Ian MacKaye

Ian MacKaye is an American musician, record label owner and producer. MacKaye is best known as the frontman of the groundbreaking hardcore punk band Minor Threat and the post-hardcore band Fugazi, and as a co-founder of legendary independent Dischord Records label. He is also credited with coining the term “straight edge” in a Minor Threat song.

Ian’s other musical projects include Embrace (no relation to the English emo band) which recorded one posthumous album; Egg Hunt, a one-off project that was his last musical collaboration with Jeff Nelson; Pailhead, which was a Ministry side-project with MacKaye as lead vocalist (this is the only project with MacKaye’s involvement that never recorded for Dischord); Skewbald, a short-lived band MacKaye and Nelson had formed after Minor Threat’s initial breakup (a posthumous single became Dischord’s 50th release); The Evens, a duo with MacKaye’s partner Amy Farina; and The Teen Idles, MacKaye’s first band and the first artist on Dischord Records.

He is heard playing lead guitar on Sonic Youth’s “Youth Against Fascism”; it is MacKaye’s only appearance on a major label release.

In the early 2000’s, MacKaye started a smaller sublabel distributed by Dischord, Northern Liberties, for more unusual projects that didn’t fit the Dischord mold.