within our community, we were totally goofy guys,” MacKaye explained. “We were just good kids. That was our whole joke: We don't do anything [objectionable]” (Azerrad 124). Additionally, the trip also inspired the band members to begin drawing large black Xs on their hands to emphatically indicate that members of the group were underage, and thus, not attending the concert to drink alcohol. They borrowed the technique from management at the Mabuhay Gardens, who employed it to spot underage patrons. Just as they had embraced the dismissive “Georgetown Punks” moniker, members of the Teen Idles and their friends proudly drew large Xs on their hands to symbolize and reaffirm their youth and drug-free lifestyle. As MacKaye recalled, “Even those of us who were old enough to drink would take the designation as a sign of solidarity, and in a way, it became part of our punk identity at that time” (Horgan 14). In the straight-edge subculture that spread internationally in the ensuing years, drawing black Xs on each hand to indicate a person's drug-free identity became a standard signifier (Rettman and Civorelli 2017). Nelson considered the influences they imported to DC from California as “sort of the deathblow to the UK punk look.” Bandanas, spurs, and X markings grew popular in their home scene, and yet, simultaneously, by the Teen Idles' final days in November 1980, Nelson's devotion to more intimidating “punk” attire was already waning. “I was already just about to start winding down from looking terribly punk,” he said (2021). Building off of the Teen Idles' evolution, MacKaye and Nelson quickly launched a new band with a revised approach to style notable for what was not employed as much as what was. As 1980 ebbed into 1981, Minor Threat's emergence marked a turning point within DC's punk subculture. Bands like the Slickee Boys' and Urban Verbs' relative dominance had wane
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