Last week, I had the opportunity to attend a Bring Me The Horizon Concert with one of my best friends. She was coming on the bus, so I paced outside a CVS pharmacy about a block down from the entrance to the venue, waiting for her to arrive.
It was an outdoor concert, and you could hear the opener screaming against the backdrop of a heavy guitar riff from a ways off. I watched as people clambered into line, wearing t-shirts that depicted everything from the headliner to Slayer.
When my friend finally arrived, we had to walk through a metal detector like they have at TSA. My friend got stopped, and I laughed at her for "looking suspicious." The venue itself consisted of a stage, a tent for beverages, and a cracked parking lot packed in with sweaty bodies. Nicole, my plus one, wanted to get up as close to the stage as possible, which was currently blocked by rows of large men pushing each other in time to the beat. I had never been in a pit before, but I trusted her guidance.
She told me to keep my elbows away from the body to force people off my back, find a small gap in the crowd, and push the people aside just enough to create a hole to slip through. The best time to do this was when the song picked up in intensity, causing the audience to jump up as a single body. In the chaos, people were already being tossed around, so it was easier to break through.
In time, I got the hang of shoving people without excusing myself, and eventually took the lead. We were able to get incredibly close to the stage, and we buckled down for when the headliner would come on. The crowd had other plans, pushing and shoving for a better vantage point, even during the half hour of set up.
At times, my ankle would rotate at an odd angle in order to support my weight, as I was sandwiched between much larger bodies. My fingernails got bent backward, my arms were crushed, and I had to take deep, deliberate gasps of air over the stench of marijuana and body odor.
Then, BMTH finally came out. The crowd roared and shoved. My body got passed around like a ping pong, and I spent all of my energy trying to remain standing. I watched as Nicole took an elbow to the neck, as I desperately clung to the snap back I made the mistake in wearing. I began to feel faint. I wasn't hydrated enough. I couldn't breathe. Then I fell.
Someone in the crowd must have gotten excessively ambitious in their quest to attain the front because one person was pushed down and toppled a group of us with them like bowling pins. I ended up on the bottom, and my mind raced.
I screamed for someone to help get the bodies off of me. A couple of seconds felt much longer. Finally, the crowd formed a circle around the fallen, with a few breaking out to help us up. Someone reached for me, but my legs were pinned underneath the remaining bodies. Eventually, those helping were able to figure that out, and I was helped. Nicole and I retreated to the back of the crowd soon after, where there were fresh air and no chance of suffocation.
As insane as my first pit experience was, I'm excited to do it again. When you go to a metal show, you and everyone in attendance subscribe to an invisible pact that means you participate at the expense of yourself. The rowdiness and lack of restraint are all part of the experience. The next day, you go back to your job, your school, and your normal life with the expectations of civility and performance.
That's why we have live shows that create a world devoid of most of the rules and responsibilities found everywhere else. It's more than being uncomfortable for the sake of experiencing art. It's saving your sanity by completely abandoning it for one evening, throwing caution to the wind in pursuit of pure, unadulterated fun. Where else do you get the chance to do that?
