Is stage diving dangerous? I bet it is! Are people gonna stop doing it? Not a chance! I don’t know about other places, but here in California, it is something I see constantly, stage diving with crowd surfing and moshing. There are some clubs where it is totally permitted (the Echo/Echoplex) however I have been to other clubs where they try to forbid it… but let’s just say these are not the cool ones.
So despite the potential danger that diving over people’s heads represents, kids just want to have fun and this is too much part of the game of punk shows to stop anytime soon… to me stage diving is a sign that the audience is really into it and likes the band, right?
However, stage diving just put the punk band Joyce Manor in the middle of a controversy, as frontman Barry] Johnson shamed a stage diver during a show, stopped the song and pulled the guy up on stage, because he was afraid the guy would crush some young boys and girls at the front: ‘How much do you weigh?’, he asked him ‘Sorry, that’s really rude. You’re much smaller than him, right? It’s completely unacceptable for him to impose himself on top of you. Completely unacceptable, right? Under no circumstances is that acceptable? OK.’
And this was not the only time it happened, the band has tried to monitor their audience and has singled out people misbehaving and stage diving… needless to say that this did not please everyone. Who do these Joyce Manor kids think they are? Are they really punk? If they want to be a boy band à la One Direction, they always can, but are they really punk if they want to regulate the violence going on during their shows? Many people are mad at them and ‘have lost respect for them’ expressing their discontent in an ongoing conversation about the incident on the band’s Facebook page… and I am kind of split on that one.
If I can see the obvious danger of stage diving, I can’t imagine a good punk show without it, rather I can’t imagine a good punk show where the band tells to the audience what to do! I have been to very dangerous gigs, I don’t participate to this sort of behavior – of course! – but I would never imagine a law against stage diving, as a matter of fact, if I see a sign ‘No stage diving’, like in some unnamed clubs on the strip, I have a tendency to think the place sucks… yes I got really scared a few times, like in the pit of the Bad Brains at the Sunset Junction fair, at a Trash Talk show at the El Rey where bodies were flying over my head, at the Dillinger Escape Plan and Ceremony shows at Eagle Rock’s Center for the Arts where everything was trembling and moving, but these are great memories. Plus I have a friend who told me that punk shows are a joke these days, apparently they were really dangerous in the 80s, when you were literally risking your life during a show at the Palladium, before been beaten up outside by the police trying to stop the show,… those were the good old days, just watch one of these old Black Flag videos on YouTube…
If it gets too rowdy, why not stepping back as I have done it many times? Let crazy guys have the nose bleed if this is what they call fun, let them break their back, and observe from afar, because Johnson’s preaching to these guys how to behave doesn’t look good, despite him having the best intention:
‘I wasn’t able to watch people being hurt so I asked people not to act in the way that was hurting people’, he wrote on their Facebook page. ‘If that means you don’t support the band, I respect that. If you don’t want to attend the shows, we respect that. If you’ve bought a ticket to the show and want your money back because you want that to be your experience, we will refund you. I don’t have an issue with anyone’s lifestyle. I apologize to losing my cool in Houston. I saw someone whose full intention was to harm people and was upset.’
Oh stop apologizing and start an emo band (wait, Joyce Manor is emo, right?)… punk shows are not necessarily safe and especially for short and small women, that’s the way it is! Believe me I have been mad myself at fat drunk idiots pushing me and forcing me to go to the back of the room, but can you imagine punk rock without Iggy Pop stage diving? I know, he is a master of the genre, probably the king of stage diving and the initiator of the trend… like anything else, stage diving is an art and should be reserved to the experts.
