New Criticals

As anybody who has ever ridden the subway surely knows, people don’t know how to behave in a variety of scenarios and settings.  This is especially true in crowds, watching bands.  They bounce beach balls around festival grounds and set off fireworks in sweaty, crowded basements; they carry full-ass draft beers in both hands and surf E-Trade on their iPads, all while bands are either playing or about to play.  Trumping all of these and any others you could catalogue, however, is moshing, which has always been and will always be the dumbest fucking thing you could possibly do at a show.

It’s impossible to criticize moshing without sounding like a fogey of some kind, like you’re the dad who doesn’t understand why the fuck his kids like Applejacks and skateboarding.  But those kids were dicks, and so are people who mosh.  Picture how awful and gross it is when some dude (usually a dude, more than six feet tall) accompanies their polite request to squeeze by you in a bar with a completely uninvited grab of the shoulder or, worse, palming of the upper back.  Now picture someone doing that while being shot out of a cannon, and marvel at why anyone would do such a thing recreationally.  It’s invasive, it’s painful, and it turns complex, purpose-determining humans, with desires OTHER THAN being bulldozed by flesh bombs, into billiard balls that will travel a certain distance if you hit them hard enough.