What's Really Going On Inside a Mosh Pit?

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Speaker 2 Before we begin, this episode contains adult language.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 It might have even been my first concert without a parent involved.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 We thought he was kind of the coolest guy that we had ever seen.

Speaker 2 As Joel and his buddies watched Henry Rollins sweating and shirtless and caught up in the moment, they got caught up in the moment too.

Speaker 2 Full of energy and fearlessness and adolescent boy oomph, They decided they needed to go into the mosh pit.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 A mosh pit is a staple of a Henry Rollins show.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Within about maybe 20 seconds of going into the pit, lost those glasses right away, and I was terrified.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 My glasses were probably the most valuable thing that I owned.

Speaker 2 So Joel steeled himself and pushed his way back into the seething mass of people.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 hit on all sides by human bodies. But he was with one hand holding in the air my glasses, and he gave them back.
Then he just kind of vanished. I think he wore glasses.

Speaker 2 A Good Samaritan was the last thing Joel had expected to find. But it turns out the Moshpit contains all sorts of surprises.

Speaker 2 This is Dakota Ring. I'm Willa Paskin.
The MoshPit has a reputation. It's a violent place inhabited by mostly white guys getting their aggression out.

Speaker 9 And you know, there's some truth there.

Speaker 2 But it's also a place where strangers will save your glasses. A place bound by camaraderie, and believe it or not, etiquette.

Speaker 2 In this episode, Dakota Ring's producer Katie Shepard is going to satisfy her lifelong curiosity about moshing, a 50-year-old cross-genre live music phenomenon that's alive alive and well to this day.

Speaker 2 She's going to speak with punks, physicists, and the people who just can't stop doing it to learn about moshing's unwritten rules. So today on Decodering, what's really going on inside a mosh pit?

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Speaker 2 Katie's going to jump in now.

Speaker 11 I've always had complicated feelings about moshing.

Speaker 11 I had a set idea of what it was.

Speaker 8 I'm either going to get punched in the face tonight or I'm going to punch someone else in the face.

Speaker 11 So we'll see how that is. 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.

Speaker 11 It looked like a release. So back in 2011, when I was 22, I finally decided to do it.
Go into the mosh pit.

Speaker 11 It was at a concert by the Irish-American Celtic punk band Flogging Molly. I liked their music fine, but I'd heard from friends about the raucous mosh pits that happened at their shows.

Speaker 11 I arrived early and found a spot in the center of the room.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 It'd be perfect. And then the moshing started.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 I was rattled, but I remember watching other people in the pit having the time of their lives.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 12 Punk.

Speaker 11 Why do they like it so much?

Speaker 12 They gotta do something with their time. Nothing else is going on.
It's the only form of revolution left.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 13 And I invented a dance that would involve being able to knock them them all over the fucking hundred club.

Speaker 13 So I just used to throw myself about, leap up like horizontal and sideways, just like boing, boing, boing, boing.

Speaker 11 That's Sid Vicious, the basis for the Sex Pistols, one of the earliest bands to self-identify as punk.

Speaker 11 He claimed around 1976 he created one of Punk's hallmark moves, just to get out his agitation with another group of guys.

Speaker 11 The simple move became known as Pogoing, and it spread through the punk scene and those adjacent to it.

Speaker 2 The pogo has has been done like this.

Speaker 11 That's Debbie Harry of the New Wave band Blondie. She's jumping up and down on a black and white Manhattan cable access show in 1978.

Speaker 14 But you have this oak, you know, arch your back and throw your head around. After you do this for half an hour, the idea is to sprinkle beer on your head.

Speaker 14 Like this!

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 15 I hate my boss. I hate the people that I work with.
I hate my parents. I hate these authoritative figures.

Speaker 11 This is Keith Morris of the hardcore bands, Circle Jerks, and Black Flag, talking about the scene's attitude in the documentary American Hardcore.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 11 And at every hardcore show you could find exactly that. Attendees going off.

Speaker 6 There was nothing more taking it to the furthest extreme than destroying everybody in the crowd.

Speaker 11 Stephen Blush is the director of American Hardcore.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 11 The violence at hardcore shows could be a lot, but it was communal.

Speaker 6 There's an inner peace in that storm that you find with the like-minded people.

Speaker 6 And the minute you step out of that, you're back to reality.

Speaker 6 But while you're in it,

Speaker 6 it's this incredible, powerful force.

Speaker 11 It was also at hardcore shows that some pits began to take the shape often seen at concerts today.

Speaker 16 And as you keep moving around in a circle like this, because that's when pit moves is in a circle, people are jumping off the path.

Speaker 11 This is a scene from the 1983 documentary, Another State of Mind, about two punk bands on tour.

Speaker 16 Just keep moving around, and it doesn't matter if you fall down or not, because your buddy's going to be there to pick you up, or someone's going to pick you up.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 As he's talking, he's demonstrating, bent over at the waist, swinging his arms, and pacing in a circle.

Speaker 12 Some people call it slamming, and some people call it pogling, and some call it the skang. But I just call it dancing because that's normally what you're doing.

Speaker 11 What he's doing is basically what we think of as moshing. But in the early 80s, most people weren't calling it that yet.

Speaker 8 As I understand it,

Speaker 8 the word mosh comes from a misinterpretation.

Speaker 11 James Spooner is an artist and filmmaker behind the Afropunk documentary and Music Festival.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 During a Bad Brains 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.

Speaker 11 But the crowd misunderstood the bad brain singer.

Speaker 8 It's just funny to me. You know, I can assume like a bunch of white kids in the audience hear him say Mash Dam Babalon and like

Speaker 8 don't already know that phrase and invent a completely new word.

Speaker 11 Mashing or moshing was born. By the early 1990s, it had spread to the dozens of offshoots of punk punk as well as heavy metal and grunge.

Speaker 11 In 1992, Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit became the biggest song in the world. The video showed people moshing in a dank dark high school gym.
And with that, moshing went mainstream.

Speaker 4 I remember being

Speaker 8 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

Speaker 1 saw

Speaker 8 the Smells Like Teen Spirit video and are just bouncing off each other. They don't understand that there are moves.

Speaker 11 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 freedom to do whatever you want.

Speaker 11 But James, a longtime mosher himself, set me straight.

Speaker 8 The kids that people notice and are like enjoy watch dancing are also just good dancers.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 James noticed similarities in other styles too.

Speaker 8 If you go to a Jamaican dance hall, they're doing like the ducky wine. It looks a lot like headbanging.

Speaker 8 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 moshes.

Speaker 11 Moshing has a whole bunch of other moves. There's the two-step, a syncopated stutter step.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Of course, there's headbanging, stage diving, and crowdsurfing.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 That That wall of death is from a show by the band Lamb of God.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 11 And this is just one of the ways there's some order at work, even if outsiders can't see it.

Speaker 11 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 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 I'm usually described as a happy-go-lucky, sickly positive sometimes kind of person.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 11 But Christina says that doesn't mean they haven't been knocked around some.

Speaker 17 I've had my glasses broken. I lost a shoe one time.
I had an asthma attack one time.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 11 She says this kind of help isn't rare. It's one of Moshing's unwritten rules.

Speaker 17 Well, the first rule is If somebody falls down, pick them up. If you see someone in trouble, somebody struggling, you got to help them.

Speaker 11 But there's another less chill rule too.

Speaker 17 If you don't want to be in the goddamn mosh pit, get the hell out of the way.

Speaker 11 Even so, her sister Courtney actually feels safer at concerts where people mosh because the rules are much more explicit and everyone knows what to expect.

Speaker 18 I was the most scared, I think, at a Lizzo concert.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 I love Lizzo, but I would go with a friend for some protection.

Speaker 11 Christina and Courtney's sense that mosh pits are, in their own way, orderly, is actually backed up by something surprising. Physics.
More on that when we come back.

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Speaker 11 Jesse Silverberg is a physicist who is really into heavy metal.

Speaker 4 Black metal, Christian metal, death metal, dark metal, doom metal, extreme metal, folk metal, yes, folk metal.

Speaker 11 That's from his TEDx talk on the physics of mosh pits.

Speaker 7 I became interested in moshing by going to heavy metal concerts.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 7 What had really jumped out of 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.

Speaker 7 It was very reminiscent of a solid state physics course I had been taking.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 For the purposes of studying moshing, they defined four forces.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 11 The kind of motion they were quantifying was all the jostling and bouncing and banging around people do in the pit before a circle starts to take shape.

Speaker 11 But what they found when you put all these motions into the machine...

Speaker 7 It was predictive.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Just the way birds will flock or fish will form a shoal.

Speaker 7 We didn't put a circle pit into the model. We didn't bake that into the equations.

Speaker 3 It emerged naturally.

Speaker 7 And that is something that is seen if you go to enough of these shows.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 But even as the pit has order, it's also not without its flaws.

Speaker 24 Well, 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,

Speaker 24 this is messed up.

Speaker 11 Sarah Marcus is the author of Girls to the Front, the true story of the Riot Girl Revolution about the punk feminist movement in the 90s.

Speaker 24 I don't just come to a show to be a coat rack while the boys mosh.

Speaker 11 Getting treated like a coat rack was just one thing.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Even with efforts like this, it could be hard to tamp down the angst that moshing releases once it's out.

Speaker 24 Moshing is like, it's fun and it's this great release, but at the same time, like, you've, you've opened that box and it's hard to close it up again.

Speaker 11 In other words, moshing can also bring out the worst in people.

Speaker 24 You have like horrible fights breaking out at punk shows between like Nazi skinheads and anti-Nazi skinheads.

Speaker 11 James Spooner also remembers Nazi punks and skinheads at shows when he was growing up.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 11 And then there's Moshing's biggest black eye.

Speaker 25 The riots.

Speaker 11 Woodstock 99 was a concert festival infamous for being as violent as the original Woodstock was peaceful.

Speaker 11 For almost three days, the festival headlined by a number of new metal bands was plagued by poor sanitation and and a lack of drinking water.

Speaker 11 There were incidents of sexual assault, and by the end, the crowd of thousands descended into chaos.

Speaker 11 All of this was captured by MTV, which blasted images to its audience of burning fires and thrashing, seething crowds, all moshing as one.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 James Spooner.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 26 There clearly were serious problems with the crowd behavior there, but usually most festivals, there's very little collective disorder.

Speaker 11 Chris Cocking is a crowd management expert who teaches social psychology at the University of Brighton.

Speaker 11 Chris says it's not usually the crowd that is to blame when something goes horribly wrong at big events.

Speaker 11 In most crowd disasters where people are killed or injured, it's usually because of structures or interventions outside of the crowd itself.

Speaker 11 It's the way the security or the venue are treating the crowd or thinking about public safety.

Speaker 1 It's the way there's no water or bathrooms, lack of infrastructure.

Speaker 11 as was the case with Woodstock 99. And sometimes it's fear of the crowd in advance that causes so many problems.

Speaker 26 When moshing first started at some venues, there was a venue that's been bulldozed now that was called the London Astoria.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 11 But Chris saw moshers and the bands figure out how to solve that problem by hiring their own security that understood moshing.

Speaker 11 And as long as basic requirements and safety precautions are present, big crowds tend to demonstrate a great deal of restraint.

Speaker 26 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,

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 11 I'm often baffled that concerts work at all. Strangers packed into a venue together, waiting sometimes for hours for the bands to start, often in summertime heat.
There's booze and other substances.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 This is also true of mosh pics.

Speaker 11 Christina Long.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 27 If in the next month you end up going to a show and

Speaker 27 moshing, maybe I could like record you before you go in.

Speaker 4 Wouldn't that be hilarious?

Speaker 11 After the break, with the help of Christina, I head back to the mosh pit.

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Speaker 9 Hey there, I'm Dahlia Lithwick, Coast of Amicus, Slate's podcast about the Supreme Court and the law.

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Speaker 29 Okay, so we're in Times Square on a side street here.

Speaker 11 I met up with Christina Long at a venue called the Palladium to see a Metal Corps show. A band called The Devil Wears Prada opened for another called August Burns Red.

Speaker 20 They've been around for at least a decade each, if not longer, and they're very well known in the scene.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 She had to scream to be heard. The serious fans

Speaker 11 who've been waiting for hours to see their artists, they're not gonna move.

Speaker 11 They're not moving, they're committed. Almost everyone in the pit was a man.

Speaker 20 When the show starts again, look around and see if anybody's staring at you. Like any men are saying at you, because sometimes they're very shocked.

Speaker 19 Like,

Speaker 20 a girl's here, and she likes it.

Speaker 11 Soon enough, the band The Devil Wears Prada took the stage. Oh, it's fucking good to be back in New

Speaker 11 One of Christina's favorite fans, The Acacia Strain, sums up what she loves about this scene.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 17 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,

Speaker 17 in the next breath, I also would like you all to know that I hate you all and I hope you fucking die.

Speaker 17 And then he would go, let us all proceed to rage.

Speaker 11 She loved it. The drama.
the honesty, the contradiction, the space to be seen, to be angry, to be mean.

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 But I couldn't bring myself to jump in. Just like last time, I realized moshing

Speaker 11 just isn't me.

Speaker 11 Still, I was happy to take it all in, from a distance, with Christina, my moshing guide, by my side.

Speaker 11 We could get a little closer.

Speaker 11 Typically, on the right-hand side, you're safe.

Speaker 11 And I could see how much it meant to the people in the pit.

Speaker 11 That this was their place to come together to get some frustration out. All while dancing really, really violently.

Speaker 11 After the show was over, I asked Christina to hang back to rate the night's moshing.

Speaker 21 What did you think of the moshing tonight? It wasn't any like negative chaos.

Speaker 11 Like, I didn't see anybody. As she was talking, I realized the moshers at this Metal Corps show.

Speaker 1 They were

Speaker 11 singing a song I knew. It's cracking me up that Sweet Caroline is playing.
Everybody knows the words.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 1 Touching hands,

Speaker 1 reaching out,

Speaker 1 touching me,

Speaker 1 touching you,

Speaker 1 sweet Caroline.

Speaker 11 This is Decodering. I'm Katie Shepard.

Speaker 2 And I'm Willa Paskin. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.
This episode was written by Katie Shepard.

Speaker 2 Katie Shepard and Willip Haskin produce Decodering. This episode was edited by Andrea Bruce and Willip Haskin with help from Joel Meyer.
Derek John is Slate's executive producer of Narrative Podcasts.

Speaker 2 Merit Jacob is Senior Technical Director. Thank you to Vivian Goldman, Paolo Raugusa, and Philip Moriarty, whose insights and research on moshing were crucial to this episode.

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Speaker 2 So please go to slate.com slash decoderplus to join Slate Plus today. We'll see you next week.

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