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The music
The Beatles, the Grateful Dead, and the Rolling Stones were fine, but hardcore sounded like something that was already part of him. He heard the Cro-Mags, Agnostic Front, and the Bad Brains, and he listened to the lyrics of Minor Threat and agreed with them. The scene had a do-it-yourself attitude: we can make this happen for ourselves, and we don't need anybody else.
The baseline it set
It set a baseline in his head: being okay with being outside, being okay with saying no, and being okay with not going along with what everyone else is doing. The music stayed in his head for life as a soundtrack.
Asking the boss
In the military that baseline mattered. When leadership told him to do something that did not seem like a good idea, he had the wherewithal to ask the boss a question about it. He would say he wasn't sure it was a good idea and wonder aloud whether there might be a better way to get it done. He was never a jerk about it.
Why did My War's second side divide fans?
Black Flag formed in Hermosa Beach, California, and released My War in 1984 on SST Records, the label the band itself ran. The first side kept the fast hardcore sound the band was known for. The second side slowed down into heavy, sludgy songs influenced by Black Sabbath, and many punk fans disliked the change. Critics have often traced some of the sludge and grunge sound of the following decade partly to it.
Why did hardcore bands run their own labels?
Early hardcore bands in the late 1970s and early 1980s found that major labels and most clubs had no interest in them. Black Flag's own label, SST Records, put out the band's records and those of many other bands. In Washington, D.C., Ian MacKaye and Jeff Nelson founded Dischord Records in 1980 to release their own music and that of other local bands. Dischord's first release was the Teen Idles' Minor Disturbance EP.
Why did Minor Threat's lyrics travel beyond music?
Minor Threat's 1981 song Straight Edge, written by singer Ian MacKaye, rejected the drinking and drug culture around the Washington punk scene. Fans took the title as a name, and straight edge grew into a movement of people who abstain from alcohol and drugs. It spread through the hardcore scene across the United States in the 1980s. New York bands including Youth of Today carried it into that city's scene.