Last week, I attended my first punk show and let my opinions be know here (XXX) but the best part of the experience got left out. My dance of death in the mosh pit. Well that’s a bit an overstatement, but I did catch an elbow in the face, which was pretty cool, but more on that later.
I had gone to see GBH with Outernational and the Unemploid. It was an odd mix. The Unemploid are some sort of local punk band with the most mismatched group of performers I have seen in a little while. Outernational played a rock and roll set that clashed oddly with GBH’s 70s punk sound, but whatever. I am not the one to tell bands who to tour with.
All in all, it’s was a bit sparse. I could stand pretty much anywhere and had about two inches of space with no one touching me, a lot of room for the Launchpad. That said, it filled pretty quick when GBH took the stage, and then the moshing begun.
The punk kids started to circle around one another. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’ve seen mosh pits on the television, and everyone left bloody in those, so I wasn’t ready to take the plunge quite yet. It stayed slow though. About 10 or 15 people dropped into the pit, and then the pushing started.
It’s kind of impossible to describe accurately. I mean, yeah, I could say it was a guy pushing a guy who then would push another and another from there and so on and so on, but that wouldn’t do it any justice. Everyone becomes blur after a while from the outside. One person shoves another constantly, and it happens so quickly it seems as though pushing in the pit is as necessary as breathing. Usually it only lasted for the first half of the song, and then everyone got tired and retreated to the edges of the pit.
It was after one of these breaks I decided to enter. I think I set myself to get knocked around. I wore a nice white button shirt to the show for reasons still unknown to me, and I stood out amid the black and tattered clothing of the punk forces to be. In the circle, I did what I could do. I shoved and shoved and shoved and occasionally got shoved. It’s completely different to be in the pit than out. Inside, everyone looks even more alike. Tall and short, fat and skinny, all those distinctions seem to disappear and the ones that emerge are only who can push harder or softer.
I wasn’t sure if I was pushing hard, but I do know that I got pushed hard. Several times I got knocked across the pit into someone else only to be pushed back and then pushed back and on and on. I did manage to shove someone across the pit, but mostly I was struggling to keep balance. When I wasn’t getting shoved by people in the pit, people around the pit pushed me back in. Actually, getting out of the pit was near impossible with people striving to keep me out, but that’s all part of it, I guess.
Like I said earlier, it dies quick, so I could get out when I was too tired to go on, which happened quick. In five minutes I had wholly soaked my shirt, jeans, and everything else I was wearing. I wasn’t the only one, though. The entire room and everyone I bumped into was sopping wet with sweat. I was told later by one of my friends that I reeked, but I never noticed it. It had become all pervading such that I couldn’t recognize any other smell.
I had vowed to keep dropping in and out of the pit till I ate the concrete. The thing is that if you fall, you might get trampled a bit, but the crowd always stops as quick as possible to lift the fallen. I wanted to get a taste of that, and some very large men had tried to help me along with that goal, but I somehow stayed on my feet the whole time. I took an elbow to the face though, and I decided that was as good as anything else and wimped out for the rest of the night.
It’s hard to recommend moshing. It really is. You’ve got to have the right mindset and physical stature and stamina to keep up with it, but if you can, try it at least once for one song. The community-based violence is really something to experience if you can manage it.
Comments
More from The Daily Lobo
