Moshing

Moshing (and a mosh) refers to the activity in which audience members at live music performances aggressively push or slam into each other. Moshing is frequently accompanied by stage diving, crowd surfing, and headbanging. It is commonly associated with concerts by heavy metal, punk rock, and alternative rock artists.

Audience members at a Dillinger Escape Plan concert moshing in front of the stage.

For other uses, see Mosh (disambiguation).

Moshing primarily takes place at live shows, though it can be done to recorded music, too. In the 2000s, many variations of moshing exist, such as "thrashing", and the dance is practiced at concerts of many musical genres. Moshing is typically done in an area in front of the stage which is referred to as the mosh pit or circle pit.

While moshing is seen as a form of positive feedback or reflection of enjoyment from live audiences, it has also drawn some controversy over its dangerous nature. However, it is generally agreed that moshers are not trying to harm one another and follow a "moshing etiquette" which promotes safety through behaviors such as immediately helping audience members that have fallen back to their feet to avoid their being trampled.

History

Origins of the term

Darryl Jenifer and H.R. (Paul Hudson) of the Washington, D.C. area band Bad Brains, regarded as a band that "put moshing on the map", were partly responsible for the coining the term. Due to their affected Jamaican-accented pronunciation of the word mash in their lyrics and stage banter, fans in D.C. heard this as mosh instead. During the emergence of the American hardcore scene, the dance was frequently spelled mash but pronounced mosh, as in the 1982 song "Total Mash" by the Washington D.C.-based hardcore group Scream. Later, the term began to appear in hardcore fanzines of the time with its current spelling.

Origins of the dance

A precursor to moshing, called "acookie", can be traced back to 1970s punk rock shows in the form of "the pogo" and was later developed into moshing by the hardcore punk subculture of the early 80s. While many use the terms slamdancing and moshing interchangeably, distinctions can be made in that slamdancing is typically more frenetic, with body movements such as arm-swinging, while moshing is slower and more exaggerated.

Moshing is thought to have originated in Orange County, California during the first wave of American hardcore in the early eighties at the Cuckoos Nest.[2] Early moshing can be seen in the film Urban Struggle. Violence and physicality characterized aspects of the movement and were manifesting on the dancefloors of shows. Slamdancing began as an audience response to the bands of the L.A. scene such as Black Flag, Fear and The Circle Jerks, whose more rhythmic and heavy form of punk rock was being called "hardcore."

To match the intensity and aggressive nature of this new music, fans would move frantically and engage in stage diving. Beyond audience and band members slamming into one another and leaping from stages into the crowd, slamdancing was defined by "strutting around in a circle, swinging your arms around and hitting everyone within your reach." This aspect of slamdancing was termed the "Huntington Beach Strut" (or "HB Strut") after the neighborhood of Orange County where it originated. Author Steven Blush writes of the HB Strut:

According to lore, Mike Marine, a former U.S. Marine and star of The Decline of Western Civilization, performed the first slamdance in 1979. Marine created a vicious version of punk dancing. He'd smash the fucking face of anyone who would get near him--especially some Hippie, who'd get pulverized.

Marine and others in the Huntington Beach and Long Beach areas invented this violent dance and soon exported it to the San Francisco and Bay Area scene, where pogoing was still the prevalent form of dance. From there, it spread to the East Coast scenes through national acts such as Bad Brains and other D.C. area natives such as Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye who witnessed the HB Strut while traveling.

Because the early American hardcore scene gave way to and coexisted with the burgeoning crossover thrash scene, it, too, became defined in part by slamdancing, although for a while, according to They Might Be Giants' John Linnell, it reached a point where "it didn’t matter what kind of music you were playing or what kind of band you were; everybody moshed to everything. It was just kind of the enforced rule of going to concerts."

Controversy and anti-moshing stances

File:No moshing.jpg

Some concert venues do not allow moshing. This notice at a Pearl Jam concert prohibits moshing and crowd surfing in the venue.

Some bands such as The Smashing Pumpkins have taken a stance against moshing. At a 1996 Smashing Pumpkins show in Dublin, 17 year old Bernadette O'Brien was crushed by moshing crowd members and later died in hospital despite warnings from the band that people were getting hurt. Billy Corgan was heard at another time on stage saying on behalf of his band:

I just want to say one thing to you, you young, college lughead-types. I've been watchin' people like you sluggin' around other people for seven years. And you know what? It's the same shit. I wish you'd understand that in an environment like this, and in a setting like this, it's fairly inappropriate and unfair to the rest of the people around you. I, and we, publicly take a stand against moshing!

On September 24, 2007, another fan died at a Smashing Pumpkins concert in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The man, aged 20, was dragged out of the mosh pit, unconscious, to be pronounced dead at St. Pauls' Hospital after first-aid specialists attempted to help him.

In another incident, Jessica Michalik died of asphyxiation after being crushed in a mosh pit during the 2001 Australian Big Day Out music festival. The coroner's findings into her death criticized the crowd control measures in use at the time, and also criticized Limp Bizkit lead singer Fred Durst for "alarming and inflammatory" comments during the rescue effort.

Cedric Bixler-Zavala of At the Drive-In had previously asked the Big Day Out audience to calm down and observe the safety rules. After the refusal of the crowd, Zavala told the crowd, "I think it's a really sad day when the only way you can express yourself is by slam-dancing!", followed by cries of, “You're a robot, you're a sheep!” and proceeded to baa like a sheep at the crowd several times before the band left the stage around 10 minutes into their set.

Some other bands have expressed varied degrees of disapproval to mosh pits. Mike Portnoy of Dream Theater, in an interview published on his website, described mosh pits as a "problem", while expressing disapproving indifference:

I think our audience have become a little bit more attentive and less of that type of [mosh] mentality [...] I understand you want to release that energy... [but] once people start doing that during "Through Her Eyes" it gets ridiculous [...] So this time around we're consciously aiming at theaters that people can actually sit down and enjoy the show and be comfortable [...] without having to worry about their legs falling off or being kicked in the face by a Mosh Pit. So [that] will probably eliminate that problem anyway.

In popular culture

Moshing is seen or spoken of in various media. The dance is mentioned in a large number of songs by many acts, even directly in the song title as seen in "Caught in a Mosh" by Anthrax and "Thank You For Not Moshing" (Originally "In The Pit") by Reel Big Fish. UK indie extreme metal/hardcore label Earache Records always used the word "mosh" as catalogue number signature, while Norwegian black metal label Deathlike Silence Productions used 'Anti Mosh' in their catalogue IDs. Moshing has appeared in cartoons and television series such as South Park, Futurama, Mighty Moshin' Emo Rangers and The Awful Truth as well as in video games such as World of Warcraft and Mario Party 8. In World Wrestling Entertainment, superstars Mosh and Thrasher named their tag-team "The Headbangers" and had finishing moves such as the "Stage dive" and "Mosh pit". A gametype in Halo 3, a variation of King of the Hill, is named Mosh Pit, where the king of the hill and all contenders can take much more damage than normal, leaving nearly all weapons besides shotguns and melees useless.

See also

• Hardcore dancing
• Wall of Death
• Skanking

External links

• Berger, Tom (2004) In the Pit - How to survive mosh pits and bodysurfing!
• The Beginners Guide To Moshing