Featured Essay: Minor Threat, Nostalgia, and Teenage Rage

by Lang Huck

I touch the record and I am sixteen again, straight-edge more or less by default, sitting in my room listening to “Seeing Red” and thinking, yeah, these guys get it.

I don’t remember where I got my copy of Minor Threat’s Complete Discography CD, but it was in heavy rotation when I was in high school. I didn’t care that they had broken up two years before I was born, the raw youthful anger was enough to make a connection regardless of time and distance. As someone who also spent my teenage years not smoking (both of my grandfathers died of smoking-related illnesses)*, drinking (I had snuck a few sips of my dad’s Stag beers and didn’t really care for it) fucking (if anyone was interested in doing that with me when I was in high school, I was utterly oblivious) or doing drugs (I wouldn’t have had the first clue where or how to get drugs, even if I had any particular interest in using them), I identified with the ideas put forth in songs like “Straight Edge”, “In My Eyes”, and “Out of Step”, even if I didn’t really feel like I had the intent necessary to consider myself straight-edge; my sober state was more one borne out of inaction than of any militancy of belief.

*(I eventually dabbled. Please don’t tell my mom.)

Still, I listened to the CD enough that eventually, when the time came to adorn a jacket with patches, as every young punk inevitably does, Minor Threat took a prominent location (front right chest pocket) – which promptly got me mocked for clearly being a lame straight-edge goober by some of the more substance-inclined members of my social circle. Whatever, just because some senior in a ripped-up leather jacket thought the music I liked was lame, that didn’t make me want to let it go. (Wasn’t that the whole idea behind this whole punk rock thing anyways, not giving a fuck about what other people thought?) Sitting in my room, listening on my shitty little portable CD player, through my shitty little earbuds, the lyrics now hit even harder.

My looks, they must threaten you

To make you act the way you do

Red, I’m seeing red

I’m seeing red

I’m seeing red

I’m seeing red!

That the band performing this song was barely older at the time they wrote it than I was listening to it was not lost on me. Unable to articulate it any better myself (the less said about my own teenage songwriting attempts, the better), simply sitting in my room and letting the sounds of raw adolescent rage wash over me was catharsis in itself.

…thanks a lot, friends.

Years go by, and eventually the jacket gets retired to a place of honor in the closet, and the CD gets sold during a purge ahead of a cross-state move. I do, to various extents, all of the things Ian said he didn’t do in those songs. I go back and listen to a few tracks online every so often, but now, after spending several years removed from my unfocused teenage anger and frustration, so much of it doesn’t connect with me in the same way that it used to. In an act surely indicative of my growing maturity, I bought two Fugazi albums from the same record store that I sold my Minor Threat CD to.

When the First Six Dischord Records box set was announced in July 2021, I preordered it almost immediately. The Minor Threat self-titled EP and In My Eyes EP are enough to convince me to drop my $50, the other four* are just a bonus. This was in the throes of COVID-related delays in record pressing and international shipping, and the original planned release date comes and goes. The label sends out updates on the manufacturing and shipping progress, first late 2021, then early 2022. That’s fine, I can wait that long. Nostalgia is a powerful thing. Almost powerful enough to make a person forget that there are other, more pressing things that they probably could have spent that 50 bucks on.

*(an unannounced, previously unreleased EP by the Slinkees, “Who Cares?”, is also included in the box set.)

The wait is worth it.

March 2, 2022. With trembling hands, I very carefully slice open the shrink wrap (always my least favorite part of getting a new record) and slide the top cover off.

More than twenty years after listening to these songs for the first time, I go down to my basement, drop the needle, and let the raw adolescent rage wash over me again, and it connects just like it used to. 

I touch the record and I am sixteen again, straight-edge more or less by default, sitting in my room listening to “Seeing Red” and thinking, yeah, these guys get it.

From all the way down in a partially-finished basement in suburban southeast Missouri,  Lang Huck makes music as Double Hell Death Match, and makes posts as himself. He can be found on all of the usual websites.