0:00

Hey, listeners, I'm Joel Anderson, host

0:02

of Slow Burn, Becoming Justice Thomas. Thanks

0:05

to all of you who listened to our four-part

0:07

series on the unlikely journey of Clarence

0:09

Thomas to the Supreme Court. We're already

0:12

hard at work on our next season of Slow Burn, but

0:14

in the meantime, we're going to use this space to

0:16

showcase some of Slate's other great narrative podcasts,

0:19

starting with Decoder Ring, which is all

0:22

about cracking cultural mysteries, many

0:24

of them from the past. After that, you'll

0:26

hear our history podcast, One Year, which

0:29

explores the forgotten stories and wildest

0:31

moments that changed America, one year

0:33

at a time.

0:34

So keep listening. Here's Decoder

0:36

Ring host, Willa Paskin.

0:40

Before we begin, this episode contains

0:42

adult language.

0:52

In 1991, when Joel Meyer, a senior

0:54

editor and producer at Slate, was 14 years old,

0:56

he went to the very first Lollapalooza

0:59

concert

0:59

tour when it stopped in St. Paul,

1:01

Minnesota. It might have even been my

1:03

first concert without a parent involved.

1:06

There were so many bands he and his friends

1:09

loved playing. Jane's Addiction,

1:11

Living Color, and especially

1:14

Henry Rollins from the hardcore

1:16

band Black Flag.

1:20

We thought he was kind of the coolest

1:22

guy that we had ever seen. As

1:25

Joel and his buddies watched Henry Rollins,

1:27

sweating and shirtless and caught up in the moment,

1:30

they got caught up in the moment too, full of

1:32

energy and fearlessness and adolescent

1:34

boy oomph, they decided

1:36

they needed to go into the

1:38

mosh pit. Because

1:41

I'm a very cautious and conservative person by

1:43

nature, I think I was maybe the last person

1:46

to go in, but then I did it.

1:48

A mosh pit is a staple of a Henry

1:51

Rollins show.

1:59

The problem is... I wear glasses, and

2:01

I have had to wear glasses since the fourth grade,

2:04

and I can't see anything without them.

2:06

Within about maybe 20 seconds of going into the

2:09

pit, I lost those glasses right away, and

2:11

I was terrified. He couldn't see

2:13

very well. He sure wasn't going to be able

2:15

to see any of the other bands, and his mom

2:17

was going to be pissed. My glasses

2:20

were probably the most valuable thing that

2:22

I owned. So Joel steeled himself

2:24

and pushed his way back into

2:26

the seething mass of people.

2:33

And lo and behold, I looked over and

2:35

there was this guy whose face I

2:37

will never forget. And he was having

2:39

the time of his life being hit

2:42

on all sides by human bodies. But

2:45

he was with one hand holding

2:47

in the air my glasses, and

2:49

he gave him back. Then he just kind of vanished.

2:52

I think he wore glasses.

2:54

A good Samaritan was the last thing

2:56

Joel had expected to find. But

2:59

it turns out the moshpit contains

3:01

all sorts of surprises.

3:11

This is Dakota Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. The

3:13

moshpit has a reputation. It's a violent

3:16

place inhabited by mostly white guys

3:18

getting their aggression out. And you know,

3:21

there's some truth there. But it's also

3:23

a place where strangers will save your

3:25

glasses. A place bound by camaraderie,

3:27

and believe it or not, etiquette. In

3:30

this episode, Dakota Ring's producer

3:32

Katie Shepherd is going to satisfy her life-long

3:35

curiosity about moshing. A

3:37

50-year-old cross-genre live

3:40

music phenomenon

3:40

that's alive and well to this day.

3:43

She's going to speak with punk's physicists and

3:46

the people who just can't stop doing

3:48

it to learn about moshings' unwritten

3:50

rules. So today on Dakota

3:53

Ring, what's really going

3:55

on inside a moshpit?

4:22

Summer is in full swing and Brooklinen

4:25

is here to help you swap out winter warmth

4:27

for easy breezy comfort with their award

4:29

winning sheets and home essentials. I

4:32

have a couple pairs of Brooklinen sheets and they

4:34

look and feel great. They're wonderful

4:36

for summer. Brooklinen uses only the highest

4:38

quality materials for all of their products

4:41

such as long staple cotton so everything

4:43

they create is built to last. The

4:45

options are endless so do yourself the favor

4:48

of simplifying your shopping by

4:50

bundling bed, bath and both. You

4:52

can save time and up to 25% when

4:55

bundling your new favorite home essentials.

4:58

So shop in store

4:58

or online at brooklinen.com

5:01

today to give yourself the cooling sleep

5:04

you deserve this summer. Use promo

5:06

code DECODERING for $20

5:08

off your online purchase of $100 or more plus free

5:12

shipping on brooklinen.com. That's

5:16

B-R-O-O-K-L-I-N-E-N

5:20

dot C-O-M. Use

5:22

promo code DECODERING for $20

5:25

off plus free shipping.

5:31

Katie's going to jump in now. I've

5:33

always had complicated feelings about moshing.

5:36

I had a set idea of what it was. I'm

5:38

either going to get punched in the face tonight or I'm going to punch

5:40

someone else in the face. And

5:42

though I didn't want to punch anyone in the face, the

5:45

idea of jumping around, screaming,

5:47

thrashing, losing myself in a mash of

5:49

humanity appealed to me. It

5:52

looked like a release. So

5:54

back in 2011 when I was 22, I finally decided to do it. go

6:00

into the mosh pit.

6:03

It was at a concert by the Irish-American

6:05

Celtic punk band Flogging Molly. I liked

6:08

her music fine, but I'd heard from friends

6:10

about the raucous mosh pits that happened at their

6:12

shows. I arrived early

6:14

and found a spot in the center of the room. I

6:17

remember looking at the crowd, all the people

6:19

gathering around me, thinking that once

6:21

the music

6:21

started, we would become a heaving,

6:24

swirling mass, all seeking

6:26

catharsis within the music.

6:28

It'd be perfect. And then the

6:31

moshing started.

6:38

I lasted all of 15 seconds in the pit.

6:41

I wanted to like it, but I most definitely

6:44

did not. It didn't make me

6:46

feel liberated or free. It

6:48

made me feel like I was about

6:50

to get an elbow to the face.

6:52

I was rattled, but I remember

6:54

watching other people in the pit having the

6:56

time of their lives. I

6:59

know the mosh pit isn't for me, but

7:01

damn, some people sure love

7:03

it. And all these years later, I still

7:06

want to know why.

7:08

I started with where moshing comes from in the

7:11

first place. Punk. Why

7:13

do they like it so much? They gotta do something

7:16

with their time. Nothing else is going on. It's

7:18

the only form of revolution left.

7:20

That's from the 1981 documentary,

7:22

The Decline of Western Civilization, about

7:24

the L.A. punk scene. Punk

7:26

was famously born in the mid-1970s

7:29

as a rebellion against everything.

7:32

Arena rock, disco, hippies,

7:34

conformity, conservatism, corporations,

7:37

you name it. And while everyone knows there's

7:39

punk music in fashion, and even

7:41

a punk ethos, there's also punk

7:44

dancing.

8:00

That's Sid Vicious, the bassist for the

8:02

Sex Pistols, one of the earliest bands

8:05

to self-identify as punk. He

8:07

claimed around 1976 he created

8:09

one of punk's Hallmark moves, just

8:11

to get out his agitation with another group

8:13

of guys.

8:15

The simple move became known as pogoing,

8:18

and it spread through the punk scene and those adjacent

8:20

to it. The pogo has

8:22

been done like this. That's

8:27

Debbie Harry of the New Wave band Blondie. She's

8:29

jumping up and down on a black and white Manhattan

8:31

cable access show in 1978.

8:34

You have to arch your back and throw your

8:36

head around. After you do this for half

8:39

an hour, the idea is to

8:41

sprinkle beer on your head. Like

8:43

this!

8:44

The pogo doesn't look like much, but that

8:47

was kind of the point. Punks wanted to get

8:49

as far from the polished moves of disco

8:51

like the bump and the hustle

8:53

as they could. They wanted to be reckless,

8:55

rowdy, and sloppy, and smash into each

8:58

other. And over time, this chaos

9:00

got codified and became a kind of standard

9:02

feature of shows. It happened

9:04

in the hardcore scene. I hate my

9:06

boss. I hate the people that I work with.

9:09

I hate my parents. I hate these authoritative

9:11

figures.

9:12

This is Keith Morris of the hardcore

9:14

bands Circle Jerks and Black Flag talking

9:17

about the scene's attitude in the documentary

9:19

American Hardcore. And at every hardcore

9:21

show, you could find exactly that.

9:26

Attendees

9:30

going off. There

9:33

was nothing more taking it to

9:35

the furthest extreme than destroying

9:37

everybody in the crowd. Stephen Blush

9:39

is the director of American Hardcore. I

9:42

compare it a lot to Lord of the Flies,

9:44

where the kids have to run their own

9:46

society and it

9:49

works out really well for a while and

9:51

then it eventually goes to hell.

9:53

The violence at hardcore shows could be

9:55

a lot, but it was communal. There's

9:58

an inner peace in that storm. you

10:00

find with the like-minded people. And

10:03

the minute you step out of that, you're back

10:05

to reality. But

10:07

while you're in it,

10:10

it's this incredible, powerful

10:12

force. It was also

10:15

at hardcore shows that some pits begin

10:17

to take the shape often seen at concerts today.

10:20

And you keep moving around in a circle like

10:22

this, because that's the way the pit moves

10:24

is in a circle. People are jumping off the stage. This

10:26

is a scene from the 1983 documentary Another

10:29

State of Mind about two punk bands on tour.

10:32

Just keep moving around. It doesn't

10:35

matter if you fall down or not, because your buddy's

10:37

gonna be there to pick you up or someone's gonna pick you up.

10:40

The young

10:40

man talking is in a small, empty

10:42

dingy room, and he's wearing a white t-shirt

10:45

and trousers, and he has closely shorn hair.

10:48

As he's talking, he's demonstrating,

10:50

bent over at the waist, swinging his arms

10:52

and pacing in a circle. Some people call

10:55

it slamming, and some people call it pogon,

10:57

and some call it the skang. But

11:00

I just call it dancing, because that's normally what you're

11:02

doing.

11:03

What he's doing is basically what we think

11:05

of as mashing. But in the early 80s, most

11:08

people weren't calling it that yet.

11:10

As I understand it, the

11:13

word mosh comes from a misinterpretation.

11:17

James Spooner is an artist and filmmaker behind

11:20

the Afropunk documentary and music festival.

11:23

He says the story goes that the term originated

11:25

in the early 80s with bad brains, an

11:28

influential hardcore band whose

11:30

members were Black and Rastafari.

11:32

["Bad Brains Song"]

11:40

During a bad brain show, the lead singer said to mash

11:43

down Babylon, which had appeared

11:45

in a number of old reggae songs,

11:46

like this one performed by Leroy

11:48

King.

11:49

["Bad Brains Song"] But

11:53

the crowd misunderstood the bad

11:55

brain singer. It's just funny to me, you know, I can

11:57

assume. like

12:00

a bunch of white kids in the audience hear

12:02

him say, mash down Babylon and like

12:05

don't already know that phrase and

12:08

invent a completely new word. Mashing

12:12

or mashing was born. By

12:15

the early 1990s, it had spread

12:17

to the dozens of offshoots of punk as well

12:19

as heavy metal and grunge.

12:21

In 1992, Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit

12:23

became the biggest song in the

12:26

world. The

12:34

video showed people mashing in a dank

12:36

dark high school gym. And

12:38

with that, mashing went mainstream.

12:44

I remember being a sophomore

12:47

in high school, walking into this

12:50

club and seeing the mosh

12:52

pit and understanding that these

12:55

kids have no idea what

12:57

they're doing. These are a bunch of kids

13:00

who saw the

13:02

Smells Like Teen Spirit video and

13:05

are just bouncing off each other.

13:07

They don't understand that there are moves. I

13:10

have to be honest, initially it never

13:12

really occurred to me that there were mashing moves

13:15

either. I thought the whole point of

13:17

mashing was that it was freedom to

13:19

do whatever you want. But James,

13:21

a long time masher himself, set me straight.

13:24

The kids that people notice and

13:27

are like enjoy watch dancing

13:30

are also just good dancers. James

13:33

told me the first time he realized this was

13:35

in his mid-20s. He was dating

13:37

a choreographer whose style was rooted

13:39

in Haitian dance. She invited

13:42

James to show some mashing moves to her dance

13:44

group. And in return, the

13:46

dancers showed him their own similar moves based

13:49

on West African and Haitian dance. James

13:52

noticed similarities in other styles too.

13:55

If you go

13:57

to a Jamaican dance hall,

14:00

They're doing like the Ducky wine. It looks

14:02

a lot like head banging. I've

14:04

seen stuff in Jamaican dance halls

14:07

that look more like

14:08

WWF wrestling than

14:12

anything I've seen at a punk show, which

14:14

is why I say the whole world

14:16

mashes.

14:18

Mashing has a whole bunch of other moves. There's

14:21

the two step, a syncopated stutter step.

14:23

There's also windmills, which are all about whirling

14:26

your arms and picking up change, which

14:28

is punching your arms down toward the ground and then

14:30

throwing your elbows back. Of

14:32

course there's head banging, stage diving and crowd

14:35

surfing. There's also the much

14:37

more nerve wracking wall of death where

14:39

the crowd splits in two and runs

14:41

at each other like they're in Braveheart.

14:44

One, two, three, four, five. That

14:49

wall of death is from a show by the band Lamb of

14:51

God. But one of the things

14:53

that James said that most convinced me the mosh

14:55

pit isn't the chaotic lawless place

14:57

I thought

14:58

was also one of the simplest.

15:01

My first show, I went the wrong way

15:03

in the circle pit and I got trampled. I

15:06

never did that again. Nobody told

15:08

me that, oh, the circle pit always

15:10

goes counterclockwise. And

15:13

this is just one of the ways there's some order at

15:15

work,

15:16

even if outsiders can't see it. What

15:18

always excited me about this space is that

15:20

there are a lot of unwritten rules

15:23

to keep it constructive

15:24

and not actually

15:26

true chaos. It might look

15:29

like chaos, but it's not.

15:31

Christina Long grew up in the Midwest

15:33

and has been mashing since she was a teen. She's

15:36

the co-founder of Black Girls World. It's

15:38

an organization that celebrates black women

15:40

and women of color who participate

15:42

in heavy music genres. She co-founded

15:44

the organization with her sister, Courtney, who

15:47

also loves to mosh. I'm

15:49

usually described as a happy-go-lucky,

15:52

sickly-positive-sometimes kind

15:55

of person. And I'm like, if

15:57

y'all knew

15:58

the anger, I had inside

16:00

of me that I'm

16:03

only allowed to express through

16:05

these rock shows, through music. You

16:08

need that outlet sometimes when you feel powerless.

16:11

But Christina says that doesn't mean they

16:13

haven't been knocked around some.

16:15

I've had my glasses broken. I

16:17

lost a shoe one time. I

16:19

had an asthma attack one time. I

16:22

had a guy get KO'd. He

16:25

was completely knocked out, stone cold, and he

16:27

fell on me. But in all

16:29

those situations, the people around me

16:32

helped. They didn't just ignore us.

16:34

She says this kind of help

16:36

isn't rare. It's one of Moshings'

16:38

unwritten rules.

16:41

Well, the first rule is if

16:43

somebody falls down, pick them up.

16:46

If you see someone in trouble, somebody's

16:49

struggling, you gotta help them.

16:51

But there's another less chill rule,

16:54

too. If you don't wanna be in the goddamn

16:56

Mosh pit, get the hell out of the way. Even

16:59

so, her sister Courtney actually

17:01

feels safer at concerts where people Mosh,

17:04

because the rules are much more explicit and

17:06

everyone knows what to expect. I

17:08

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

17:11

Some

17:11

of those people, they were like

17:13

dressed to the nines in all these sparkly

17:15

outfits, and they were ready to fight about

17:18

who was closest to the stage. I

17:21

love Lizzo, but I would go with a friend

17:23

for some protection. Christina

17:26

and Courtney sense that Mosh pits are, in

17:28

their own way, orderly, is

17:31

actually backed up by something surprising, physics.

17:35

More on that when we come back.

17:40

From an Iraq war coverup to towns

17:42

ravaged by opioids, to the roots

17:44

of our modern immigration crisis, Embedded

17:47

explores what's been sealed off and

17:49

undisclosed. NPR's

17:51

original investigative podcast reveals

17:54

why these stories and the people behind

17:56

them matter. Listen to the Embedded

17:58

podcast only for...

18:02

Jesse Silverberg is a physicist who

18:05

is really into heavy metal. Black

18:07

metal, Christian metal, death metal, dark metal,

18:09

doom metal, extreme metal, folk

18:11

metal, yes, folk metal. That's from his TEDx

18:13

talk on the physics of mosh pits. Power

18:16

progressive, speed stoner symphonic,

18:18

thrash, and of course, just

18:20

plain old heavy metal.

18:22

I became interested in mosh by

18:24

going to heavy metal concerts. When

18:27

he was an undergrad, he took a date to a

18:29

metal show and they found themselves standing

18:31

to the side watching the mosh pit.

18:33

What had really jumped out of

18:35

me and was really distracting during that show

18:38

was not the date, which is probably where I

18:40

should have had my attention, frankly, but

18:43

being able to see the way that people were moving

18:45

and the way that the crowd was moving collectively,

18:47

it was very reminiscent of

18:50

a solid state physics course I had

18:52

been taking.

18:53

The movement in the pit reminded Jesse of how

18:55

groups of fish swim collectively and how

18:58

birds flock. And Jesse wondered

19:00

if something similar wasn't happening with moshing.

19:03

He and his colleagues thought Newton's second law

19:05

of motion, force equals mass times

19:07

acceleration, might be an effective

19:09

way of looking at mosh pits. For

19:12

the purposes of studying moshing, they

19:14

defined

19:15

four forces. Propulsion,

19:17

the force I generate when I move. Repulsion,

19:20

when two people bounce off each other. Noise,

19:23

which refers to the presence of randomness. And

19:25

lastly, the force of flocking, the

19:28

tendency for people to follow other

19:30

people around.

19:31

So the first thing that we did was

19:34

we wrote some computer vision

19:36

image analysis code that quantified

19:38

the motion of people in a mosh pit.

19:41

The kind of motion they were quantifying was all

19:43

the jostling and bouncing and banging around

19:45

people doing the pit before a circle

19:47

starts to take shape. But what they found

19:50

when you put all these motions into the machine,

19:52

it was predictive.

19:59

ganking, a circle will likely

20:02

start to emerge. Just the way birds will

20:04

flock or fish will form a shoal.

20:06

We didn't put

20:08

a circle pit into the model. We didn't bake

20:11

that into the equations. It emerged

20:13

naturally. And that is something

20:15

that is seen if you go to enough of

20:17

these shows.

20:19

You can create your own mosh pit simulation

20:21

using the same tools Jesse and his colleagues

20:24

did. We'll link to it in the show notes.

20:26

And you'll see how the circle pit emerges naturally.

20:29

It's just how humans arrange themselves when,

20:32

you know, they're violently hurling themselves

20:34

at each other in an enclosed space while

20:36

listening to very loud music.

20:39

But even as the pit has order, it's

20:41

also not without its flaws. If

20:43

there was a mosh pit of all boys, and

20:46

they're asking their female friends

20:48

to hold their coats, the girls would be like,

20:51

this is, this is messed up. Sarah

20:53

Marcus is the author of Girls to the Front,

20:55

the true story of the Riot Girl revolution

20:58

about the punk feminist movement in the 90s. I

21:00

don't just come to a show to be a coat rack while the

21:03

boys mosh. Getting treated like a coat rack

21:05

was just one thing. Another was that

21:07

women and people with physical vulnerabilities

21:09

would find themselves being pushed out of the pit

21:11

by aggressive male dancers, which

21:14

is why in the 1990s the band Bikini

21:16

Kill started to make space for them at the front

21:18

of the stage. By screaming the phrase

21:20

that gave Sarah's book

21:21

its name.

21:28

Even with efforts like this, it could be

21:30

hard to tamp down the angst that mashing releases

21:33

once it's out. Mashing is

21:35

like, it's fun and it's this great release, but

21:37

at the same time, like you've opened

21:39

that box and it's hard to close it up again.

21:42

In other words, mashing can also bring

21:44

out the worst in people. You have like horrible

21:47

fights breaking out at punk shows between

21:49

like Nazi skinheads and anti-Nazi

21:51

skinheads.

21:52

James Spooner also remembers Nazi

21:54

punks and skinheads at shows when he was growing up.

21:57

By the early 80s, there were already a number of people

21:59

who were in the Nazi skins were

22:01

a huge part of the punk

22:04

community that we had to deal with. That wasn't

22:06

like a weird anomaly in

22:08

my

22:09

small backwards town. And

22:11

then there's Moshings biggest black eye. Shit

22:13

is fucked up, man. Let's

22:16

start a riot. Woodstock 99. The riots.

22:20

Woodstock 99 was a concert festival

22:22

infamous for being as violent

22:24

as the original Woodstock was peaceful.

22:30

For almost three days,

22:31

the festival headlined by a number of new

22:33

metal bands was plagued by poor sanitation

22:36

and a lack of drinking water. There were

22:38

incidents of sexual assault, and by the

22:40

end, the crowd of thousands descended into

22:42

chaos. All of this was captured

22:45

by MTV, which blasted images to

22:47

its audience of burning fires and thrashing

22:49

seeding crowds,

22:50

all moshing as one.

22:52

Give me some rain. Give

22:57

me some rain. Moshings

23:02

had grown out of small communal scenes, basements

23:05

and tiny venues where small groups of people

23:07

all knew the rules of the road. At Woodstock 99,

23:11

moshing became something completely

23:14

different. James Spooner.

23:16

It doesn't scale up. It's like trying to make

23:18

a batch of brownies. You just do

23:21

the recipe times 100 and it just turns out

23:23

like garbage.

23:24

There clearly were serious problems with the crowd

23:26

behavior there, but usually most

23:28

festivals, there's very little collective

23:30

disorder.

23:31

Chris Cocking is a crowd management expert

23:34

who teaches social psychology at the University

23:36

of Brighton. Chris says it's not usually

23:38

the crowd that is to blame when something goes horribly

23:41

wrong at big events. In most

23:43

crowd disasters, where people are killed

23:45

or injured, it's usually because of

23:47

structures or interventions outside

23:49

of the crowd itself. It's the way the security

23:52

or the venue are treating the crowd or thinking

23:54

about public safety. It's the way there's no

23:56

water or bathrooms, lack of infrastructure.

24:00

as was the case with Woodstock 99. And

24:02

sometimes it's fear of the crowd

24:05

in advance that causes so many problems.

24:08

When moshing first started at some venues

24:10

there was a venue that's been bulldozed now that

24:13

was called the London Story. When they had thrash

24:15

metal bands playing there and the security

24:17

were not aware of the concept of moshing

24:19

they almost started a riot because people

24:22

were moshing and people were trying to

24:24

stage dive and the security just basically

24:26

started beating the shit out of them. But

24:28

Chris saw moshers in the bands figure out

24:30

how to solve that problem by hiring

24:32

their own security that understood moshing.

24:35

And as long as basic requirements and safety

24:38

precautions are present big crowds

24:40

tend to demonstrate a great deal of restraint.

24:42

Even if you have individuals

24:45

who sit there and go I want to fuck things up

24:47

and you know some people mosh more vigorously than

24:49

others I

24:51

would say that doesn't translate into a kind

24:53

of collective mass where everybody

24:55

is moshing in a let's fuck things up kind

24:57

of way.

24:58

I'm often baffled

25:00

that concerts work at all. Strangers

25:03

packed into a venue together waiting

25:05

sometimes for hours for the bands

25:07

to start often in summertime heat.

25:09

There's booze and other substances.

25:12

There's short people who don't know what to do

25:15

about tall people and the other way around.

25:17

People who arrive late and push in front of the ones

25:20

who got there at doors. It's easy

25:22

to see

25:22

how things can get out of control except

25:25

they rarely do and

25:28

when they do it's like a plane crash.

25:30

This very irregular event that's so

25:33

horrible it's kind of all you can

25:35

think about eclipsing the hundreds of

25:37

thousands of times things went fine

25:40

or maybe even better than fine.

25:43

This is also

25:44

true of mosh pits. Christina

25:47

Long. If anyone is there

25:49

to cause harm and they indicate

25:51

that they're there to hurt someone on purpose

25:54

we as a community will pick you up

25:56

and kick you out of the venue.

25:59

So with Christina's reassurances and

26:02

the laws of physics, with Chris Cocking's expertise

26:05

and James Spooner's list of mashing moves, I

26:07

felt newly curious. I

26:10

wanted to experience a mosh

26:12

pit again, but not fully confident

26:14

about jumping in. I asked the long

26:16

sisters if one of them might be willing

26:19

to go with me. If in the next month

26:21

you end up going to a show and

26:24

mosh and Mary I could like record you before

26:26

you go in. Would that be hilarious?

26:28

After the break,

26:30

with the help of Christina, I head back

26:33

to the mosh pit.

26:41

Okay so we're in Times Square

26:43

on a side street here. I

26:45

met up with Christina Long at a venue called

26:47

the Palladium to see a metalcore show. A

26:50

band called the Devil Wears Prada opened for

26:52

another called August Burns Red. They've

26:55

been around for at least a decade each if

26:57

not longer, and they're very well known

26:59

in the scene. The Palladium holds about 2,000

27:01

people, and as we

27:03

entered, a small mosh pit was already

27:06

moving in the middle of the room.

27:08

I asked her why it wasn't right in front of the stage.

27:10

She had to scream to be heard. The

27:12

serious fans who've

27:16

been waiting for hours to see their

27:18

artists, they're not gonna move. They're

27:21

not moved. They're committed. Almost

27:23

everyone in the pit was a man. When the show

27:26

starts again, look around and see if

27:28

anybody's staring at you, like any men

27:30

are saying,

27:31

and sometimes they're very shocked like

27:34

a girl's here, and she likes

27:36

it. Soon enough, the band the Devil Wears

27:38

Prada took the stage.

27:50

One of Christina's favorite bands, the Acacia

27:53

Strain, sums up what she loves about

27:55

this scene. Earlier, she told

27:57

me they start their shows by announcing

27:59

that audience...

27:59

members were safe to express anger

28:02

or any feelings they might have about being

28:04

neglected and unloved. We want

28:06

you to know there's a place for you to go to express

28:10

yourself in all the things you

28:12

feel so that you don't go back out in

28:14

the world and do something worse.

28:17

And then the musician

28:19

would say,

28:21

in the next breath, I also would

28:23

like you all to know that I hate you all

28:25

and I hope you fucking die. And

28:28

then he would go, let us all

28:30

proceed to rage. She

28:33

loved it. The drama, the

28:36

honesty, the contradiction, the

28:38

space to be seen, to be angry,

28:41

to be mean. And I

28:43

get that. Anger is an emotion

28:46

we're supposed to douse quickly.

28:48

But what if, in the right place, with

28:51

others who understand us, we didn't

28:54

have to. When the

28:56

moshing started, I could picture it,

28:58

jumping into the pit, losing myself,

29:01

releasing some primal rage,

29:02

and screaming into each other's faces.

29:05

I got close to the edge of the pit. But

29:07

I couldn't bring myself to jump

29:09

in. Just

29:15

like last time, I realized moshing

29:18

just isn't me. Still,

29:21

I was happy to take it all in from a distance

29:24

with Christina, my moshing

29:25

guide, by my side.

29:32

And I could

29:34

see how much it meant to the people in the pit. That

29:37

this was their place to come together to get some frustration

29:39

out, all while dancing really,

29:42

really violently.

29:43

After

29:47

the show was over, I asked Christina to hang

29:49

back to rate the night's moshing.

29:52

What did you think of the

29:52

moshing tonight? It wasn't any

29:54

like negative chaos.

29:56

As she was talking, I realized

29:59

the moshers at the metalcore show, they

30:03

were singing a song I knew. At

30:11

that moment, listening to a Neil Diamond

30:13

song about people reaching out to one another, I

30:16

understood how someone could be scared at the mosh

30:18

pit, and how someone else could

30:21

jump in face first.

30:55

This is Decoder-ing, I'm Katie

30:57

Shepherd. And I'm Willow Paskin. If you

30:59

have any cultural mysteries you want us to

31:01

decode, you can email us at decodering

31:03

at slate.com. This

31:06

episode was written by Katie Shepherd. Katie

31:08

Shepherd and Willow Paskin produced Decoder-ing.

31:11

This episode was edited by Andrea Bruce and

31:13

Willow Paskin, with help from Joel Meyer. Derek

31:15

John is Slate's executive producer of narrative podcasts.

31:18

Merritt Jacob is senior technical director. Thank

31:21

you to Vivian Goldman, Paolo Raugusa,

31:23

and Philip Moriarty, whose insights and research

31:26

on moshing

31:26

were crucial to this episode. If

31:28

you haven't yet, please subscribe and

31:30

rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever

31:33

you get your podcasts. Even

31:35

better, tell your friends. If you're a fan

31:37

of the show, I'd also love for you to sign up for Slate

31:39

Plus. Slate Plus members get to listen to Decoder-ing

31:42

without any ads, and their support

31:44

is crucial to our work. So please

31:46

go to slate.com slash decoder

31:48

plus to join Slate Plus today.

31:51

We'll see you next week.