This is the third article in our series on youth subcultures. The first two installments are on Zazous and Chongas.

“I’m a person just like you, but I’ve got better things to do, than sit around and fuck my head, hang out with the living dead, snort white shit up my nose, pass out at the shows, I don’t even think about speed, that’s something I just don’t need, I’ve got the straight edge.”

Those are the words of Ian Mackaye, frontman of the seminal Washington DC hardcore band Minor Threat, in 1981. The loud, pissed off 46-second track, which appeared on the band’s eponymous debut 7”, quickly took on a life of its own, and went on to become the anthem of an international movement.

Straight edge — abstinence from alcohol, drugs, nicotine, and in some cases promiscuous sex — is a self-imposed label that alienated young punks, nerds, and other outcasts have chosen for themselves for more than three decades, starting in the early 1980s and continuing through today. Straight edge kids are recognizable by the letter X, which is often emblazoned on their clothing or Sharpied on the backs of their hands. (It’s a symbol adapted from the pre-wristband era, when doormen at bars and clubs flagged underage patrons by marking their hands with x’s.)

Straight edge kids “x-ed up” with tattoos and marker in the 1990s. (PYMCA/Getty)

Straight edge was in many ways a response to the notoriously substance-addled punk culture of the 1970s. Punk, too, was a resistance movement, but its rebellion was laced with nihilism. And drugs. A lot of drugs. Many punks were angry but cynical, and sometimes indolent, expressing their hostility for mainstream culture through fashion and generalized acts of fuck-it-all recklessness or disobedience.

In a 2013 talk at the Library of Congress, Mackaye said, “[In the ’70s] pretty much what I saw were just people getting high. In high school, I loved all my friends, but so many of them were just partying. It was disappointing that that was the only form of rebellion that they could come up with, which was self-destruction.”