Which band invented moshing?
It’s one of the most immediate images that spring to a layman’s mind when envisioning a typical hardcore or metal show. A perilous swirl of aggro kids keen to batter each other and send a handful to the local hospital, all orchestrated by the irresponsible frontman of whatever satanic poster band currently triggering your square parents’ panic attacks.
The hysteria around moshing reached its fever pitch in the mid-1990s with The Phil Donahue Show devoting an entire show to the dreaded craze, although to be fair to the late presenter, he conducted the episode with greater good faith than the moral crusaders of the era.
Letting off steam and looking to give and receive bruises can be traced back to punk’s original wave in the late 1970s. According to Sex Pistols lore, second bassist Sid Vicious invented pogoing, the practice of jumping up and down in a volatile manner, as a way of mocking attendees of their gigs who had no affinity with the punk community. As punk took off in California and DC into the 1980s, pogoing evolved into slam dancing, raising the stakes by actively running into each other and encouraging a belligerent whirlpool by the front of the stage.
According to journalist Steven Blush in 2001’s American Hardcore: A Tribal History, former Marine and star of Penelope Spheeris’ The Decline of Western Civilisation, Mike Marine performed the first slam dance in Orange County in 1978, stomping around in a circle and swinging his arms around with such force he knocked out a hippie. Dubbed ‘The Huntington Beach Strut’, slamdancing eventually became perceived as a method of separating the punks from the posers.
Slam dancing’s reach to the East Coast took on a much more violent turn. Exposed to slam dancing while touring California in 1980, Ian MacKaye’s The Teen Idles brought the practice to their Washington DC hometown, which grew more chaotic with its frequent stage diving. The Boston hardcore scene took another step into serious casual violence, introducing digging at people below the neck, known as “punching penguins” and “pig piles”, resulting from someone falling to the floor and being pinned down by a giant, sweaty bundle.
…but where did the name come from?
The term ‘mosh’ is half-credited to DC legends Bad Brains.
Around 1980, singer HR ended their ‘Banned in DC’ blast with “mash it-mash down Babylon!” causing the crowd to slam dance like crazy. Possibly a nod to Leroy King’s 1977 King Tubby release, HR’s patois delivery was misinterpreted as ‘mosh’, and the name stuck. As heavy metal fancied its chances in the pit, crossover thrash group Stormtroopers of Death, featuring Anthrax’s Scott Ian and MOD frontman Billy Milano, cut ‘Milano Mosh’ from their debut Speak English or Die, popularising the term and practice among the metal world.
As moshing entered hip hop and electronic music via groups like Beastie Boys or The Progidy across the 1990s, not everybody appreciated its enthusiastic practitioners. MacKaye’s Fugazi are well-known for stamping out any moshing to ensure a safe place for everyone to enjoy their sets, and after a 17-year-old was crushed to death at a Dublin gig, Smashing Pumpkins would regularly call out anyone attempting to trigger a moshpit. With rapper Travis Scott’s notorious encouragement of moshing resulting in 2021’s Astroworld Festival crowd crush, killing ten and injuring hundreds, the moshing debate looks set to wage further on.
The science of moshing
However, there are scientific explanations for such behaviours that help to shed light on the possible benefits too. One study by Cornell University found that humans in a moshing situation begin to act like atoms in a gas. “Human collective behaviour can vary from calm to panicked depending on social context. Using videos publicly available online, we study the highly energised collective motion of attendees at heavy metal concerts,” the study explained.
Continuing, “We find these extreme social gatherings generate similarly extreme behaviours: a disordered gaslike state called a mosh pit, and an ordered vortexlike state called a circle pit. Both phenomena are reproduced in flocking simulations, demonstrating that human collective behaviour is consistent with the predictions of simplified models.”
This free-flowing state helps to explain their appeal too. Moshers can enter a different state psychologically; however, they are also aware of the safety net of the ‘rules of the pit’. In short, they can behave with wild abandon to such an extent that they also become gaslike, yet they are aware that should they fall, a fellow reveller will make sure they’re safe. You can only really experience that at, well, a Sex Pistols gig, for one.
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