The Mosh Pit
On Catharsis
I want to begin with a question that has two parts, because I don’t think they can be answered separately. Why has aggression always needed a space of its own? And why is that space becoming harder to find?
Public life is now watched more closely than at any point in living memory, and one consequence, mostly unremarked, is that fewer and fewer spaces remain where people can transgress a social norm without that transgression being recorded, flagged, or shut down before it finishes happening. I’m not interested in relitigating the surveillance state, that ground has been covered. What interests me is a narrower question: what happens to the impulse itself when it has nowhere left to go unwatched?
Civilization has become remarkably skilled at managing disorder. But in becoming so good at containing it, we may have forgotten that disorder was never something to be eliminated, only ever given form. Throughout history, societies built rituals, festivals, and communal spaces where people could meet their more unruly impulses on shared terms, controlled but not denied. The difficulty is that those impulses don’t disappear when the spaces do. They lose the form that once gave them meaning, and without that form, they resurface elsewhere, unbounded and far more corrosive. We are, I think, already living inside that byproduct.
Every generation inherits the enclosed spaces of its predecessors and has to decide what to do with whatever’s left outside the fence. The mosh pit, for those who have stood inside one, was never really about violence, if you’re a metal or punk head, you already know this. It was about finding a patch of ground, however small and however temporary, where the ordinary rules of bodily distance and civility could be suspended by mutual agreement, and something unspoken could move through a crowd instead of staying locked inside individual bodies. Gentrified venues, algorithmic mediation, and a culture increasingly fluent in the language of risk haven’t eliminated the appetite for that release. They’ve made the ground harder to hold onto.
The instinct might be to look for a replacement: a new venue, a new scene, a new app that promises the same release, blah blah blah. But this searches for catharsis in the wrong register. The crossfit gym, the breathwork circle, the PvP lobby, the protest crowd, all are already owned, monitored, or monetized in ways the pit at its best managed to resist, however briefly. If catharsis requires a space that is bounded but not owned, the real question becomes whether it is still possible to make one, and what claiming it would actually require of us now.
There is something to learn here from the world of metal music. The mistake is to read metal’s aggression at the level of appearance alone. The volume, the distortion, the imagery, and the physicality can make it look like a celebration of chaos. But as the anthropologist and filmmaker Sam Dunn has explored through his documentaries on metal culture, what appears from the outside as aggression often functions internally as something closer to belonging. Metal has long provided a home for those who feel alienated by mainstream culture, a space where people can confront emotions and experiences that are often pushed aside elsewhere.
This is perhaps one of the greatest misunderstandings of metal culture. To an outsider, the darkness can appear to be a celebration of nihilism, violence, or evil. But often the opposite is true. Metal does not turn toward darkness because it wishes to glorify it. The turn toward darkness is because it refuses to pretend darkness does not exist. The imagery of Satan, demons, and the underworld, whether taken literally, symbolically, or theatrically, often functions as a language for confronting the destructive forces within humanity itself, such as cruelty, greed, hatred, domination, despair.
As a dear friend of mine put it, “Aside from a few loonies who truly believe they are worshipping the devil seriously, it’s about acknowledging evil and injustice, lamenting it, fighting it, powering up to confront it.”
In this sense, Satan becomes less a figure of worship than a symbol of humanity’s shadow, the parts of ourselves and our society that we would rather deny. Metal creates a space where these forces can be examined, and transformed into art rather than left to remain unconscious. The darkness becomes not an escape from reality, but more an engagement with the uncomfortable realities morality must confront.
I am not here to convince you to trade your Sunday mornings for black metal festivals, or to argue that standing in a crowd of thousands while guitars sound like the gates of hell opening is everyone’s idea of enlightenment. The metal scene has its own threshold of initiation. I suspect very few people could make it through a full weekend at Roadburn and emerge unchanged, or with their hearing fully intact.
As Dunn’s work suggests, metal’s power lies in its willingness to confront what society often prefers to avoid…the uncomfortable, the excessive, the painful, the parts of human experience that don’t fit neatly into narratives of constant optimism, progress, and self-improvement. Metal does not glorify darkness for its own sake. It creates a space where people can enter darkness together, acknowledge it, and emerge with a renewed sense of connection and belonging.
We tend to assume communal spaces exist to produce something like joy, celebration, connection, some outcome we can point to and call worthwhile. But some of the most necessary spaces a civilization can build are the ones that produce nothing at all. Spaces to encounter difficulty together. To struggle, to grieve, to move something through the body that has no other exit. A society that only makes room for what feels good, that only builds spaces which promise happiness, distraction, escape, is not actually more humane. It risks avoiding the parts of being human that don’t resolve into anything useful.
The pit understood this. It never promised anyone a good time. It promised a place to put something down.