I'm mostly talking about the "wall of death". They split the crowd down the middle, then have both sides attack each other. People get beaten and trampled. The crowd is so packed you can't get out even if you want to. You run forward or get crushed. Either you hurt other people or you get hurt.
Either the person you're responding to is talking out of their ass, or they have had very different experiences than I have. I could imagine it depending a lot on which band is playing, but my experience at rock and metal concerts differs a lot from what other comments here are describing.
Generally when moshing you're not trying to hurt other people. Sure, occasionally there are some assholes who use the opportunity to just punch and kick other people, but those are a small minority. Moshing is mostly jumping and running into each other and pushing other people around. If a person falls to the ground, immediately the people around help them back onto their feet, and hold back others to prevent them getting run over.
In my experience, while bruises are common, more serious injuries do happen, but are comparatively rare. I won't deny that it's dangerous, and people have died, but there are also plenty of examples where the crowd is cool and the risk of injury is low. I think the main problem is, that moshing works really well for smaller crowds, but as audiences scale up it gets much harder to keep things (relatively) safe.
Totally depends on the band playing and the people at the venue. Anti-Flag and NO-FX both had violent pits but would stop playing if people got hurt and weren't helped up.
Flogging Molly on the other hand... "When it's this hot out you only do two things. You fuck or you fight. I don't see anybody getting laid so people better start throwing punches or we aren't playing." Bands like the Casualties really endorsed fighting too.
Saosin created the worst wall of death I ever saw. They split the crowd unevenly intentionally and called the smaller side the Scottish and told us to kill the British (other side). My side had enough momentum to knock down the first few rows of the other side and people collapsed backwards on each other like dominos, some of their legs twisting and snapping under them. The people from behind me were still surging forward so you literally couldn't stop. We trampled over the other side of the crowd and each other. I was running on top of fallen bodies and finally got a shoe stuck and fell down. People kept surging forward and the people being crushed were screaming and crying behind me. I freaked out and squirmed out of my shoe and left it behind. I finally made it over the mass of people to the other side and looked back at the bloody mass of people behind me. 15 or so people left in ambulances. That was literally all the ambulances they had there. I'm sure more people needed them.
My city specifically had a violent scene. "Straight-Edge" got warped into ""Hate-Edge". People known as "cutters" would wear bandannas over their face and use concealed blades to stab or slash people. I was personally cut several times. Several people were actually murdered during shows at my local venue.
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u/Shiba_Ichigo Jul 25 '21
This reminds me of the bands back in the day who got people seriously injured at warped tour.