On the Almost Liberating Possibilites of Moshing Jaime Serrato Marks

I was first introduced to moshing by the massive bruise on my coworker Dannyboi’s cheek. Dannyboi shuffled into the ice cream shop where we worked two minutes late and grabbed a pint from the freezer. He winced as he iced his chipmunky face. Service work is service work, and service workers talk. When Dannyboi walked in, we talked bruise.

“What happened?” we, the chorus, sang. “Mosh pit. I took an elbow to the face, man,” he said. “On the first song too! I was so pissed.”

“Did the elbower apologize?” I asked. “Nah, it was a great mosh pit. Too much chaos for an apology, you know. It’s whatever.”

Dannyboi’s bruise lived two weeks and died a slow death. I shuddered every time I saw it. I knew I would never mosh.

+++ My first mosh pit was a birthday present to myself.

I bought one ticket to an IDLES concert. IDLES is my favorite punk band, a screaming bastion of love and kindness. They sing of unity, respecting immigrants, eradicating toxic masculinity and rape culture. The band’s lead singer, Joe Talbot, belts out raw, drunk-uncle-at-karaoke vocals.

Joe Talbot’s first words at the concert: “Take care of yourselves, alright?”

The words were needed; a mosh pit had already formed. Mosh: to dance frenetically, especially to rock music, especially to collide with others.

A mosh pit is not inherently violent, but it tests violence’s lower limit. Moshing shakes up the boundaries of how bodies can interact. How hard can I shove a body and inflict no pain? How soft is soft enough to let that body come tumbling back for another shove?

From a bird’s eye view, the pit resembles the cross section of a beehive. From the crowd, it’s a freeform jazz version of WrestleMania in which all the ropes are human arms. The goal is not to pin, but to free oneself from stillness, boredom, gravity. The goal is elevation— bodily epiphany.

In other words, a mosh pit is a bunch of bodies shoving each other and dancing like children mid-tantrum.

At the IDLES concert, Joe Talbot made the pit more than bodies colliding. Joe Talbot is a bearded, shirtless punk with dyed pink hair, a man with a history of drug abuse and alcoholism, a father to a stillborn child, and a preacher of the motto “All is Love.” Joe Talbot asked the crowd to cleave down the middle. The moshers retreated ten paces from the dividing line, forming two scrums that faced one another. It looked like the beginning of a dodgeball game. Runner’s stances. Twitchy anticipation.

“When I say go—and only when I say go—” Joe Talbot said, “you’re going to show each other more love than you have ever shown a community. Because that’s what we are, a community. Do you understand?” Learned moshers call this particular brand of chaos a ‘wall of death.’ But Joe called it love. And on his cue, I ran forward with all the love I could muster. I have never known such turbulent intimacy. +++ At its best, a mosh pit is the most human, natural, and exhilarating expression of intimacy a body can achieve. A mosh pit is the logical conclusion to a drum kick or bass line. A beat prompts a push, which necessitates a push back, which results in the organic, lunglike heaving of the whole crowd. All natural, all alive. Even choreographed movements, like Talbot’s wall of death, lack order. Although they begin with a sense of who should run into whom, I knew as soon as I sprinted into someone sprinting into me that all order was lost. Mosh pits are all about shaking off the plan.

Mosh pits allow one to embrace a childlike disregard for bodily consequence. While moshing, I recalled a demonstration in my 4th grade classroom. Ms. O’Connell helped us visualize how particles form different states of matter by instructing us to move around on her fuzzy blue carpet. We each represented a water molecule, we were told.

“Solid,” she called. Everyone clumped together, vibrating. “Liquid,” she called. We spread out viscously. We walked into each other and bounced off.

“Gas!” We sprinted, giggling, our arms up to repel other molecules.

One can find every state of matter in a mosh pit. The furthest from the pit shift minimally, walling, wallflowering. Solid.

Further in, the moshers follow the waves of the rest of the crowd. They cohere to form bubbles of space, surface tension. Liquid.

In the middle: the truly free. We who prance and thrash as we fling and are flung. Gas, where I found myself most alive. Gas, where I found myself with a body, and only a body, and that was enough.

In the mosh pit, I found myself more comfortable in my body than I had ever been. I viewed my body not as a collection of parts I did and did not like, but as a means of delivering joy both to myself and strangers. A community formed around unorthodox care. We showed each other love by shoving with consent, by protecting each other from the shoves when needed. “Shoe?” I heard. “What?” I shouted. “Shoe!” A guy circled his arms around my untied shoe, smiling.

I lifted my leg and tied my laces in the protective bubble he created with his body. I bet he would have tied it for me if I had asked.

Later, I shouted, “Shoe!” The crowd opened. A crouching human with phone light ablaze grabbed their shoe from the empty circle the crowd formed. I waltzed into the center. Soft pushes greeted me.

After the concert, I biked home safe to my then-partner’s apartment and peeled off my sweatdrenched clothes. Tiny bruises were scattered across my back like constellations.