Slam Dancing
GatorToof
582 Posts
I don't go to shows at certain venues anymore because of the physical danger of slam dancing. Last time this person catapulted their body through the air into me and knocked me back. Luckily there was girl behind me, she didn't get knocked over, however; she did help keep me from falling. When I see her again I will be sure to thank her. As a result, I don't go to shows where I know people are going to be doing that type of dancing.
Comments
Give me a chance
Punk rock girl!
Let's go slam dance
Hahaha.
Just a couple of notes into seeing The Refused at Coachella last year, I got blindsided and the wind knocked out of me. As I was struggling to catch my breath, four or five people helped me back onto my feet. There's an interesting camaraderie that goes on in a mosh pit.
Yea, it's like most things in the world. Starts out cool and fun then the idiots ruin it.
Originally it was all us punks just looking to get our anger out. We were all on the same page just wanting to thrash with no intention on hurting each other. When someone went down, that section of the pit stop and got the person back up and then went back to business. It wasn't long before skin heads would show up to punk parties just just trow blows in the pit. The places I went to in Dallas had large body guards that would escort the skinheads out pretty quickly.
Then frat boys started showing up and aggressively shoving people with the intention of hurting each other as well as the idiots that would just swing their firsts like crazy secretly hoping to punch some one.
God I'm old.....
mid-afternoon rant over
And I say this as a dusty and rusty B-Boy.
Sorry, but you just made me want to obscure your view even more with some good ole fashioned SKANK.
Most violent "dancing" I ever saw was at a show by the Meteors in '84 or so. This was just a straight up mass fist fight and after the first couple of songs about half the crowd seemed to be bleeding from their faces. I think they had a different word for it than slam dancing though. Second place was the Bad Brains during the I Against I tour.
It always struck me as odd how guys would want to get all physical and sweaty and half naked with a bunch of other guys and behave in a way that ensures the sweat soaked sausage fest doesn't get interrupted by any member of the other sex.
Yea, I know, it's a macho man's world and the rest of us just live in it.
Most hardcore bands I've seen encourage it.
Also, most violent "dancing" I've ever seen ended with a crippled (as in wheelchair-bound) Crip toppled over and bleeding from a gunshot wound in his abdomen and me and my friends laying face down on the street with guns drawn on us. I guess I can see how the cops can confuse a bunch of Chicano cholos with a bunch of Black Bloods.
The best is when slam dancing is in the middle of the room, which was the general etiquette where I grew up. That way it doesn't fuck with the folks up front, the folks playing the wall, or the folks chilling in back.
A long time ago at some punk show outside Athens, Georgia (at Club Fred: "Where People Go To Drink"), my man Wavy Davy attempted expanding the horizons and expanding the parameters by trying to get an inverted slam pit going, running wide laps around the perimeter of the room while stomping and throwing 'bows. Cooler heads weren't ready, and some guy drinking with his girl calculated Dave's movements for a minute, then at the right point in his trajectory just kind of held up a bar stool and let Dave run right into it and knock himself the fuck out. After that, Dave confined his slamming to the middle, and order was restored. On the trip home, he inadvertently seated himself over a corroded spot in our girl Fontaine's van, and some errant exhaust heat came up through the floor and straight melted his pleather wallet, fusing it to his ass cheek most painfully.
All of which is just to say: Heedless slam-dancers get theirs, believe it.
No, it's actually not a macho thing. Plenty of girls/women in the pit at the shows I used to go to. Ole Ross Hogg will surely remember a particular chick with a hockey mask on at the Mudhoney show at Liberty Lunch. Great times!
And funk shows in the 21st Street Coop...which has recently been torn down...females galore.
Another who wasn't going to the right shows to know that it's moreso a fun dance, and not just a show of male brutality.
I mean, I went to some of those shows too. In fact, for some reason the skinheads would come out in droves any time Firehose would come to town. They'd certainly try, but we wouldn't let them drag it all down to their ignorant level.
POGO!
We see it different. I am not speaking as a tourist.
Not just women who don't want to be in the pit and there are plenty of rude-ass ladies ruining it for others out there, too - so my mistake to limit it to macho men.
And I am not seeing too much SKANKING at funk/soul/hip hop parties. Like I said above - bboys/bgirls...
Co-op.
They had a 2nd story rec room and seemingly endless Shiner Bock kegs (back when it was still a good beer) and local groups who fashioned themselves after the Big Boys who would get the place in a slamdancing frenzy to the point that it felt that the whole building would fall down. But I swear, those were the most insane but also the most cordial and girl-friendly moshpits anywhere. Loved it!
Sounds more like slam prancing to me, hommie.
Yeah, I'm mostly talking about 20 years ago. But again, women slamdancing aren't automatically rude. Nor is every moshpit inherently rude. The bands down here welcomed crowd particpation like that. It was all part of an all-inclusive scene. Actually, listen to what's being said here...
My favorite girls in the pit story involves a show I was playing on Long Island about 15 years ago. There was one guy, a kid who was probably about 17 and 6' 4" who was barreling into everyone whether they were in the pit or not, karate kicking, hitting much smaller girls, etc. Not cool. Eventually during my band's set my wife and her girlfriends decided that they had endured this kid long enough and completely destroyed him the next time he slammed into them. Except they did it so aggressively that they shattered this poor kid's knee. I could hear him screaming in pain over the top of our extremely loud music. We had to stop playing and stand around onstage for 15 minutes while an ambulance was called to haul this guy off to the emergency room and the cops asked around to see what had happened. After they all left we then had to try and re-start our set and get everyone in the mood for "fun" again. Didn't work.
Some of my earliest memories of shows were ska pits and moshing. My thoughts really changed at the beginning of the 90's tho, when it became a super hyped macho type deal. Dudes wanted to slam dance everywhere to anything and where some dudes just wanted to fight and used it to punch some guy in the face who was really in a pit looking to enjoy the music and blow off some steam. Many didn't even care about the music. They just wanted to punch some dude in the face.
not no cute pretty little nice smelling numbers youd bring home to mom, mind you
"harv, i know youll pick me up if i fall, baby!"