\n<\/p>\n
\u201cOpen it the fuck back up!\u201d<\/span> the muscular Matt Honeycutt commands, mic gripped in his left fist, mustache prickling with indignation. He is balefully slash lovingly surveying the crowd and finding it a little sluggish and closely packed for his taste. \u201cI need all my primitive, low-IQ motherfuckers!\u201d Behind him, his band, Kublai Khan TX, rears and slumps into its next song. And the crowd lurches; the crowd flexes; the crowd feels its core, which is both a sucking emptiness and a site of repellent energy, like the space cleared by a fistfight.<\/p>\n \u201cBuild myself in the dirt!\u201d Honeycutt roars. \u201cSacred right, sacred curse.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d hate to be in that pit right now,\u201d someone says behind me.<\/p>\n Hot autumn night has fallen over Worcester, Massachusetts, over the huge, baked asphalt lot behind the Palladium, the ancestral seat of the Northeast\u2019s heavy-metal kingdom. This is the New England Metal and Hardcore Festival, 25 bands on three stages, 10 unbroken hours of heavy music, and all day, I\u2019ve been watching the pit\u2014the mosh pit, the area close to the stage where inflamed dancers whirl and collide. I\u2019ve been watching it, and skulking around it journalistically, because I am possessed by an idea: What if the pit, this ritualized maelstrom at the heart of the hardcore-metal crowd, could teach us something about how to live together in 2025\u2014about how to be?<\/p>\n Heavy metal, of all music, knows just how sick we are. Just how pinned down by depression, addiction, insanity, technology, the machine of society and the thumb of God. Metal has been telling us this\u2014gleefully, monstrously\u2014since Ozzy Osbourne first sang, \u201cBack on Earth, the flame of life burns low \/ Everywhere is misery and woe.\u201d It\u2019s a message that never goes out of style. But right now in America\u2014what with the digital splatteration, the black-hole subjectivity, and the goon squad crouched in a van behind Dunkin\u2019\u2014it has, shall we say, an especial piquancy.<\/p>\n Metalfest, as I like to call it, has been running at the Palladium since 1999, reliably showcasing the best and the brightest, the worst and the darkest, from across the spectrum of metal and hardcore punk. When I say \u201c10 unbroken hours of heavy music,\u201d I\u2019m not kidding. Metalfest is immaculately organized and relentlessly programmed, and the heaviness is continuous.<\/p>\n Inside the Palladium, there\u2019s a small, explosive room for the bands at the jumpier and more hardcore-punk end of the spectrum, bands such as Hard Target, from Central Massachusetts, and New York City\u2019s Madball. Outside in the lot, where the metal hordes are gathered, two large stages face each other across an expanse of a few hundred yards, and when a band (say, Gideon) stops playing at one end, another band (say, Full of Hell) starts up\u2014immediately\u2014at the other end. As one set finishes, in other words\u2014THANK YOU, WOOST-AAAAAH!<\/em>\u2014its last chord still decaying and its ions still swimming in the afternoon air, you hear behind you a scuttle of drums and a squawk of feedback and an AWRIGHT! LET\u2019S FUCKING GO! <\/em>All you have to do is turn around.<\/p>\n Perfect. Perfect for this crowd. For this is the deepest and most unassuaged desire of all metalheads: to live in a state of continuous heaviness.<\/p>\n And heaviness is \u2026? I\u2019ll hazard some definitions. It\u2019s a sense of cosmic tragedy, a love of the low end, an affinity for the thicker frequencies of existence, a paradoxically joyful desolation. It\u2019s the compression of Time in a riff. It\u2019s the weight of experience and the curve of space. It\u2019s the caped shadow of Ozzy, his wings spread, crying, \u201cLost in the wheels of confusion.\u201d It\u2019s the mood conveyed by the slogans on the backs of the various band T-shirts that everyone at Metalfest is wearing: FUCK YOUR LIFE<\/span>; SORROW WILL PREVAIL<\/span>; YOU WILL DIE MY ENEMY<\/span>.<\/p>\n Michael Wylie \/ Avalon \/ Getty<\/p>\n The pit is an institution<\/span>, at least 40 years old. Who started it? Where? Was it birthed in the skinhead cauldron of New York\u2019s Lower East Side, or in Southern California, with the punk-rock surfers and skaters of Huntington Beach? The legends abound, but somewhere (or more likely in several places at once), around the beginning of the 1980s, the crowd at U.S. hardcore shows opened up. Where there had been a crush or a scrum, there was suddenly and dramatically a space: for violence, for collision, for expression, for the hardest of the hardcore. The pit. And as the aggression and acceleration of hardcore migrated into metal, and into the roomier, boomier venues of the metal circuit, the pit got bigger.<\/p>\n (And not every hardcore or post-hardcore band was pro-pit. Fugazi, of Washington, D.C., would regularly stop their shows mid-song, the set\u2019s momentum quiveringly arrested, to address thuggish behavior in the space in front of the stage.)<\/p>\n As to who\u2019s in the pit, who\u2019s making the pit happen, let\u2019s take a look. There are big boys throwing their weight around, and there are wild skinnies with flying arms and spinning back-kicks, chopping out their emergency version of personal space. There are cheerful barging amateurs, happy to be bounced about, and there are prowling malevolences, waiting for the moment to blindside someone or chuck an elbow in their face. There is the occasional fearless woman. Like America, the pit is just barely a democracy. But you need youth, and you need strength: It\u2019s no country for old men.<\/p>\n And here\u2019s something interesting. The amount of fights, bloody noses, chest-to-chest confrontations, bouncer interventions I spot at Metalfest: zero. A self-policing environment, to a remarkable degree. Although I do overhear one young woman in post-pit distress\u2014\u201cThat was the stupidest shit I\u2019ve ever seen, girl! I am livid! Like, who is this bitch? I\u2019ve never seen her before!\u201d\u2014while her partner murmurs indecipherable sounds of consolation.<\/p>\n Part of being a metal or hardcore front man in 2025 is knowing how to work the pit, appointing yourself a specialist in mob physics. All day at Metalfest, you could hear them calling out the moves: \u201cMake a circle pit!\u201d (a vortex); \u201cTwo-step! TWO-STEPPP!\u201d (a dance, a kind of hobbit-y stomp); \u201cSide to fuckin\u2019 side!\u201d (self-explanatory). The crowd will obediently convulse, or it won\u2019t. \u201cOkay, now we\u2019re gonna play a game called Wall of Death,\u201d the singer of Despised Icon announces during their early-evening set. \u201cThe game\u2019s pretty simple. I\u2019m gonna count to four\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTOO HARD!\u201d one wag bellows in front of us.<\/p>\n The Wall of Death, incidentally, involves splitting the crowd down the middle, creating a channel of space, and then having the two sides charge across it like clashing medieval armies.<\/p>\n Mid-afternoon, battered by metal, away from the melee, I have a chat with the least metal-looking person I can find\u2014Black, nonbinary, softly and secretly smiling, in pants and combat boots but with floating diaphanous layers. \u201cI\u2019m tripping balls<\/em>,\u201d they tell me, which partly explains their air of conspicuous apartness: They are on a private journey, drifting through Metalfest on luminous drug filaments. They show me their sketchbook, full of tarot-like images of aliens and birds.<\/p>\n \u201cI saw you in the pit,\u201d I say. \u201cHow did it feel in there?\u201d<\/p>\n The soft, secret smile. \u201cIt\u2019s all hugging; it\u2019s all love. They want the contact.\u201d<\/p>\n You\u2019re wondering about the politics. Metal itself, being essentially a sensation in the brain stem, is apolitical, but metalheads are human, and they have their opinions. And if you want to listen to this elemental, unreconstructed music, you\u2019re going to have to take your dose of illiberalism. In the pit, you\u2019re going to have to deal with the guy whose T-shirt reads I STAND FOR THE FLAG AND KNEEL FOR THE CROSS<\/span>. The front men are demagogues; the crowd is suggestible, fanatical; and between one downstroked chord and the next, you can hear the eclipse of the Enlightenment.<\/p>\n But love abides. Care abides. \u201cI\u2019ve got 15 seconds \u2019til I say some real shit,\u201d Mychal Soto, a guitarist for Oklahoma\u2019s PeelingFlesh, shouts, wiping his face mid-set with a towel in the afternoon glare and looking out at the crowd. \u201cThis set right here goes out to anybody that\u2019s a minority or a person of color that\u2019s had to battle some real shit,\u201d he continues. \u201cEven though that\u2019s not your problem? Make it your problem\u2014make it your fucking problem. I think it\u2019s time for us as a people to become human again. It\u2019s time to give a shit about the people next to us. We have to stop this madness, because if we don\u2019t, this country is going to be over in our lifetime. This ain\u2019t a cry for either side; this is a cry for love and compassion for human beings. So LET\u2019S DO THIS SHIT.\u201d<\/p>\n Five hours later, Honeycutt doffs his baseball hat to the audience. \u201cThis next track,\u201d he declares, \u201cgoes out to all the ladies in the house!\u201d But this isn\u2019t some sexist rave-up. This isn\u2019t \u201cGirls, Girls, Girls,\u201d by M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce. This one\u2019s about truck-stop sex workers, exploitation, and generational abuse. This is Kublai Khan TX\u2019s \u201cSwan Song\u201d: \u201cTo all the ladies working Iowa 80 \u2026\u201d Could it be the most savagely empathetic pro-woman song ever produced by a bunch of big hairy metal dudes? If you\u2019d heard the chorus of women\u2019s voices singing along at Metalfest\u2014\u201cFor all the fear, every tear \/ Slowly burning your sight \/ For every moment in the light \/ I fucking see you tonight\u201d\u2014you wouldn\u2019t hesitate to say yes<\/em>, yes<\/em>, yes<\/em>. \u201cWonderful!\u201d Honeycutt growls contentedly.<\/p>\n There is a set by Cannibal Corpse at one end of the Palladium lot, a set by Lorna Shore at the other end. Then Metalfest wraps up, and we drift off, vibrationally pummeled, numb and gladdened, into the heavy-metal night. Reality will come with the dawn: normal life, the 2025 model, with its warpings of ambient pressure and its weightless panics. For now, we\u2019re held in the sweet penumbra of heaviness. As for my big idea\u2014that we can heal ourselves in the pit\u2014well, let\u2019s just say that it\u2019s the kind of idea only a journalist would have. But I can still see them whirling and colliding, the dancers, and my mind slows it all to half speed, and shafts of beauty beam out, dazzlingly, from the blur of the limbs and the ecstatic, grimacing faces.<\/p>\n It looks like chaos, but there\u2019s no real chaos, is there? Everything\u2019s cause and effect, if you know where to look.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cOpen it the fuck back up!\u201d the muscular Matt Honeycutt commands, mic gripped in his left fist, mustache prickling with indignation. He is balefully slash lovingly surveying the crowd and finding it a little sluggish and closely packed for his taste. \u201cI need all my primitive, low-IQ motherfuckers!\u201d Behind him, his band, Kublai Khan TX,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37693,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[2390,20787,17264,20786],"class_list":{"0":"post-37692","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-empathy","9":"tag-mosh","10":"tag-pit","11":"tag-savage"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37692\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}