Most people know punk music as kids lacing up their Vans, spiking their hair and rocking out to Green Day and Blink 182. In addition to reputations for dark clothes and bad attitudes, “punks” are also known to be drug abusers and alcoholics. So is there another side to punk rockers? The answer is yes and these rockers are part of the Straight Edge or sXe movement.

What exactly does it mean to be Straight Edge? It’s not a club, religion or cult. As most Straight Edgers will put it, it’s just a title. “When you call yourself Straight Edge, it’s basically just a way of letting everybody know that you live the clean life. Nothing more, nothing less,” said Alex Windell, a 17-year-old athlete and sXe of three years.

Dating back to the Ramones and Sex Pistols, punk music came alive in the 1970s. Along with this genre came a new lifestyle for teenagers. Underage drinking, drugs and sex became everyday things. Some people, however, didn't like what was happening on the punk scene.

These people, still hardcore fans of the music, started a movement in the early 1980s. Like most things, this movement started out small. It began with a few hundred kids wearing the underage drinking “X” on their hands to show that not only were they alcohol-free but also that they wanted to be alcohol-free. It didn’t take long for this trend to catch wind and hit it big.

“My mom and dad listened to punk music a lot in the 80s. It’s pretty cool because they were around when the whole thing started,” said Emma Buckett, a second-generation sXe. “They were there when all the movements were happening and they were just as hardcore sXe as the next person.”

Before anyone knew it, Minor Threat, a popular punk band in the early 1980s, had written a song about the movement, forever giving it the title “Straight Edge." egend has it that one day, a band member was using a wooden ruler to draw a poster advertising the next concert. In correspondence with the straight side of the ruler, the band members decided the name Straight Edge was an appropriate metaphor for living a “straight” life. The name stuck. So did the movement. A collection of popular bands wrote over ten songs about what was happening on the punk scene, permanently engraving Straight Edge in the minds and history books of the future.

“You know something is really important when it lasts for more than a couple of years,” said Kris Alfredson, a 16-year-old member of a band called The Phalcons. “Straight Edge has been around for over twenty years. More and more people are calling themselves Straight Edge every day."

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