Like Minor Threat before them – and unlike the drug-addled, booze-heavy scene of nearby Manhattan punk – the bands abided by a straight edge lifestyle, the kind that would define the youth crew movement, a strict doctrine of no drugs and no booze partnered with a heavily vegetarian diet. The record became formative for a young band from Connecticut called Youth of Today, as well as Crippled Youth, whose 1986 debut EP Join the Fight has a cover image of a bloodied Maurice (Rocket) Richard shaking hands with (Sugar) Jim Henry of the Boston Bruins after what looked like a brutal hockey game, and who would go on to be the iconic New York Hardcore band Bold. Two years after Skins, Brains & Guts, 7 Seconds released their debut album 1984’s The Crew. They’d say, ‘Aren’t you proud to be punk?'” In Steven Blush’s seminal American Hardcore: A Tribal History, Kevin Seconds refers to the athletic look as a particular kind of anti-punk fashion, “I didn’t buy into the whole thing of walking around like peacocks, with big blue-green Mohawks,” he explains, “The kids I knew that were into that gave me shit because I’d always just go for a shaved-head look. But in 2016, a football letterman jacket mixed up with a Screaming Females shirt and a pair of Chuck Taylors, a teen skating in old Sk8-Hi Vans and an Oakland Raiders t-shirt, a guy walking around the indie music fest in a vintage Hakeem Olajuwon jersey or even the famous “Yankees Suck” t-shirt worn by Boston Red Sox fans, in some way, can trace back to that single EP.Īnd it really started as a middle finger to punk’s uniform look of the time. Nearly 35 years ago, punks and sports just didn’t mix. For a band that wrote songs about hating sports, they certainly appeared otherwise. Most defining are the faded smudges of black grease a football or baseball player might apply to keep the sun out of their eyes. The cover image was of Jimmy “Dim Menace” Borghino, the original singer of 7 Seconds, scowling with the word “society” etched on his raised fist.
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