Have you ever been punched in the face? I have. In all honesty, I’m rather nerdy, and it wasn’t a fight that left me with a black eye. It was a mosh pit. Jumping into a mosh pit for the first time, my understanding of music changed. Growing up as a perfectionist guitar nerd, punk rock isn’t something I usually listen to, and when I was invited to the show, I was a little hesitant to go. Social situations make me anxious. But I hadn’t seen my friend, nor had I been to a concert in a while, so I decided to go. It was going to be an exciting night.

First, dinner

An hour before the show, we all met up at Chin Ting Hsüan (金鼎軒), a famous restaurant chain and tourist attraction near the Lama Temple in Beijing. We chose this place because the show was in an alley near the temple.

It’s a decent restaurant, much better than I would expect for such a touristy location.

At the show

The venue was a place called School Bar, a cozy venue tucked away in Wudaoying Alley. This place is one of the older live music venues in Beijing, and one of the few that survived the pandemic and the government crackdowns on the music scene in 2023.

When the first band started playing, I went in to have a look. I watched from the sidelines for a while. During the first band’s performance, relatively few were in the audience, save for the more hardcore fans. One of them climbed onto the PA, preparing to crowd-surf—all three or four of the audience members. They must have been good friends.

During the second band, I saw my friends in the mosh pit. The beat dropped and I felt a wave of courage (maybe it was the beer). I jumped in. I pushed a big guy in front of me. He pushed back. A skinny guy on the left pushed me. I pushed back. Around we all went, a merry-go-round of adrenaline and youthful angst let loose. Then, I got hit in the face. It didn’t hurt. I was just surprised. Already dizzy from jostling around, I felt lighter than ever.

After the band finished their set, I went back out to the bar side of the venue to catch a breath of air. My friend met up with me, and commented on my face. “You’ve got a shiner, mate.” Nice! That’s a first for me, I thought.

Another friend told me I was doing it wrong. He told me I should be an ostrich, to keep my head down. I was standing in the mosh pit with my head up like a fool, apparently. No worries, though. It was worth a black eye for the experience.

After the show

This evening was a new experience for me. It my first time in a mosh pit—and my first black eye. My idyllic suburban childhood meant I had missed out on that sort of thing.

The experience was also a chance to reflect on my perspectives towards music in general. Ever since I learned to play guitar, I always thought that the highest form of music was recorded music. Every live show I attended was about comparing what happened on the stage to what was being done in the recording studio. Zappa Plays Zappa did an excellent job of that, and is still one of my favorite shows. But this was a reflection of my perfectionist tendencies.

There’s something special about a mosh pit. There’s a certain freedom of expression, a lack of judgment that comes with more typical types of dancing. I reckon many in the crowd might have been as shy as me in their younger years. But I could see and feel the sense of communion between the band and the audience, just inches away from each other.

Fighting with ghosts

One friend who came with us to the show was a longtime punk fan. With a wife and kid and his 41st birthday the Monday after the show, punk music was important to him. “Punk music really helped me learn self-confidence and relax,” he told me afterwards. I could tell he really loved the music, too. Of the four hours of music played that night, he was front and center for most of it, bobbing away with the music.

I wish I’d done this earlier. I used to be deathly afraid of dancing. I remember one harrowing experience in middle school during a Sadie Hawkins dance. It was the only one I attended during all my school years, since it was held during school hours. I really wanted to disappear, but one girl asked me to dance, so I stumbled around in a few circles with her until I felt dizzy. Then I excused myself out of the gym to go play my guitar, which I lugged to school every day just to escape situations like that.

This music naturally comes with a sense of aggression and danger. That gets translated into windmilling fists and airborne kicks, almost as if the young men were fighting off spirits. The result was a great catharsis as each set ended and the crowd broke back into the bar. The specters of social pressures and responsibilities were defeated, left twitching on the live house floor.

Music lessons

This experience changed my perspective on music. I had often used music as an excuse for avoiding the anxiety that social interactions gave me as a kid. The guitar-oriented music I liked was a competition to be the fastest, the coolest, the most digitally agile. For me, music was a search for the perfect form of expression.

The music at this show wasn’t about that. The bands that played that night weren’t perfect. Nobody played a blazing guitar solo. That wasn’t the point. The point was to get together and enjoy some kick-ass riffs, screams, and howls. After my years of guitar noodling and pursuit of perfection, I loved this feeling, and I look forward to doing it again. It was mission accomplished.