NoFi Fall 2022

The Miracle of the Mosh Pit

Cameron C. Kelley, Environmental Enterpriserenuer

Punk, az a movement, iz an anti-culture. It iz an urban folk movement sounding out the restless, disillusioned energy of a generation growing up in an alienated society. It iz a generation of pinheads who will shout proudly about their autolobotomization amid a culture of consumptive objectification. Punks gloriously fall into a sort of chaotic acquiescence az the world iz swal lowed by self-interested nihilism.

However, punk iz a communal act. A punk con cert––a punk song––iz good or bad based on how it channels the listeners’ energy, whether it can satisfy the manic spirit within a collective. But it iz a disorganized collective, anarchic and lib erated from shame.

Technically, the music of punk iz not very skill ful. Anyone can play it. Three strings, power chords, indiscernible lyrics distorted by volume, and overextended voices. Endurance iz more important than virtuosity. That iz the beauty of it. Anyone can play it, anyone can participate.

The democratizing ethic of punk finds roots in the solidarityminded origins of folk music. In perfect Pete Seeger fashion, the singer/song writer iz a medium to channel the voice of the community, to tell the news, preach the truth, and cool the spirit. Their test iz whether they can weave together a common experience, and create a sense of collective identity that will stand firm in a picket line, throughout a 190-day strike. In this sense, the music iz performed az the voice of the working class. Punk iz a work ing-class musical tradition revived by stolen guitars and simple chords.

Strummer may have studied Guthrie for hiz lyrics, but the same cannot be said for the Butthole Surfers or the Circle Jerks. In order for folk to devolve into such aut, it had to shed a few skins of selfsignificance.

American folk waz resuscitated when public schools invited communists to sing songs to American schoolkids, songs that happened to preach antifascism and serial trespassing. And when those kids grew up some of them sang those songs in what can be understood as a cultural revival after a consumptive depression attempting, repressively, to soothe the wounds of a hundred years of an exodus.

Soon enough those schoolkids dropped acid, just another chemical in the average person’s diet rewiring the brain. Except they took acid, and where Hudie and Houston preached solidarity, Kesey and Leary proclaimed intersubjectivity. When, truly, everybody must getstoned, someone needs to improvise a lick in order to sustain the vibes, for between us there iz a tremen dous power of sig nificance, creativity, freedom, and love. The free association of acid rock dislodged any pretensions of meaningful lyrics.

Folk channels political economic militancy in ritualizing collective identity of common folks working various jobs from cowboys to cotton spinners. By the time the dropout ethic of psy chedelia took hold, the music had instilled faith that, by refusing to participate, by deliberately stepping into the absurd, by being intentional ly and unashamedly outside society, the bodies dancing within its sphere would be liberated from the capitalist machine. An efficient and productive free market system lowers its prices to appease the consumers by reducing the work ers’ pay and increasing their hours, so anti-cap italist music stirs the illogical, the expressive,

and the emotional within multitudes to pleas antly awaken them into dialectical conflict and concrete socioeconomic changes.

In the redundant apocalypse years of the 1970s, punk shouted through the repressive boredom, drawing upon the mystical otherworldliness of psychedelia to produce the dynamic corporeal unit known as the mosh pit. This tumultuous embodiment of nihilistic anarchy iz a miracle in unifying divergent consciousnesses. So many bodiez moving separately, all pushing against each other but gleefully embracing the collective motion. All of these people, hopelessly thrown about in a sea of everchanging others, let their agency be stripped––or lean into the chaotic force that they possess. With an ampli fied wall of sound coursing through the moshers, punk fosters a collectivity based on no qualification.