I live sweat...

“Every bad thing I have is acknowledged as worth it, because it led to this moment.” - Joe Briggs on the transgressive power of the pit

(Andy’s note: For my money, Joe is spot on when he talks about great crowds as a transgressive, almost religious, collective experience. Been there, so many times.)

(Photo by Marc Gaertner)

I have seen a lot of people recently criticising violent dancing in punk rock, as sexist, as ableist, or as just plain selfish. and most of the time, when people tell me something makes them uncomfortable, for whatever reason, I am okay with appreciating their perspective and stopping doing it, even if I don’t agree with their reasons, because I do have a lot of privileges and if I can attempt to eliminate and nullify them then it’s great, but not with this one. While I do try to understand other people’s perspectives I have real trouble imagining someone who hears music that is this energetic and loves it and doesn’t want to move to it. I can totally get someone who’s weirded out by touching strangers or by crowds like that, but surely that can’t be everyone. So I acknowledge that I’m not going to be able to comprehend everything, this is one time where I just don’t get the opposing point of view, so I’ll just say to them something along the lines of “Look, I have no idea why you would consider standing still to be an appropriate response to a band you like, but if that’s you’re thing then go for it.” This doesn’t mean that I am going to stop to notice people who are not dancing and attempt to fit in with the way they’re acting, and there’s an extremely important reason for that.

When I dance, in some crappy basement or the grimy back room of a pub, surrounded by a dozen or a hundred people dancing like that with me, I am not thinking about someone who’s not dancing, and why they may not be dancing. I’m not thinking of anything but the words in my throat and my unsteady footing. When I am dancing like that, in a really good pit, that is boisterous but not scary, that supports all the crowd-surfers and immediately picks up anyone who falls, that is as close as I get to a genuinely spiritual experience. The one time in my life where I feel the tickle of what might be described as a higher-consciousness. That is the moment where all the effort, and hurt, and stress, and love, all coalesces into a greater whole and just pours out of me and I grin like a moron. Every bad thing I have is acknowledged as worth it because it led to this moment. The dark only made this light seem brighter. Every good thing I have is present and screamed at the top of my voice. All the time spent working soul-sapping dead-end jobs, all the mistakes and shitty things I’ve done, all the frustration, all the lonely desolation I’ve ploughed through, all the hours spent listening to punk rock and scrutinising lyrics booklets as holy texts, they all seem completely worth it. When I’m dancing and singing, with other people dancing and singing, I no longer feel as if I’m some isolated fuck-up who’s toiling in obscurity, destined to live and die frustrated and alone; I feel like I am kin with a million isolated fuck-ups who all feel these things. I am feeling the music. And the music is in part born of pent-up rage, and pent-up loneliness and despair and all that shit streamed into these coruscating anthems. I will not abase that part of myself before anyone who just wants to stand there, no matter how valid or important the reason is that they want to do that. Maybe that’s selfish to an extent, but it’s not lazy or ill-considered, it’s that core part of me that makes me me. It’s the one stand I will always take, because in the dancing exists the little unshakable nugget of hope and self-evident truth that makes me barrel out of the show drenched in sweat and want to change the world, want to write books, want to play music that connects to some lonely 15 year old and save them the way I was saved, want to rip apart racism, and sexism, and homophobia, and all these shitty destructive prejudices, want to shock oppressive arseholes with wild situationist pranks, and blow minds with truth, and burn down entrenched class systems with a song in my heart and a glint in my eye. And I’m supposed to reel that in, to stifle that sensation because someone, whoever they are, whatever their sex or experiences, feels uncomfortable with it? Because someone wants to stand still and drink a beer and take a crappy blurry cellphone picture of the band and feels that this raucous and beautiful music is best appreciated by head nodding? Fuck that.

I’m not alone in this. It’d probably be really cliche to quote Emma Goldman right about now but it probably fits. As well as that Pat the Bunny line and guys talking feminism to get into girls’ pants and quoting Emma Goldman without bothering to dance. And I’d point to the sheer amount of people my age seduced into the punk scene and its progressive politics by Against Me!’s romantic glorious vision of crowds of likeminded people dancing like no-one’s watching with one fist in the air. This is a quote from a piece entitled My First Punk Show written by Brittany Walenta, a good friend of mine, about why she loves punk rock:

“In the pit, i realized that, outside of the pit, I was wearing a leash that I had never noticed because I had not tested its length. I discovered just how glorious it felt to be rude, violent, and drenched both in my sweat and the sweat of others. How cathartic it was to shout along to songs with no regard for how it sounds to other people. How completely primal and desexualizing it can be to fight a crowd of people to music.

And that night I was reluctant to wash the perfume, of cheap cigarettes, and lone star beer, and gallons of sweat, away in the shower. And the next day at school I wore my bruises and aching muscles as a badge of honor, because I knew I had found something so much more satisfying and thrilling than fluorescent lights and class rank and “funny” student run morning announcements. And for the first time i understood wanting to run away and join the circus.”

I want to just address a couple of specific points here, that a moshpit is sexist and/or ableist. I don’t think it’s sexist. To characterise the pit as purely an expression of testosterone is an incredibly limited gender-normative viewpoint that is effectively attempting to shame women into maintaining a quiet, reflective, stand-in-the-corner, coatrack, appreciation of the music when they might want to release all their stresses, and demonstrate all their love for this music, by dancing freely with a bunch of similarly stressed-out and wasted punks, like a scarecrow caught in the wind, just as a guy might want to sit at the back and watch the music in peace.

And as for ableism, I once saw a guy crowdsurfing in a wheelchair and it was a wonderful thing. I got the sense from everyone around me that there was this real joy at seeing someone do this, at realising that a disabled person is connecting with the music in exactly the same way that all us more able-bodied people were. Now maybe that’s patronising in a way, most able-bodied people don’t really have an exact idea of how hard it is to live with a physical disability, but we assume it must be pretty fucking hard at times and we do try to make allowances, though it’s just great to see someone just doing what the fuck they want regardless of what the expectations of them are. My girlfriend has been whacked in the face by a guy with no hand, and smacked in the shins by a guy in a motorised wheelchair in a circle pit, but when she related these stories to me it wasn’t like “What are those people doing there?” but again this sense of “How fucking awesome was it that people who might be constrained by their physical disabilities and also the social pressures to play up the victim card as a result of those physical disabilities are getting in the pit and enjoying it the way anyone can?” It was taking great joy in a reaffirmation of the powers of this thing we love and believe in, that it can lift up and free people who will often face a much tougher day-to-day struggle than most of us on the most basic level.

Real violence born of malevolence or carelessness is a terrible thing, but the fantasy of it, the concept of a constructive upward-striking violence that we are all a part of is a beautiful idea, and the pit offers that. I have been assaulted in the street more than once, not for quite some time but when I was 17 an amazing string of bad luck led to me being attacked three times in two days, the first two within 15 minutes of each other, by three completely unrelated groups of people for three different reasons. This led to me barely leaving the house for quite a while. It was tough and I hated myself for it (one of the big issues was that I thought that as a man I should’ve been able to defend myself), but I did get over this paranoia, and agoraphobia, and self-loathing, and one of the ways I got over it was by going to punk shows and moshing, getting into pits, filling myself with enough adrenaline that I didn’t care when I was hit in the face, I didn’t feel pain or terror, just concentration and exhilaration. At one Zatopeks show I fell over on the beer-slick floor and didn’t notice until two songs later that I had a significantly sized shard of glass sticking out of my hand which I ripped out with my teeth and carried on dancing. I’ve had a friend hit in the head with the lead singer’s guitar and he barely cared because he was dancing and because he was having fun, and yes, because there is an odd badge-of-pride to shrugging off pain and injury that some would characterise as a pointlessly macho exercise, but to me represents a physical aspect of that desire to pull in all one’s hurt, and to stream it into songs, and art, and the expression of dancing, mind over matter, rhythm over the chattering spikes of the world.

The pit is violent, but it’s not a violence aimed at anyone. (Also, let’s not pretend that non-dancers are inherently non-violent, we’ve all encountered the dickhead who throws punches at people dancing too close to them and their girlfriend. That happened to me personally at an Andrew Jackson Jihad show.) It is a communal physical and mental catharsis that should be, in its most perfect form, open to anyone who’s willing to stream all the love and passion they have for this music into a chaotic slamdance. Yes, some pits are overly violent and macho and that might annoy me, but it also pisses me off when nobody in a venue wants to respond to a beautiful piece of music by throwing themselves around with reckless abandon. I think ultimately there should always a place for both sitting and absorbing in peace and someone who wants to release all their stresses and demonstrate all their love for this music by dancing freely with a bunch of similarly stressed-out and wasted punks, like a scarecrow caught in the wind, but I always know which one I’m going to pick given an absolute choice. In a perfect pit, the kind I’ve been in a bunch of times, there’s always support for crowd-surfers or stage-divers, people actively attempting to hit people (or to molest people) rather than just bounce and shove are treated with utter contempt and disrespect, and nobody ever fails to stop dancing and immediately go to the aid of somebody who’s hit the floor, which is inevitably going to happen sometimes because of the expressive full-contact nature of the dancing, no matter how friendly the pit is.

What I am always extremely quick to oppose is anything that seeks to sanitise and simplify the culture that I love. That I have invested myself in for about 40% of my time on this planet now, and all its stupidity and sweetness, all its intelligent activism and hard-fought communal spaces, all its noise. That it is a place for everything from gleefully pissy songs to a sustained self-interrogation of privilege and prejudice present within the scene. That it accepts and encourages all these things on a local and global scale. That it’s got bands ranging sonically from Ghost Mice to Threatener, from the simplicity of Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue to the sprawling epics of Fucked Up. In scenes from everywhere from Japan to Alaska. It’s a place for something as fantastically juvenile as the Hickey/Voodoo Glow Split or the music of Splodgenessabounds as it is for more stridently political or serious material like Crass or Bikini Kill.

I reject the attempts to dull the sharp edge of punk rock, not just from the co-opting powers of mainstream culture, and their desire to remove the serious radical politics, and package rebellion as a hairstyle and a power chord, but from the uncompromising drive for equality eroding the fact that the beautiful (and terrible but ultimately essential) thing about people is that we’re all from different places, and all have our different ways of expressing ourselves, and comprehending the world, and fighting to make it the better world that we want. How can we invite and welcome people into the scene by taking away some of the verve, and romance, and noise, which makes it appeal to the sort of people who want to get into it? How can we make punk a threat again if we systematically purge all that is wild and carefree in its adherents? The idea that everyone has to cater wholly to one perspective by limiting the freedom of expression of everyone else, or that we need to institute equality by forcing people to give up anything that might offend or disturb anyone else is pretty much Stalinist. It is so absurd that it’s like a stereotypical right-wing caricature of a left-wing position. It’s the mentality that Kurt Vonnegut so perfectly satirised in Harrison Bergeron and the Sirens of Titan.

Why should I be forced to acknowledge, and kowtow to, the possible misinterpretation of my dancing, and compromise this essential part of my being in favour of people who are crowing that a moshpit is anti-inclusive, as they completely fail to make the same attempt to understand the possible appeal and ethos behind something they disagree with, as I have done repeatedly with positions that are not my own; who have not made a single concession to the idea that what me, and my friends, and dozens of strangers who are for this moment my very best friend, are doing is not alienating in it’s intent, or even alienating in it’s execution, if you’re willing to understand it, but is in fact motivated by a constructive and inclusive desire to create, for one of these perfect moments that can occur when a band full of people as confused, and shitty, and broken as we are play their hearts out and everybody’s tumbling around the mic, these glorious fucking moments of equality, and joy, and freedom, open to all who wish to engage in it. The notion that we should stop that, and turn around and look for guidance from people who by all outward attributes appear to just not give a shit about where they are, and who they’re with, and what they’re witnessing, is lazy and selfish and anti-intellectual on your part and I reject it totally. Me and my fellow dancers and our pitborn friendships are Kevin Bacon and you are John Lithgow. And no-one roots for Lithgow.

I have huge problems with this piece. Maryam Hassan has thankfully already pointed out the inherent irony in the phrase “Consideration for others is punk fucking rock.” used in it, but there are bigger problems than that:

“I’ve never moshed because if you shove me, I am going to want to fight you. Because wanting to fight you is the natural reaction to being shoved. Now, you can kick my ass, no doubt. I’m an old lady. But I’ll still try to fucking fight you. Because you don’t just fucking shove people. What the fuck?”

Isn’t that your issue more than it is anyone elses? Because when someone shoves me at a show, I can recognise when there is intended malice and when there is not. Wanting to fight someone is not an all-purpose natural reaction to someone shoving you, it’s a selfish arsehole reaction. You’re mistaking your own views for the absolute truth.

“You are selfish. You are a selfish asshole, just like every selfish asshole you have ever complained about in your life. You are THE selfish asshole at every show you attend.”

Indeed.

How is you saying that people shouldn’t dance, or that people should dance in a certain way (telling people at a punk show to learn to dance is like telling a punk band to learn their instruments, enthusiasm over technical ability is kind of the bloody point of the whole endeavour) less selfish than me and my friends wanting to dance and wanting to dance in the way that we love? “What about you and your desires trumps me and mine?”

I’ve been moved to apologise to bands after shows where people didn’t dance on behalf of the crowd and the scene, because it just seems disrespectful to these people, who have travelled hundreds, or thousands, of miles to play their hearts out, in a tiny room, for little to no money. Some things are incompatible, sometimes ideologies and philosophies will clatter and clang against each other, and there can be no compromise or diplomacy, and we just have to live with that. People who don’t want to dance have to accept people dancing and just stand a little further back, just as I have to reign in my exuberance and accept people not dancing at shows when there’s a crowd that doesn’t want to move even though it makes me feel massively uncomfortable and never fails to really make me feel like shit in the one place that can often lift me from my lowest moods. It’s an unbearably complex world, and often we have to acknowledge other people’s feelings and maybe cater to them if we realise that something means more to them than it does to us, but almost nothing means more to me than dancing. It is my line in the sand. NO PASARAN!

Joe Briggs is a writer from Oxford. He owns too many books and yet not enough. He attempts to map the shape of his punk-addled brain on his blog. He also has a twitter, a tumblr and a barely know ‘er. Like every other cunt in the world, he’s writing a novel. He’s asked me to include his email if any of you would like to discuss this piece directly.