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Decoder Ring: What's Really Going On Inside a Mosh Pit?
00:30:30
The etiquette, science and enduring appeal of a concertgoing ritual.
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- [00:01]
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Hey listeners. I'm Joel Anderson, host of Slow Burn Becoming Justice Thomas. Thanks to all of you who listened to our four part series on the unlikely journey of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. We're already hard at work on our next season of Slow Burn, but in the meantime, we're gonna use this space to showcase some of Slate's other great narrative podcasts, starting with Decoder Ring, which is all about cracking cultural mysteries, many of them from the past. After that, you'll hear our history podcast, One Year, which explores the forgotten stories and wildest moments that changed America one year at a time. So keep listening, here's Dakota Ring host Willa Paskin.
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Before we begin, this episode contains adult language. In 1991, when Joel Meyer, a senior editor and producer at Slate, was 14 years old, he went to the very first Lollapalooza concert tour when it stopped in St. Paul, Minnesota.
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It might have even been my first concert without a parent involved.
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There were so many bands he and his friends loved playing, Jane's Addiction, Living Color, and especially Henry Rollins from the hardcore band Black Flag.
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We thought he was kind of the coolest guy that we had ever seen.
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As Joel and his buddies watch Henry Rollins sweating and shirtless and caught up in the moment, they got caught up in the moment too. Full of energy and fearlessness and adolescent boy oomph, they decided they needed to go into the mosh pit.
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Because I'm a very cautious and conservative person by nature. I think I was maybe the last person to go in. But then I did it.
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A mosh pit is a staple of a Henry Rollins show.
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The problem is I wear glasses, and I have had to wear glasses since the fourth grade and I can't see anything without them. Within about maybe 20 seconds of going into the pit, lost those glasses right away. And I was terrified.
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He couldn't see very well. He sure wasn't going to be able to see any of the other bands and his mom was going to be pissed.
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My glasses were probably the most valuable thing that I owned.
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So Joel steeled himself and pushed his weight back, back into the seething mass of people.
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And lo and behold, I looked over and there was this guy whose face I will never forget, and he was having the time of his life being hit on all sides by human bodies. But he was with one hand holding in the air my glasses. And he gave him back. Then he just kind of vanished. I think he wore glasses.
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A Good Samaritan was the last thing Joel had expected to find. But it turns out the Mosh Pit contains all sorts of surprises. This is Dakota Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. The mosh pit has a reputation. It's a violent place inhabited by mostly white guys getting their aggression out, and you know there's some truth there. But it's also a place where strangers will save your glasses. A place bound by camaraderie and, believe it or not, etiquette. In this episode, Dakota Rings producer Katie shepherd is going to satisfy her lifelong curiosity about moshing, a 50 year old cross genre live music phenomenon that's alive and well to this day. She's gonna speak with punks, physicists, and the people who just can't. You can't stop doing it. To learn about moshing's unwritten rules. So today on Decoder Ring, what's really going on inside a mosh pit? Katie's gonna jump in now.
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I've always had complicated feelings about moshing. I had a set idea of what it was.
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I'm either gonna get punched in the face tonight or I'm gonna punch someone else in the face. So we'll see how that.
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And though I didn't want to punch anyone in the face, the idea of jumping around screaming, thrashing, losing myself in a mash of humanity appealed to me. It looked like a release. So back in 2011, when I was 22, I finally decided to do it. Go into the mosh pit. It was at a concert by the Irish American Celtic punk band Flogging Molly. I liked her music fine, but I'd heard from friends about the raucous mosh pits that happen at their shows. I arrived early and found a spot in the center of the room. I remember looking at the crowd, all the people gathering around me, thinking that once the music started, we would become a heaving, swirling mass, all seeking catharsis within the music. It'd be perfect. And then the moshing started. I lasted all of 15 seconds in the pit. I wanted to like it, but I most definitely did not. It didn't make me feel liberated or free. It made me feel like I was about to get an elbow to the face. I was rattled. But I remember watching other people in the pit having the time of their lives. I know the mosh pit isn't for me, but damn, some people sure love it. And all these years later, I still want to know why. I started with where moshing comes from in the first place.
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Punk.
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Why do they like it so much?
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They gotta do something with their time. Nothing else is going on. It's the only form of revolution. Left.
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That's from the 1981 documentary the Decline of Western Civilization, about the LA punk scene. Punk was famously born in the mid-1970s as a rebellion against everything. Arena rock, disco, hippies, conformity, conservatism, corporations, you name it. And while everyone knows there's punk music in fashion and even a punk ethos, there's also punk dancing.
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I invented a dance that would involve being able to knock them all over the fucking Hundred Club. So I just used to throw myself about, leap up like horizontal and sideways.
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Just like boing, boing, boing, boing. That's Sid Vicious, the basis for the Sex Pistols, one of the earliest bands to self identify as punk. He claimed around 1976 he created one of punk's hallmark moves just to get out his agitation with another group of guys. The simple move became known as pogoing. And it spread through the punk scene and those adjacent to it.
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The pogo has been done like this.
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That's Debbie Harry of the new wave band Blondie. She, she's jumping up and down on a black and white Manhattan cable Access show in 1978. But you have to so arch your back and throw your head around. After you do this for half an hour, the idea is to sprinkle beer.
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On your head like this.
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The pogo doesn't look like much, but that was kind of the point. Punks wanted to get as far from the polished moves of disco like the Bump and the Hustle as they could. They wanted to be reckless, rowdy and sloppy and smash into each other. And over time this chaos got codified and became a kind of standard feature of shows. It happened in the hardcore scene.
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I hate my boss, I hate the people that I work with, I hate my parents, I hate these authoritative figures.
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This is Keith Morris of the hardcore bands Circle Jerks and Black Flag talking about the scene's attitude in the documentary American Hardcore.
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And now I have a chance to be with a bunch of my own type of people and I have a chance to go off.
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And at every hardcore show you could find exactly that. Attendees going off.
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There was nothing more taking it to the furthest extreme than destroying everybody in the crowd.
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Stephen Blush is the director of American Hardcore.
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I compare it a lot to Lord of the Flies where it's the kids have to run their own society and it works out really well for a while and then it eventually goes to hell.
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The violence at hardcore shows could be a lot, but it was communal.
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There's an inner peace in that storm that you find with the like minded people and the minute you step out of that, you're back to reality. But while you're in it, it's this incredible, powerful force.
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It was also at hardcore shows that some pits began to take the shape often seen at concerts today.
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And as you keep moving around in a circle like this, because that's the way the pit moves is in a circle, people jumping off.
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This is a scene from the 1983 documentary Another State of Mind, about two punk bands on tour.
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Just keep moving around. It doesn't matter if you fall down.
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Or not, because your buddy's gonna be.
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There to pick you up or someone's gonna pick you up.
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The young man talking is in a small, empty, dingy room, and he's wearing a white T shirt and trousers, and he has closely shorn hair. As he's talking, he's demonstrating, bent over at the waist, swinging his arms and pacing in a circle.
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Some people call it slamming, and some people call it pogolin, and some call it the skang. But I just call it dancing, because that's normally what you're doing.
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What he's doing is basically what we think of as moshing. But in the early 80s, most people weren't calling it that.
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Yet, as I understand it, the word mosh comes from a misinterpretation.
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James Spooner is an artist and filmmaker behind the Afropunk documentary and music festival. He says the story goes that the term originated in the early 80s with bad brains, an influential hardcore band whose members were black and Rastafari. During a Bad Brain show, the lead singer said to mash down Babylon, which had appeared in a number of old reggae songs like this one performed by Leroy King. But the crowd misunderstood the Bad Brains singer.
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It's just funny to me, you know, I can assume, like, a bunch of white kids in the audience hear him say, mash down Babylon, and, like, don't already know that phrase and invent a completely new word.
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Mashing, or moshing, was born. By the early 1990s, it had spread to the dozens of offshoots of punk as well as heavy metal and grunge. In 1992, Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit became the biggest song in the world. The video showed people moshing in a dank, dirty, dark high school gym. And with that, moshing went mainstream.
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I remember being a sophomore in high school walking into this club and seeing the mosh pit and understanding that these kids have no idea what they're doing. These are a bunch of kids who saw the Smells Like Teen Spirit video and are just bouncing off each other. They don't understand that there are moves.
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I have to be honest, initially it never really occurred to me that there were moshing moves either. I thought the whole point of moshing was that it was freedom to do whatever you want. But James, a longtime mosher himself, set me straight.
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The kids that people notice and are like, enjoy, watch dancing. Are also just good dancers.
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James told me the first time he realized this was in his mid-20s. He was dating a choreographer whose style was rooted in Haitian dance. She invited James to show some moshing moves to her dance group, and in return, the dancers showed him their own similar moves based on West African and Haitian dance. James noticed similarities in other styles too.
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If you go to a Jamaican dance hall, they're doing like the ducky wine. It looks a lot like headbanging. I've seen stuff in Jamaican dance halls that look more like WWF wrestling than anything I've seen at a punk show. Which is why I say the whole world.
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Moshes moshing has a whole bunch of other moves. There's the two step, a syncopated stutter step. There's also windmills, which are all about whirling your arms and picking up change, which is punching your arms down toward the ground and then throwing your elbows back. Of course there's headbanging, stage diving and crowd surfing. There's also the much more nerve wracking wall of Death, where the crowd splits in two and runs at each other like they're in Braveheart. What?
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How Braveheart.
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That wall of death is from a show by the band Lamb of God. But one of the things that James said that most convinced me the mosh pit isn't the chaotic, lawless place I thought was also one of the simplest.
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My first show, I went the wrong way in the circle pit and I got trampled. I never did that again. Nobody told me that. Oh, the circle pit always goes counterclockwise.
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And this is just one of the ways there's some order at work, even if outsiders can't see it.
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What always excited me about this space is that there are a lot of unwritten rules to keep it constructive and not actually true. Chaos. It might look like chaos, but it's not.
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Christina long grew up in the midwest and has been moshing since she was a teen. She's the co founder of Black girls World. It's an organization that celebrates black women and women of color who participate in heavy music genres. She co founded the organization with her sister Courtney, who also loves to mosh.
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I'M usually described as a happy, go lucky, sickly positive, sometimes kind of person. And I'm like, if y' all knew the anger I had inside of me that I'm only allowed to express through these rock shows, through music, you need that outlet sometimes when you feel powerless.
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But Christina says that doesn't mean they haven't been knocked around some.
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I've had my glasses broken. I lost a shoe one time. I had an asthma attack one time. I had a guy get KO'd. He was completely knocked out, stone cold, and he fell on me. But in all those situations, the people around me helped. They didn't just ignore us.
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She says this kind of help isn't rare. It's one of moshing's unwritten rules.
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Well, the first rule is, if somebody falls down, pick them up. If you see someone in trouble, somebody struggling, you gotta help them.
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But there's another less chill rule, too.
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If you don't want to be in the goddamn mosh pit, get the hell out of the way.
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Even so, her sister Courtney actually feels safer at concerts when where people mosh because the rules are much more explicit and everyone knows what to expect.
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I was the most scared, I think, at a Lizzo concert. Some of those people, they were, like, dressed to the nines and all these sparkly outfits, and they were ready to fight about who was closest to the stage. I love Lizzo, but I would go with a friend for some protection.
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Christina and Kourtney sense that mosh pits are their own way. Orderly is actually backed up by something surprising. Physics. More on that when we come back. Jesse Silverberg is a physicist who is really into heavy metal, black metal, Christian.
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Metal, death metal, dark metal, doom metal, extreme metal, Folk metal. Yes, folk metal.
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That's from his TEDx talk on the.
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Physics of mosh pit, speed stone, or symphonic thrash. And of course, just plain old heavy metal. I became interested in moshing by going to heavy metal concerts.
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When he was an undergrad, he took a date to a metal show, and they found themselves standing to the side watching the mosh pit.
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What had really jumped out at me and was really distracting during that show was not the date, which is probably where I probably should have had my attention, frankly. But being able to see the way that people were moving and the way that the crowd was moving collectively, it was very reminiscent of a solid state physics course I had been taking.
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The movement in the pit reminded Jesse of how groups of fish swim collectively and how birds flock. And Jesse wondered if something similar wasn't happening with Moshing he and his colleagues thought Newton's second law of motion, force equals mass times acceleration might be an effective way of looking at mosh pits. For the purposes of studying mosh p watching, they define four propulsion. The force I generate when I move. Repulsion, when two people bounce off each other. Noise, which refers to the presence of randomness. And lastly, the force of flocking, the tendency for people to follow other people around.
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So the first thing that we did was we wrote some computer vision image analysis code that quantified the motion of people in a mosh pit.
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The kind of motion they were quantifying was all of the jostling and bouncing and banging around people do in the pit before a circle starts to take shape. But what they found when you put all these motions into the machine, it was predictive. This computer model predicted that when you get people bouncing off each other, slamming and pogoing and skanking, a circle will likely start to emerge, just the way birds will flock or fish will form a shoal.
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We didn't put a circle pit into the model. We didn't bake that into the equations. It emerged naturally, and that is something that is seen. If you go to enough of these.
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Shows, you can create your own mosh pit simulation using the same tools Jesse and his colleagues did. We'll link to it in the show notes and you'll see how the circle pit emerges naturally. It's just how humans arrange themselves when, you know, they're violently hurling themselves at each other in an enclosed space while listening to very loud music. But even as the pit has order, it's also not without its flaws. If there was a mosh pit of all boys, and they're asking their female friends to hold their coats, the girls would be like, this is. This is messed up. Sarah Marcus is the author of Girls to the the True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, about the punk feminist movement in the 90s. I don't just come to a show to be a coat rack while the boys mosh. Getting treated like a coat rack was just one thing. Another was that women and people with physical vulnerabilities would find themselves being pushed out of the pit by aggressive male dancers. Which is why in the 1990s, the band Bikini Kill started to make space for them at the front of the stage by screaming the phrase that gave Sarah's book its name. Even with efforts like this, it could be hard to tamp down the angst that moshing releases. Once it's out, moshing is like. It's fun. And it's this great release, but at the same time, like, you've opened that box and it's hard to close it up again. In other words, moshing can also bring out the worst in people. You had like, horrible fights breaking out.
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At punk shows between, like, Nazi skinheads and anti Nazi skinheads.
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James Spooner also remembers Nazi punks and skinheads at shows when he was growing up.
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By the early 80s, there were already. Nazi skins were a huge part of the punk community that we had to deal with. That wasn't like a weird anomaly in my small backwards town.
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And then there's moshing's biggest black eye. Shit is fucked up, man. Let's start a riot. Woodstock 99 the Riots Woodstock 99 was a concert festival infamous for being as violent as the original. Woodstock was peaceful. For almost three days. The festival, headlined by a number of nu metal bands, was plagued by poor sanitation and a lack of drinking water. There were incidents of sexual assault, and by the end, the crowd of thousands descended into chaos. All of this was captured by mtv, which blasted images to its audience of burning fires and thrashing, seething crowds. All moshing is one. Moshing had grown out of small communal scenes, basements and tiny venues where small groups of people all knew the rules of the road. At Woodstock 99, moshing became something completely different.
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James Spooner it doesn't scale up. It's like trying to make a batch of brownies. You just do the recipe times 100 and it just turns out like garbage.
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There clearly were serious problems with the crowd behavior there. But usually most festivals, there's very little collective disorder. Chris Cocking is a crowd management expert who teaches social psychology at the University of Brighton. Chris says it's not usually the crowd that is to blame when something goes horribly wrong at big events. In most crowd disasters where people are killed or injured, it's usually because of structures or interventions outside of the crowd itself. It's the way the security or the venue are treating the crowd or thinking about public safety. It's the way there's no water or bathrooms, lack of infrastructure, as was the case with Woodstock 99. And sometimes it's fear of the crowd in advance that causes so many problems. When moshing first started at some venues, there was a venue that's been bulldozed now that was called the London Astoria. When they had thrash metal bands playing there and the security were not aware of the concept of moshing. They almost started a riot because people were moshing and people were trying to stage dive and the security Just basically started beating the shit out of them. But Chris saw Moshers, and the bands figure out how to solve that problem by hiring their own security that understood moshing. And as long as basic requirements and safety precautions are present, big crowds tend to demonstrate a great deal of restraint. Even if you have individuals who sit there and go, I want to fuck things up. And, you know, some people mosh more vigorously than others. I would say that doesn't translate into a kind of collective mass where everybody is moshing in a let's fuck things up kind of way. I'm often baffled that concerts work at all. Strangers packed into a venue together, waiting sometimes for hours for the band to start. Often in summertime heat, there's booze and other substances. There's short people who don't know what to do about tall people, and the other way around, people who arrive late and push in front of the ones who got their doors. It's easy to see how things can get out of control. Except they rarely do. And when they do, it's like a plane crash. This very irregular event that's so horrible, it's kind of all you can think about, eclipsing the hundreds of thousands of times. Things went fine, or maybe even better than fine. This is also true of mosh pits. Christina Long.
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If anyone is there to cause harm and they indicate that they're there to hurt someone on purpose, we as a community will pick you up and kick you out of the venue.
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So with Christina's reassurances and the laws of physics, with Chris Cocking's expertise and James Spooner's list of moshing moves, I felt newly curious. I wanted to experience a mosh pit again, but not fully confident about jumping in, I asked the Long sisters if one of them might be willing to go with me. If in the next month you end up going to a show and mosh is, and maybe I could, like, record you before you go in.
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Wouldn't that be hilarious?
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After the break, with the help of Christina, I head back to the mosh pit. Okay, so we're in Times Square on a side street. Here. I met up with Christina Long at a venue called the Palladium to see a metalcore show. A band called the Devil Wears Prada opened for another called August Burns Red.
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They've been around for at least a decade each, if not longer, and they're very well known in the scene.
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The Palladium holds about 2,000 people, and as we entered, a small mosh pit was already moving in the middle of the Room. I asked her why it wasn't right in front of the stage. She had to scream to be heard.
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The serious fans who've been waiting for hours to see their artists, they're not going to move. They're not moving. They're committed.
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Almost everyone in the pit was a man.
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When the show starts again, look around and see if anybody's staring at you like any men are saying at you. Sometimes they're very shocked, like, a girl's here, and she likes it.
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Soon enough, the band the Devil Wears Prada took the stage.
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Oh, it's good to be back in New York City.
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One of Christina's favorite bands, the Acacia Strain, sums up what she loves about this scene. Earlier, she told me they start their shows by announcing that audience members were safe to express anger or any feelings they might have about being neglected and unloved.
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We want you to know there's a place for you to go to express yourself and all the things you feel so that you don't go back out in the world and do something worse. And then the musician would say, in the next breath, I also would like you all to know that I hate you all and I hope you fucking die. And then he would go, let us all proceed to rage.
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She loved it. The drama, the honesty, the contradiction, the space to be seen, to be angry, to be mean. And I get that anger is an emotion we're supposed to douse quickly. But what if in the right place, with others who understand us, we didn't have to. When the moshing started, I could picture it jumping into the pit, losing myself, releasing some primal rage, and screaming into each other's faces. I got close to the edge of the pit, But I couldn't bring myself to jump in. Just like last time, I realized moshing just isn't me. Still, I was happy to take it all in from a distance. With Christina, my moshing guide, by my.
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Side, we can get a little closer. Typically, on the right hand side, you're safe.
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And I could see how much it meant to the people in the pit that this was their place to come together, to get some frustration out, all while dancing really, really violently. After the show was over, I asked Christina to hang back to rate the night's moshing. What did you think of the moshing tonight?
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There wasn't any, like, negative chaos. Like, I didn't see anybody.
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As she was talking, I realized the movie moshers at this metalcore show, they were singing a song I knew it's cracking me up that Sweet Caroline is.
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Playing everybody knows the words.
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At that moment, listening to a Neil diamond song about people reaching out to one another, I understood how someone could be scared of the mosh pit and how someone else could jump in face first. Touching hand, reaching out Touching me touching.
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You Sweet Caroline.
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Good times never seem so good.
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Foreign.
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This is Decoder Ring. I'm Katie Shepherd.
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And I'm Willa Paskin. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us@decoderinglate.com this episode was written by Katie Shepherd. Katie shepherd and Willa Paskin produced Decoder Ring. This episode was edited by Andrea Bruce and Willa Paskin with help from Joel Meyer. Derek John is Slate's Executive Producer of Narrative Podcast. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. Thank you to Vivian Goldman, Paolo Raucousa, and Philip Moriarty, whose insights and research on moshing were crucial to this episode. If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Even better, tell your friends if you're a fan of the show, I'd also love for you to sign up for Slate plus. Slate plus members get to listen to Decoder Ring without any ads and their support is great crucial to our work. So please go to slate.com decoder plus to join Slate plus today. We'll see you next week.
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