It just occurred to me that I don't ever see these at shows anymore. Didn't even dawn on me until the last two nights at two very unlikely shows I caught Kottonmouth Kings on Saturday night, and they managed to generate a small / weak circle pit for about 30 seconds during a couple of their punky songs. And then I caught Taproot last night, and Stephen was pulling folks onstage and they were stage diving. Neither of these is exactly circle pit or stage diving music, but it got me thinking. I don't even remember the last time I went to a show where I saw this stuff. It used to be mandatory at every show I went to in my teens and early 20s. Mostly metal, punk, and industrial shows. Anything aggressive. It was everywhere. And now I never see it anymore. That stuff was half the fun of the show. I went to two shows in the span of a year where somebody lost an eye in the pit. One was Pantera and the other was Warped Tour. Back when Warped Tour used to be a punk rock festival. You'd never see that today with all these tiny little kids with their flat-ironed hair and skinny jeans. What do the kids even do at these shows now? Just stand there, I guess? They don't seem to move much. At least the neo-hardcore/scene-core bands of the mid-2000s (Atreyu, 18 Visions, etc.) had kids playing Mortal Kombat with each other, dancing the windmill and such. That was fun. But you don't really even see that anymore. Or at least I don't.
Dying perhaps.....but not dead. [video=youtube;xO-PP0Z7ij0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO-PP0Z7ij0[/video]
Some punk rock and a lot of the metal core music got really trendy around the mid 2000s, and think the dulling of the scenes really started around then. Instead of angry youth trying to let out some aggression, you just had a bunch of scenesters trying to be cool. They are too concerned about messing up their hair or ripping their clothes to mosh, and the furthest they'll go is the two step. I imagine if you went to more underground punk/ hardcore/ metal/ grind shows you'd still see a lot of circle pits and slam dancing.
