The Savage Empathy of the Mosh Pit
“Open it the fuck back up!” 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. “I need all my primitive, low-IQ motherfuckers!” 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.
“Build myself in the dirt!” Honeycutt roars. “Sacred right, sacred curse.”
“I’d hate to be in that pit right now,” someone says behind me.
Hot autumn night has fallen over Worcester, Massachusetts, over the huge, baked asphalt lot behind the Palladium, the ancestral seat of the Northeast’s 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’ve been watching the pit—the mosh pit, the area close to the stage where inflamed dancers whirl and collide. I’ve 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—about how to be?
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—gleefully, monstrously—since Ozzy Osbourne first sang, “Back on Earth, the flame of life burns low / Everywhere is misery and woe.” It’s a message that never goes out of style. But right now in America—what with the digital splatteration, the black-hole subjectivity, and the goon squad crouched in a van behind Dunkin’—it has, shall we say, an especial piquancy.
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 “10 unbroken hours of heavy music,” I’m not kidding. Metalfest is immaculately organized and relentlessly programmed, and the heaviness is continuous.
Inside the Palladium, there’s 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’s 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—immediately—at the other end. As one set finishes, in other words—THANK YOU, WOOST-AAAAAH!—its 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’S FUCKING GO! All you have to do is turn around.
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.
And heaviness is …? I’ll hazard some definitions. It’s a sense of cosmic tragedy, a love of the low end, an affinity for the thicker frequencies of existence, a paradoxically joyful desolation. It’s the compression of Time in a riff. It’s the weight of experience and the curve of space. It’s the caped shadow of Ozzy, his wings spread, crying, “Lost in the wheels of confusion.” It’s the mood conveyed by the slogans on the backs of the various band T-shirts that everyone at Metalfest is wearing: FUCK YOUR LIFE; SORROW WILL PREVAIL; YOU WILL DIE MY ENEMY.
The pit is an institution, at least 40 years old. Who started it? Where? Was it birthed in the skinhead cauldron of New York’s 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.
(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’s momentum quiveringly arrested, to address thuggish behavior in the space in front of the stage.)
As to who’s in the pit, who’s making the pit happen, let’s 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’s no country for old men.
And here’s 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—“That was the stupidest shit I’ve ever seen, girl! I am livid! Like, who is this bitch? I’ve never seen her before!”—while her partner murmurs indecipherable sounds of consolation.
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: “Make a circle pit!” (a vortex); “Two-step! TWO-STEPPP!” (a dance, a kind of hobbit-y stomp); “Side to fuckin’ side!” (self-explanatory). The crowd will obediently convulse, or it won’t. “Okay, now we’re gonna play a game called Wall of Death,” the singer of Despised Icon announces during their early-evening set. “The game’s pretty simple. I’m gonna count to four—”
“TOO HARD!” one wag bellows in front of us.
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.
Mid-afternoon, battered by metal, away from the melee, I have a chat with the least metal-looking person I can find—Black, nonbinary, softly and secretly smiling, in pants and combat boots but with floating diaphanous layers. “I’m tripping balls,” 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.
“I saw you in the pit,” I say. “How did it feel in there?”
The soft, secret smile. “It’s all hugging; it’s all love. They want the contact.”
You’re 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’re going to have to take your dose of illiberalism. In the pit, you’re going to have to deal with the guy whose T-shirt reads I STAND FOR THE FLAG AND KNEEL FOR THE CROSS. 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.
But love abides. Care abides. “I’ve got 15 seconds ’til I say some real shit,” Mychal Soto, a guitarist for Oklahoma’s PeelingFlesh, shouts, wiping his face mid-set with a towel in the afternoon glare and looking out at the crowd. “This set right here goes out to anybody that’s a minority or a person of color that’s had to battle some real shit,” he continues. “Even though that’s not your problem? Make it your problem—make it your fucking problem. I think it’s time for us as a people to become human again. It’s time to give a shit about the people next to us. We have to stop this madness, because if we don’t, this country is going to be over in our lifetime. This ain’t a cry for either side; this is a cry for love and compassion for human beings. So LET’S DO THIS SHIT.”
Five hours later, Honeycutt doffs his baseball hat to the audience. “This next track,” he declares, “goes out to all the ladies in the house!” But this isn’t some sexist rave-up. This isn’t “Girls, Girls, Girls,” by Mötley Crüe. This one’s about truck-stop sex workers, exploitation, and generational abuse. This is Kublai Khan TX’s “Swan Song”: “To all the ladies working Iowa 80 …” Could it be the most savagely empathetic pro-woman song ever produced by a bunch of big hairy metal dudes? If you’d heard the chorus of women’s voices singing along at Metalfest—“For all the fear, every tear / Slowly burning your sight / For every moment in the light / I fucking see you tonight”—you wouldn’t hesitate to say yes, yes, yes. “Wonderful!” Honeycutt growls contentedly.
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’re held in the sweet penumbra of heaviness. As for my big idea—that we can heal ourselves in the pit—well, let’s just say that it’s 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.
It looks like chaos, but there’s no real chaos, is there? Everything’s cause and effect, if you know where to look.