Adopts cartoonish old man voice: “Back in my day, we called it ‘Slam-Dancing!’ Now get off my lawn!”
Honestly speaking, I’m old enough to remember when the universally acknowledged dance for all things punk rock was “the pogo,” allegedly invented by the late Sid Vicious and born out of his inherent ineptitude. I have zero idea of that particular legend is true, but it sounds more or less plausible.
It wasn’t until the dawn of hardcore punk (and, yes, that’s certainly what I remember people first calling it, prior to it being truncated to simply hardcore) that the whole “slamming” thing came about.
I’d been initially indoctrinated into the faith of punk by a series of grade school chums keen on shaking me out of my KISS, Queen and Pink Floyd stupor, and by way of a box of records my father sent my sister and I from England containing the first Clash record and Pure Mania by the Vibrators. But while I was still digging on that stuff, and getting into ancilary bands like the Dickies and Adam & the Ants, the same friends who’d gotten me into Devo, the `Pistols and the Ramones had moved onto much harder fare.
My friend Brad-O was the first to hip me to the bands like FEAR, the Misfits, Minor Threat and the essential Alternative Tentacles compilation, Let Them Eat Jellybeans (which featured Flipper, Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, Bad Brains and the Dead Kennedys -- it was an amazing primer), while our mutual classmate Rich K. evangelized bands like The Mob and the ROIR cassette, New York Thrash. In much the same way the Ramones had made Pink Floyd and KISS sound flatulent, bloated and tame, the genuinely exciting music of bands like the Bad Brains and Minor Threat made the Ramones sound almost equally staid. I was summarily hooked.
Within the percolating realm of hardcore punk, of course, not only did the sound and sentiment come with a harder edge, it came with its own tribal rituals, foremost among them the practice of “slam-dancing.” Now, honestly, I don’t know who coined that term, given that it sounded more like a pejorative descriptor a journalist might have come up with, but it also made a bit of sense, given that the dance involved a rather pointed degree of full-contact tussle.
That said, at least in those early days, “slamming” (or basically just “skanking” around in one’s big boots and colliding with one another) wasn’t ostensibly intended as a means of injuring your fellow show-goer. Did people get hurt along the way? Absolutely, but it was more out of an unbridled reaction specifically to the music (prompting more frenzied dancing, basically) than as an aggressive way of hurting people. The times I subjected my gangly, pipe-cleaner-like physique into the mix, whenever I hit the deck or got lost in the ersatz-melee (later famously described by NYHC-adoring metalheads Anthrax as getting “caught in a mosh”), someone usually leant me a helping hand. It may sound like a wafer-thin distinction, but that exertion of aggressive energy was more about release (and, dare I suggest, “fun”) and less about ill-will.
And it was fun, for a while, at least, until it started to mutate, and not for the better. Given a number of factors, hardcore punk gradually seemed to get marred by violence, often propagated by folks who didn’t understand it, or simply saw it as a quasi-sanctioned way of acting like an asshole. I vividly remember seeing certain folks standing around the edges of the circle (or “pit” as it would later be called) just itching to be bumped into, so they could shove back with all force. While the dance or practice or ritual or whatever you want to call it was indeed an aggressive physical act, it was never just about beating people up.
Personally speaking, I became less and less enthused by it. For a start, as mentioned, for most of my adolescence and into my twenties, I boasted all the bruising brawn of Anthony Michael Hall circa “The Breakfast Club.” I certainly had the aggressive energy and pent-up frustration (never a shortage of that, in those days), but I just wasn’t all that keen on getting the tar knocked out of me, especially when I was ultimately in those circumstances just to enjoy the music. It also was getting crazier. I remember seeing Murphy’s Law at the old 11th Street Ritz one night, and a burly contingent of giddy skinheads were just running around roughing up just about anyone on the floor with the audacity to sport hair in front of them. My friend Spike (not his real name, but immortalized on this post) chipped a goddamn tooth at a Bad Brains show. For us, it was getting out of hand.
By the mid-to-late `80s, you had the whole “crossover” phenom, and suddenly slamming fully devolved into “moshing” (a British term originally? I cannot remember). I attended a couple of bona fide thrash shows, and by that point, the “skanking” element from way back in the hardcore punk days was gone. Now it was just a full-on conflagration of fists and boots and a perfectly fabulous way to get hurt.
Before ya knew it, though, people were suddenly “moshing” at shows that had previously never courted such a practice. I remember going to see a double bill of the Pogues and the Violent Femmes -– two bands that, while both certainly born of all things Punk -– were primarily acoustic and not-at-all hardcore, and a sort of dim moshpit formed. The Smithereens (ultimately a power-pop band with a tuneful, Rickenbacker-based chime) played my college, and a bunch of lacrosse players “started a mosh.” I remember going to see Fishbone at the Academy off 42nd Street (long gone) and zealous attendees were actually moshing in between songs. The whole concept of it being a direct reaction to the music had just completely mutated into just meaningless, meat-headed cliché.
Eventually, there was pushback, both literal and figurative. Fugazi would famously stop playing if a pit broke out. I remember seeing Iron Maiden at the New Ritz on the Fear of the Dark tour, and Bruce Dickinson witheringly chastising the crowd for “moshing.” I remember seeing Redd Kross – who were also born out of the first wave of hardcore, counting members of Black Flag and the Circle Jerks in its early ranks – at the Grand on 13th Street (formerly the Cat Cub), and them repeatedly stopping their harmony-laden pop songs to plead to the meatnecked jocks in the audience to refrain from inadvertently kidney-punching the teenage girls in the front.
Was slamming/moshing always a dumb idea? Maybe so, but it honestly didn’t start off as such, or at least not in my experience. Here’s the thing, though –- with precious few exceptions, it was easy enough to avoid. Apart from a particularly spirited gig by the Bad Brains at the New Ritz on the Quickness tour (wherein the entirety of the venue basically became one, huge moshpit), all I’ve ever had to do to avoid getting a boot in the mouth, a fist to the temple or an elbow in the groin was to simply stay out of the moshpit. If other folks want that inimitable brand of release, are that excited by the music, or want to court serious injury, that’s fine with me, but that was absolutely never my first reason for being there.
As I’m prone to laboriously point out, I’m 49 years old these days. Even if I genuinely wanted to, I don’t believe I’d even be allowed to participate in a moshpit (or I would sincerely hope some concerned party would take pains to talk me out of it). I saw OFF! last year at the Gramercy Theatre and even when they dipped into surprise renditions of “My War” and “Rise Above,” at no point did I feel inclined to leap into the fray with flailing elbows akimbo. Those days are over for me.
But while my skanking may now be solely relegated to the privacy of my living room and I may have lost my taste for it literally decades ago, I don’t necessarily begrudge others for still wanting to partake. I spotted an article today, however, that reported that there’s now a movement afoot to clamp down on moshpits in favor of “safe spaces.”
Like I said, what’s wrong with just stepping out of it? DISCUSS…..
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