Beer and Loathing in New Jersey: Earth Crisis in Concert

By Christopher Pearson | Wednesday, January 20, 1999

For some musicians, songwriting is an art of subtlety:

Die motherf*ckers/we never want you back.
You're unworthy of the honor/that the title straightedge holds.
Your ilk's a dime a dozen/there's no room for weaklings here.
Through dedication to the creed/I live free and clear...

Karl Buechner is not one of these musicians. Lead singer of veteran vegan straightedge band Earth Crisis and lyricist of the above song chorus, Buechner explains, 'We're not writing pop songs. We have no interest in that. We are into aggressive powerful music...with a message.' He and his band are slated to perform that music tonight at the Stone Pony, a small New Jersey club that once nurtured the gooey power ballads of a teenager from nearby Sayreville named Jon Bon Jovi.

The 'message' of Buechner's music is straightedge, a movement for which he is the most well-known icon and a creed among hard-core punks that proscribes all drugs and alcohol, condemns promiscuous sexual behavior, and, among the more rigorously straightedged, requires veganism, a diet free of all animal products. No meat. No eggs. No dairy. In Marshall McLuhan's dictum, 'the medium is the message.' Straightedge rejects that notion whole cloth, separating the aggression and abandon of the music from its demands of self-control and social awareness.

Though it now has a following throughout America and Europe, Straightedge (sXe) originally emerged in the early 80's as an adjunct to the East Coast punk scene. Heroin and cocaine were flourishing and in their wake came kids receptive to an anti-drug message. As the epidemic moved inland, Straightedge followed and it quickly established a presence in most major cities of the East. At this point, straightedge was little more than a loosely organized group of urban punks dissatisfied with the drug scene. It took the formation of the band Minor Threat by a lanky teenager from Washington DC named Ian Mackaye to give the nascent movement definition. Minor Threat's frenzied delivery of three chord, two minute songs established the musical parameters.

The lyrics to a track on the bands' second EP gave the movement a name: 'I'm a person just like you/ But I've got better things to do/Than sit around and fuck my head/hang around with the living dead/Snort white shit up my nose/pass out at the shows/ I've got the straightedge.' Energized by Minor Threat and Discord, the record label Mackaye founded, straightedge exploded. By the mid 80's straightedge bands like Connecticut's Wide Awake, Washington, D.C.'s Youth Brigade, and New York's Youth of Today were playing to clubs packed with kids.

The inheritors of this legacy, Earth Crisis has drawn an eclectic crowd tonight, a lot of whom should be expected, namely pencil-thin teenagers shaved to the scalp with shirts that read 'Poison Free.' Yet there remains another contingent of fans, middle aged, tattooed generously, and mostly bald, who seem somehow out of place. Their limbs and jowls are lean but their bellies aren't. They each look like they just swallowed a basketball whole. One of them wears both a shirt that says, 'Mean People Rule' and a perplexed look that seems to say, 'What the hell is wrong with these kids?'

Today, straightedge owes its current popularity to bands like Earth Crisis, which take the message of straightedge punk and fuse it to the caustic riffs of heavy metal. Dubbed 'metalcore,' this union is a development that for many years seemed inevitable. Most straightedge kids never just listened to punk but also loved the music, if not the message, of metal bands like Slayer and Venom, whose drug-addled paeans to Satan, war, booze, and death exist at the polar opposite of the teetotaling spectrum as the straightedge ethic. Buechner himself acknowledges the influence of traditional heavy metal on his music. 'I love Slayer,' he enthuses.

Yet even fans of heavy metal, not just punks, are now supporters of the new metalcore sound. It is, in fact, this mixing of genres that sometimes brings such divergent fans, including aging metalheads weaned on Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, to Earth Crisis's shows. These heavy metal fans care little, it seems, whether a song's lyrics praise some obscure pagan war god or read like a public service announcement from Nancy Reagan. They simply feed off the visceral aggression of the music, be it straightedge or metal, ignoring the message of the lyrics