When someone falls down, they pick them up. “But at this point we’re almost like mosh pit professionals as crazy as our pits get, people also feel safe around us.” This is because 175tv practices good mosh pit etiquette. “There’s something about opening up a pit and seeing the excitement build up on people’s faces knowing it’s about to get crazy,” he explains. He said he had always seen how much fun people looked like they were having in pits, but never thought to try and participate himself until Walé gave him that gateway to try it. I even had an XO crew (NYCXO) that went to every Weeknd event similar to how the Ragers do it with Travis and Carti.” Then, he met Walé at Rolling Loud New York and began immersing himself in the moshing scene. “Before all of this, I was in the XO scene heavy. Steven Gutierrez from Ellenville, New York, who has been with 175tv since 2019 said that “Before I met 175, I wasn’t really a mosh pit type of guy,” the 27-year-old explained. (He also works with Rolling Loud in an official capacity, traveling to their different festivals around the world, from Thailand and Holland to Miami, to capture mosh pit footage for them.) At concerts, they recognize each other by their neon ski masks with the caution symbol on the forehead. In 2019, he started a Discord that now boasts 1,300 members from across the globe. Through those experiences, he discovered a bustling community of like-minded music fans. Walé initially started vlogging his experience in various festival crowds in Europe in 2018. Even legacy acts like Jay-Z and Kanye West have encouraged fans to mosh at their own shows, reeling Queen Bey herself at their show in 2012. ASAP Rocky has made it a habit of starting his shows by opening up a mosh pit in the middle of the crowd in disguise and performing from there. These artists were critical in normalizing mosh pits and moshing at hip-hop shows. Running parallel to them were acts from the first SoundCloud era like Travis Scott, Lil Uzi Vert, Playboi Carti, Ski Mask the Slump God, and Trippie Redd. Odd Future was among the first of mainstream artists in the 21st century to push moshing even deeper into rap. One of the early and most notable instances of early rap moshing was captured in the now-iconic video of DMX’s 1999 Woodstock set, where the New York rapper performed “Ruff Ryders Anthem” to a massive sea of fans.įast-forward two decades later and the chaotic collision of humanity has become more prevalent in rap as artists have embraced more rockstar personas. When it originated in the California punk rock scene in the ‘80s, moshing was defined by its freeform “thrash dancing.” There were similar albeit less chaotic variations of freeform dance that were associated with rap around the same time, like crunk and Memphis Jookin. Mosh pits are not a new concept: Heavy metal rock and other genres have been moshing for decades. “Even though I would be in foreign places by myself, I felt connected to the people in those pits and the crowd.”
“I see myself as an artist who’s trying to help curate the community,” Walé told me as we both struggle to hear each other waiting for the next artist to perform. From behind his lens, he documents the madness of mosh pits at rap shows, where everyone is committed to the rage-when the beat drops, a curtain of bodies swings open as me and hundreds of other concertgoers start jumping and pushing for our lives.
It’s outside of one of these chaotic scenes, at a Sheck Wes performance, where I run into a digital camcorder-holding videographer named Walé, better known by his Instragram handle 175tv. All I can hear is, “Open that shit up!”Īs I look around, panicked at first, to try and find my place in the pit, it feels like I’m preparing for a theatrical performance.The teens take their places and begin to form massive black holes in the middle of the festival grounds. The people around me are screaming louder than any of the artists on stage. My ears are ringing, but it’s not because of the music booming from what has become a center for young moshers. In late September 2022, we brave the cold New York City air outside of Citi Field to travel into Rolling Loud’s pit’s orbit. You’re floating in a sea of colliding humans with a (typically) intense beat and song as the soundtrack, but there is more community to the madness than most people realize.
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