The mosh pit can be understood as a form of circle dance

August 19, 2022 11:18 AM

In an effort to overcome my inability to convey (in words) the emotional rush of mosh pits to people who would never step foot into one, in 2016 I started taking my medium-format film camera into metal shows at St. Vitus in Brooklyn, New York.

Photojournalist and Anthropology student Ryan Jones looks at mosh pits.
posted by Rumple (26 comments total)

Cool shots but a Mamiya 7 is an expensive bit of gear to be risking at shows like that.
posted by octothorpe at 12:05 PM on August 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

One of my bigger culture shocks was seeing a concert in Vienna. Zero moshing was happening. It was a great show, but looking from the sitting section to the standing section was odd. A whole crowd of people enjoying the show but barely moving besides the applause.
posted by ockmockbock at 12:10 PM on August 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

In the same vein: The Mosh Pit Paintings of Dan Witz.
posted by hoodrich at 12:20 PM on August 19, 2022 [12 favorites]

Recently saw a friend's band play in a tiny metal venue when they toured through Asheville...I was pleasantly surprised with the gender equality in the pit! It was 50/50 as far as my wife and I could tell. What I loved was the reaction to the inevitable knockdowns or falling...immediately everyone around the fallen would stop moshing and swarm to pick up the person.

My wife and I left the show talking about how "The kids are alright!"

The last time I moshed I was either barefoot or wearing flipflops...
posted by schyler523 at 12:26 PM on August 19, 2022 [9 favorites]

A whole crowd of people enjoying the show but barely moving besides the applause.

So Heaven was in Vienna this whole time.
posted by star gentle uterus at 12:40 PM on August 19, 2022

The (blessed!) irony of basing this project at "St. Vitus in Brooklyn."
posted by jamjam at 12:55 PM on August 19, 2022 [5 favorites]

I don't know if mosh pits have changed a lot or if my YouTube Google-foo is just terrible, but I was trying to explain to my son what a mosh pit was and looking for videos on YouTube, and all the mosh pits I could find were just so sparse. There were huge gaps between people, like when that "swing your arms around like an industrial robot that went crazy and is out to kill" style of dancing became popular, except that nobody was doing the killer robot dancing. Nothing I could find would reconcile with the fact that when I was a young 'un there were always crowd surfers on top of the mosh pit.
posted by Bugbread at 5:25 PM on August 19, 2022

Decades ago I used to go to hardcore, grindcore, and death metal shows at lots of clubs including Gilman. Everybody knew the rules: there's one pit, it's at the front of the crowd in the middle, people who don't want to mosh are left alone, if anyone falls down they are helped back up. And then there were the Gwar shows. I would leave early in disgust because the crowd was obnoxious. There'd be like four pits at random spots, and part of their fun was colliding with people who just wanted to watch the band. It was less about the counter-culture and more about being the coolest (most obnoxious) frat boy.
posted by arancidamoeba at 5:48 PM on August 19, 2022

I went to a GWAR show in the 90s in LA, and the crowd was a really good one. Friendly, nobody trying to prove what a tough guy they were, etc. I wonder if the difference was regional (Berkeley drew a different GWAR crowd than LA) or temporal (like maybe 90s GWAR shows had good audiences but 80s shows had bad audiences, or the like). Or a combination of the two.
posted by Bugbread at 6:21 PM on August 19, 2022

Bugbread, the swinging arm dance you describe is hardcore dancing. It probably got introduced to metal shows through crossover thrash and the early 90s metalcore stuff, but it was really popularized with the metalcore bands from the New Wave of American Heavy Metal (like Killswitch Engage) and the deathcore bands (like Whitechapel) that followed. You still, thankfully, find normal moshing at death metal and thrash metal shows, but given that metal and hardcore have more or less merged into a single scene, it's not uncommon to see both kinds of moshing (and animosity between both fanbases) at any kind of heavy music show.
posted by TheKaijuCommuter at 6:59 PM on August 19, 2022

Many years ago I caught a Dead Kennedys show in (of all places) Palo Alto, CA. Part way through the evening I found myself adopted by some burly dude all dressed up in military camo garb and with his face painted up in camo colors. Best as I can tell from his mutterings I reminded him of a friend/buddy who was killed in Vietnam. He even called me by that name---I don't remember what it was, unfortunately. I just rolled with the whole thing, never getting any kind of menacing vibe from him. Plus I was there with some friends who could keep an eye out on me. More than anything I felt something more like a sadness in him. I guess hanging with him reminded me of someone he lost, that was OK.

Anyway...at some point he insisted that I needed to have my face painted and when I agreed (in for a dime...you know the rest)) he pulled out a handful of military camo paint sticks. He then proceeded to warm the ends of the sticks in a lighter flame and paint my face. (Reminded me of how Lance in 'Apocalypse Now' had painted his own face.) I think it turned out half of one color, one half of another. He stopped, took a look at me, pronounced the work 'perfect' (he might have even said 'pretty') and then, without warning, propelled me into the mosh pit with him. Honestly, a total exhilarating experience. I would not have guessed.

As some point he must have bounced cause I looked around and couldn't find him anywhere. That was probably 40 years ago now.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 7:11 PM on August 19, 2022 [37 favorites]

Such a vivid story, Insert Clever Name Here.
posted by umbú at 8:53 PM on August 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

A whole crowd of people enjoying the show but barely moving besides the applause.

Heaven was in Springfield this whole time.
posted by y2karl at 8:58 PM on August 19, 2022

Mid 90s university town Pietermaritzburg, South Africa had a punk scene, almost solely the result of one Jan Welter, the 'father' of the scene who collected vintage band gear and recorded bands in the kitchen of his flat back of the Victorian cricket stadium.

I learnt to pogo dance, and do the shoulder bump, a big deal since just a year ago, I was a classical violist into string quartets and African jazz.

A really friendly crowd, help always on hand if someone fell over, or lost their glasses*.

A few years later I was in Cape Town at a club and pogo dancing to the band, and I gave someone a gentle shoulder bump. My action was met with shock. And I was puzzled. Cape Town is SA's culture capital with far more bands.


*I once did this at a Metallica stadium gig, it was huge, first time in SA, and kinda embarrassing to one minute be all like devil signs, and the next, crawling around in the grass!
posted by BrStekker at 11:18 PM on August 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is a cool visualisation of something I’ve often experienced in mosh pits myself. It’s transcendental in a way.

Though not a metal band, the mosh pit at concerts of the Dutch band De Staat literally does a circle dance during their song Witch Doctor.
posted by fregoli at 2:11 AM on August 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

A friend of mine was just telling me yesterday how one of the safest feelings they'd ever had was at a metal show, when she had some health issues and was about to faint, and all the hairy and burly dudes immediately created a space for her and one of them acted as, what do you call it, backrest? Like on a chair, so that she could sit down and lean back. And called medics ofc etc.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 3:46 AM on August 20, 2022 [4 favorites]

I discovered slam dancing and the mosh pit back in the late 80s at the tail end of the great 80s indie punk underground explosion.
The energy was exhilarating; and if you fell 5 hands would reach down and pull you up. It was so different from the big, mainstream rock and roll shows I had seen; this almost weird sense of intimacy and feeling we were sharing something.
At the end of a gig, after copious amounts of booze and slam dancing I would feel this very beautiful sense of peace; it felt like the only time I could get to that particular place back then.
Obviously not a sustainable way of achieving nirvana.
But, I do have wonderful memories of those times, and it was more slamming than moshing(yes, there is a difference) and those nights, full of energy, intensity, music, and a collective sense of being are still central to my being.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 3:50 AM on August 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

I recently watched the Woodstock 99 documentary on Netflix, and I’m convinced there’s a wonderful psychology/biology crossover research project to be done studying mosh pits. The liquidity, surging and wave motion of the crowds during the Limp Bizkit, Korn etc crowds is amazing and absolutely terrifying.

The two most dangerous mosh pits I was caught in were in the late 90s: Silverchair, having to get hauled over the front barriers, and Nine Inch Nails, where I experienced that horrific sensation of having my feet lifted off the ground and wondering if I’d ever stand again.
posted by chronic sublime at 4:44 AM on August 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

I used to mosh in my young days. UK, 88-93ish. Small-ish gigs. They were the friendliest, kindest places. I'd go so far as to say I learned a lot about people, especially subgroups that were looked down upon by the cool kids who, it turned out, had no idea how you behave in a mosh pit.
posted by dowcrag at 10:18 AM on August 20, 2022

the cool kids who, it turned out, had no idea how you behave in a mosh pit.

so many hardcore shows ruined back in the day by football jocks showing up to bully people because they could. Every now and then, you'd see one get put in his place. Maybe not beaten up (down?) but neutralized, firmly escorted from the mosh. That was always good to see. Some of them even learned a thing or two. Because a mosh pit may not have rules but it does have energies. And the good ones can be amazing -- everybody looking out for everybody else, like a great big play fight.
posted by philip-random at 11:17 AM on August 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

I love punk and I'm 5'0" and I hate mosh pits so much.
posted by pelvicsorcery at 2:15 PM on August 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

> some burly dude all dressed up in military camo garb and with his face painted up in camo colors... As some point he must have bounced cause I looked around and couldn't find him anywhere.

If you re-read the beginning of your story you'll figure out why you couldn't find him.
posted by The corpse in the library at 2:53 PM on August 20, 2022 [4 favorites]

Yeah I’m not such a fan of the best spot from which to watch a show being taken over by a relative handful of dudes who can’t find another way to express a feeling.
posted by sinfony at 9:29 AM on August 21, 2022

I don't actually know what genre(s) of music I was moshing to in the late 80s. I was just there to Lindy at full energy. But I totally remember both the early maximize-energy style of everyone in the pit -- and the pit-wall -- taking care of everyone, and the shift to aggression and damage.

At one point I was crowdsurfing accidentally and there were hands all over me and I wasn't being groped. Transcendental. The possibility didn't last.
posted by clew at 12:26 PM on August 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

sinfony: "Yeah I’m not such a fan of the best spot from which to watch a show being taken over by a relative handful of dudes who can’t find another way to express a feeling."

I'm not sure if you're talking about all moshpits, but on the odd chance that you are, I went to a lot of shows with friends in high school, and they all had moshpits, and we enjoyed moshing, but we had plenty of other ways of expressing feelings. It wasn't an emotional hangup thing, it was just one of a myriad of ways of having fun.

That said, these were shows where I'd say at least half of the audience was moshing, so it wasn't really "a relative handful". If you're talking about that thing where like 95% of a crowd doesn't want to mosh but then five dudes try to start a moshpit in prime territory, yeah, that sucks.
posted by Bugbread at 4:57 PM on August 21, 2022

I was thinking right now about why moshing is fun. I mean, obviously, there are the things like "in a good pit everyone watches out for each other," but those are what makes a good pit, not what makes the actual act enjoyable. And this is just a fledgling idea right now, but what I'm thinking so far is:

Unpredictability.

I like to dance (like, regular dancing), and that's a lot of fun, but when you dance you know everything that will happen at each step. If you jump up, you will go up for a second, and then you will come back down. If you step to the left, you will move to the left. If you spin, you will spin.

With moshing, you're dancing but there's also a random number generator constantly running. You might suddenly move to the right! You might move to the right an inch but then suddenly move to the left! You might unexpectedly spin!

It's like mixing dancing with being on a roller coaster or a bumper car.

In fact, in my own experience, the thing that has felt the most like moshing so far has been those bouncy castles in amusement parks and fairs and children's events. You run, you bounce, you lurch. You bump into things but it doesn't hurt unless you're really unlucky. And you're surrounded by other people who are doing the same bouncing and running and lurching and bumping.
posted by Bugbread at 6:34 PM on August 21, 2022