Logo #215: Minor Threat

Too soon for another sheep? Ian MacKaye of discusses the plaintive sheep at the corner of the cover of the 1983 Minor Threat LP "Out of Step": "As I remember, the basic concept of the black sheep running away from the serious white sheep was largely mine, but Cynthia Connolly did the actual illustration and the black sheep's primary representation is all Cynthia. I never thought of it as a logo, but I reckon it's by far the image that most people associate with Minor Threat." Straight out of the Ed Emberley school of illustration, Connolly's sheep is the poetry of economy - a triangle, stick legs and a curly black cloud. That's all. You can draw it anywhere and with almost anything. It doesn't even have to be a big drawing - that's the brilliance of the concept. Black sheep are small but noticeable. They usually make things happen.

I personally don't "get" hardcore - I'm too apolitical and spindly to have ever made it as a punker - but, as I told MacKaye the other day: what matters is not so much the music itself as it is the resultant ripples from the Work; concentric circles that affect people positively and act as catalysts for change. So in that way, I have a really good feeling about MacKaye's Work. Every so often you get a pornographer named Eon McKai running around out there, but I guess there's no helping that (although I wish there were!). As far as straight edge goes - which I suspect I am by default because I'm real square and don't see an inherent profit motive in anything the movement abhors (and if I were dyslexic, I might think they were all about s-e-x) - Richard and Judy tell you everything you need to know! Embrace your inner cluelessness! It's how you learn about things and it makes our sitcoms far funnier because of it!

7 Seconds: Logo #10

One or two because I missed a day or three.

Straight-edge punk pioneer Kevin Seconds (née Marvelli) designed the 7 Seconds logo in 1980. The cattier dyslexics among us may mistake "sXe" for "sex," but the straight-edge credo - a slightly grumpier Eagle Scout worldview - is concerned with anything but. 1980 was a good year for emblems: Devo's energy dome, The Anti-Nowhere League's spiked fist and mace, and the White Spirit eagle. "The logo first appeared on gig fliers in our hometown of Reno," Seconds remembers - which, having abstained from copious amounts of drink and drugs, is fairly easy to do after 27 years. Here the circle also suggests a mosh pit - which, in an odd way, with its convivial picking up of punks who have fallen to the ground, is comforting in itself. 7 Seconds, having much in common with common-sense Christianity in its core philosophy, cleverly offers a simple yet multi-faceted icon with straight edges that can be seen as either crooked crosses or an overwhelming paranoia from persecution by authority - something inherent in punk from day 12 (it took The Man a little while to catch on).