What a metal moshpit can teach us about life and human contact

Music. Do you hear it? It emerges from the poorly sealed doors of nightclubs. It reverberates in the doors of cars along highways the same way as suburban roads - it is the backdrop to a party, and it is a universal human language that so many are not taught.

Photo taken by me: An Evening With Machinehead, a the Governor Hindmarsh Hotel, Adelaide, South Australia.

You don't have to be taught to know a sad song from a happy one. It is is an instinctual, formulaic thing that seems to be embedded in our beings, regardless of our language, or our culture.

Witnessing live music is a joy. I appreciate a wide range of music, but reserve my attendance of live music to things I am truly passionate for.

Have ears, will travel, is a phrase I've never muttered, but one that I think of when it comes to music.

Almost every time I've embarked on domestic travel within my homeland, music was the reason. As I mused in a recent comment,

I can headbang and throw my body around in a moshpit, but I also like to be mesmerised by the skill on offer, the emotional outpouring of every member of an ensemble - and being engulfed in the unfamiliar tides of bodies who I am connected to because of it, even if I've never met, or will never meet them ever again.

... and that is what I want to focus on here, today. That burning mass of bodies that assembles before a stage.

Personal space vanishes. You trust the person behind you. You respect the person in front of you. Those by your side, beyond your party of friends, are your new friends, if only for a single night.

This isn't a claustrophobic feeling, it is instead the joined worship of the Art that is Music. I am not a dancer. I've never learned, but in a metal moshpit, where bodies collide into one another with what, to an external viewer may see as a violent, flailing disorder, there's small moments of affection.

Of hands catching your balance. A palm on your back, an arm over the shoulder of a group of strangers. I high five that ends in interlocked fingers and a cooperative devil's horn.

A crowdsurfer placed gently back onto solid ground, or into the arms of a waiting security guard.

And all the while, the music blares out of speakers. People get hurt in moshpits, but that's not the point of them.

I've seen a lot of live music over the years, and I want to see much, much more. I even wrote about this very experience not too long ago, reflecting on the feeling of being in the crowd at a concert. Then, I travelled hundreds of kilometers, to be a pilgrim at another.

When I first introduce my friends to the concept of a moshpit, and encourage them to get right on in, its with love, of trying to get them to experience the same things that I feel when I am engaged in no other stimulus than sound and the vague awareness of other bodies.

They're a risky place to be, and the reward is the sort of detached affection you can garner from other human contact, where there are simple rules:

If someone falls down, you pick them up. You get them back up on their feet, and your smile at them. You lend them a steady arm, or shoulder, and remember that we're all human.

A lesson that can be applied to places beyond the pit of a metal gig. And any other genre, where you get together and dance your little heart out. It's good for the soul.