Moshing was angry, violent and dangerous, a marker that distinguished hardcore punk from the mainstream culture it was rebelling against. Due to his distinctive accent, punkers heard it as “mosh.” “And then because the floor is so crowded, people start banging into each other.” H.R., the frontman of pioneering hardcore punk band Bad Brains, would urge audiences to “mash it up” when the banging got especially frenzied. “At all our shows, it would be so crowded up front, and you would have no place to move so you would go up and down, and pogo,” recalled punk musician Steve Garvey. And so the mosh, or slam dance as it was first known, was born. The pogo, punk’s signature dance at the time, simply couldn’t keep up. SoCal bands like Black Flag, Fear, and Circle Jerks played even faster and harder than their punk peers. In Southern California’s Orange County, what we’d come to know as moshing emerged in the late 1970s punk scene. Nobody can agree exactly on when moshing came to be, but there’s little doubt as to where. It occurred to me while watching a mosh pit break out unceremoniously at San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival earlier this year-as banjo-playing musicians with flowers in their hair regarded with puzzled faces the swarm of white, male bodies flailing about at random before them- that the art of moshing might be truly dead.

Mosh pit at a 1980 punk show at The Starwood in Los Angeles.

Punk mosh pit