Social Issues and Activism
Stretch Arm Strong has actively addressed several pressing social concerns, such as the following:
- Their first album for Solid State, Rituals of Life, was dedicated to a friend of the band, Matthew Leveton, who was injured in a car accident and left quadriplegic. The band has since done several benefit shows for raising money for Leveton's recovery.
- On their album A Revolution Transmission, they had a song called "Take Back. Control" which provided a candid, but clean, discussion of sexual violence. The song was intended for rape victims in particular, and they included a telephone number for a rape hotline in the liner notes for the CD.
- Band members Chris McLane and David Sease are longtime vegetarians, have shown support for PETA, and the band went on a "Hardcore Against Fur" tour starting in December 2004 with H2O and With Honor.
Throughout their career, Stretch Arm Strong has made their music—and themselves—as youth-friendly as possible. Most of their lyrics have been much more positively oriented than the typical hardcore band's lyrics. In their song "For the Record" on A Revolution Transmission, they tell their story of how they grew up in the early South Carolina hardcore scene and went to all-ages shows; they have also refused to play shows at venues (or even in cities) which would not allow anyone under 18 to attend their concerts. In addition, some of the band members served as schoolteachers when not playing with the band.
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Famous quotes containing the words social and/or issues:
“What is done for science must also be done for art: accepting undesirable side effects for the sake of the main goal, and moreover diminishing their importance by making this main goal more magnificent. For one should reform forward, not backward: social illnesses, revolutions, are evolutions inhibited by a conserving stupidity.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)
“The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)