by Cara McClain

For me, a typical Sunday night looks like piles of ignored homework coupled with the exhaustion from the weekend, but breaking pattern last Sunday night, I went to a punk show in the Crossroads. It’d been a while since I’d gone to a show, so I felt the usual uneasiness of an unfamiliar, mysterious environment filled with unfamiliar, mysterious people. Fleetingly, I questioned whether to dress more like a punk but quickly threw that thought away in the “dumb-things-I-sometimes-think-but-never-act-on” bin.

As I walked toward the building, I could hear the music from the street corner. I entered the door into the building, a large-sized garage with walls splashed with mural-like paintings and flyers for other punk bands. After paying my five dollar donation, I scanned the crowd for my friends, and seeing them in the corner, I sighed in relief. Walking over to them, I mouthed hello, not even attempting to compete with the music overpowering the whole area.

The other people there formed a semicircle facing the opening band, and, in the space between, some brave (crazy?) few were moshing, ridiculously stomping around, shoving and ramming into one another. Safely cushioned away from the middle by a layer of people, I observed, mentally taking notes of everybody’s behavior.

Generally, everyone not moshing stood around, arms folded, nodding their heads along with the imperceptible beat. The singer (I guess) of the band, half-eating, half-screeching into his microphone, moved as if tormented by internal demons. I looked at my friends to catch their reactions and wasn’t surprised to see them completely stone-faced, standing with their arms folded too. I mean, it’s not like you’d be smiling at a punk show…

Except that I was. I couldn’t help it. The drama of the whole production was just hilarious. I laughed through the majority of the show. I kept thinking, “People can’t honestly think this music sounds pleasant, right?” I assume most people go for either the experience or the credibility of attending a punk show, definitely not because they wanted to hear the music they listen to before bed every night live. No, not possible.

While another band set up and everyone made the mass exodus outside, a friend of mine told me he thought I’d have some rational explanation for it all. The funny thing was I had been trying to come up with one between laughs during the first band without any luck.

There’s no rational explanation for people’s behavior at a punk show, but I guess that’s probably the point.