Is there a good explanation for the fact that people virtually stopped moving at rock shows?

It's all Ian MacKaye's fault

depends on the show, no?

Hormonal effects of soy milk.

"Come on Vern, the kids haven't changed, you have!"

No explanation worth going into, but I don't have any real problem w/ the stand-arounders. Don't comprehend, but at least they don't take up much space. Am bothered by the phone camera bringers. These people should be fucking pulped with bricks.

At the risk of sounding obvious, Hurting, can't this just be a criticism of the kind of bands you happen to be seeing?

in second life is there a "dance" button?

Yes and no, Ned. I think there are some bands that people stand still for today that fifteen years ago would have people tearing up the floor and each other.

I wondered that, too. 'Cuz as long as I've been going to shows (20+ years), people have been bitching about the stand around. And when I saw Monotonix/Black Eyes & Neckties this past weekend, there were plenty of folks moving, dancing and moshing.

At bigger indie shows people seem pretty still but at small punk/noise/DJ homemade events around people seem to be dancing like crazy

I also wonder if clubs have discouraged it due to liability issues.

Although I don't know how exactly they'd do that.

Think it has nothing to do with clubs. I've never seen club staff discourage non-violent dancing/moshing. Filthy Dylan OTM.

At bigger indie shows people seem pretty still but at small punk/noise/DJ homemade events around people seem to be dancing like crazy

-- filthy dylan, Monday, February 25, 2008 12:36 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

i think this is it - if youre going to bullshit major indie shows with a bunch of office worker dudes who love the shins youre probably gonna get a lot of standing around but all the grimy punk kids i know get buckwild

"Come on Vern, the kids haven't changed, you have!"

-- bnw, Monday, February 25, 2008 12:18 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

so this basically.

;_;

if youre going to bullshit major indie shows with a bunch of office worker dudes who love the shins youre probably fucked

Admittedly, I'm not going to heavy-ass shows all the time, but I remember being really shocked at no one moving to The Ex, for example, especially since I could barely contain myself. I guess that one could just be aging band = aging audience.

The last time I saw Sleater-Kinney (early 2003) the crowd was apeshit for the whole show. Carrie and Corin remarked about 10 times throughout the show how happy and shocked they were that so many people were dancing. Apparently on the other shows on the tour they'd been playing to motionless crowds.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39283

NYC clubs have been known to ask people not to dance, haven't they? lol cabaret laws. Still obv that could only be a tiny piece of an answer.

another element here, besides audience age, and type of act/show/club, is the country/culture the act performing at.
i remember reading and interview with a band i don't remember which, who said that while playing at the U.S. the audience didn't move, in Spain the crowd was dancing intensivly.
plus, playing in countries that don't get the shows routine regulary, can get the crowd go apeshit.
so don't get this stuff for granted..

I think it depends a lot on the vibe on the night, and it only takes a couple of people to get it going. It so rarely gets going these days in the UK though. US bands always seem to express surprise when they see Brit crowds moving at all, even at the end of their tour.

I just saw Jay Reatard last week, and there was plenty of moshing throughout the whole set. However, when someone who trying to crowd surf made it up to the front of the stage, a big security guy came out from the side and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and carried him backstage. After this happened, Jay demanded that the kid be brought back because he didn't do anything wrong. I didn't see where the kid went but I assume he was allowed back in the crowd. A few more people crowd surfed after that without incident.

Yeah, I saw a whole weekend of shows at the Warsaw in Greenpoint last fall and the Polish security guards were GIANT and pretty scary, even to someone who never had any intention of starting anything. Fucking bruisers, man.

do they still have the polish dogs for sale at those shows?

(that's the place that used to be the polish national home, right?)

They all looked like Russian Mafiya enforcers.

xp I dunno but they still have pierogies and Budweiser and that's all I ask.

xxp Yes, I think so.

awesome

i saw foetus there once - good times

my explanation is usually "it's minneapolis"

hurting go to some hardcore basement shows in new brunswick. my friend got two ribs cracked at one of them in high school.

I think this ties into the question that I've been asking for years, which is "why did (non-metal) rock music cease to rock?" The sluggish tempos and thudding rhythms that arose in the wake of grunge really killed any impetus to move around, I think. And that's true of big arena-sized bands as well as club acts, at least in my experience. I mean, name one Nickelback song, for example, that actually rocks the way a mid-70s Ted Nugent or Aerosmith song (examples chosen because those would have been their peers had Nickelback arisen in 1975, say) does.

I was watching Zeppelin concert footage the other day and I was bemused at how still the vast majority of the crowd were standing. So maybe this is not an exciting new phenomenon.

yeah but its cuz they were all baked

i do admit some of this bullshit punk funk new rave whatever rock does actually get me movin a lil bit

on the original question:

This might be a USA v. UK/Ireland thing, as people seemed a lot more frozen at the few gigs in the USA I have been to. Also, when a load of us from different countries were at a concert in Amsterdam recently, one of the American fellows was astonished at how animated the east Atlantaeans were.

It could be a generational thing (the post 1990s age cohort have stopped dancing), except the kids were going crazy at the last young person gig I attended.

^^this is truth. having lived in and been to plenty of gigs in both countries, I'd say this is definitely the case. contrarily, i fidn in the US that it's actually less the case with bigger, indie sellouts then with smaller bands. half the shows i go to I feel like most people don't even know the band.

: (

a brand new step that everybody isn't moving to

Oh, 2001.

The gentleman's name is Doom
Lee & Ditko, Jack Kirby
Oh baby baby baby baby
With a blinding flash and a deafening report
The pigdogs they cometh and to me they snort:
Do the standing still

http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j182/swiftian/062307/cheney_doom2.jpg

^^ GIS for "dr. doom dancing"

this thread makes me think of this.

i did an article some years back on the whole not-dancing thing, talked to musicians, promoters, dancers (amateur and professional). people had a lot of different theories about it, but the one that interested me the most came from an appalachian clog dancer. he was talking about how in a lot of more traditional, pre-mass-media cultures people were much less self-conscious about dancing. he thought that the exposure via tv and hollywood over the years to dancing as a specialized form practiced by professionals had made a lot of people uncomfortable about dancing in any public setting. definitely something like dancing with the stars gives the impression that this is something only certain people have the skills or knowledge for.

also there's the idea that music has been decoupled from dancing, with the two existing in overlapping but separate domains, which dates at least from the beginning of recorded music. if you went to see gid tanner play, that meant you were going to a dance; but if you bought a gid tanner 78 to play in your living room, you weren't necessarily going to be dancing.

(which is to say, i think it's a real phenomenon, but a complicated one that goes back a lot farther than the 1990s. and obviously there are plenty of places and settings where people still dance.)

Seeing yourself dance on video for the first time is enough to stop a lot of people.

in a lot of more traditional, pre-mass-media cultures people were much less self-conscious about dancing.

-- tipsy

OTM, in a general sense at least. I'm not sure we should attribute it to TV/Hollywood, but modern Americans do seem VERY fearful about how they'll be perceived by others. That's always been part of the human condition, but among certain groups, a pathological level of such fear is so widespread as to have come to seem "normal". Interferes w/ dancing.

Caek's post very much OTM, too. The wide availability of home video equipment has given humanity a crash course in what it actually looks like.

"why did (non-metal) rock music cease to rock?"

One word (actually, two words hyphenated): click-track.

http://www.edu.lahti.fi/~lloikkan/art/paranoid.jpg

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