Personally, I had a ton of fun at the Joyce Manor show last night, dancing with my friends and singing our lungs out, the enjoyment only heightened by Barry's speaking out against violence in the pit. I'm seeing a lot of people posting shit about how "Joyce Manor sucks now", and I can't even comprehend how you could feel that way. I've always felt that crowd surfing is an extremely selfish and aggressive position to take, not only physically hurting people with flailing legs or just sheer weight, but also limiting the enjoyment of everyone under you just to have a few seconds of a good time. I thought it was awesome that Barry refused to play if anyone was crowd surfing, and I commend him for being brave enough to speak his mind about issues in the scene. The punk scene is a community, or at least it's supposed to be. It's where you go when you don't fit in anywhere else, when no one else gets you like the crowd in the pit at a show. But lately, I don't know if it's newcomers or just a shift in attitude, but it seems like a lot of guys are going to shows specifically with the intention of hurting people. I would attribute it to the growing merge of the punk scene with the hardcore scene, where "fuckin people up in the pit" is the norm. I'm not saying we don't like going hard, releasing aggression, and getting wild, but in the punk scene at least, the idea is that you do that while still keeping everyone else's safety and comfort in mind. It's okay to accidentally hurt someone in the pit, it's going to happen and we know that when we get in. But treating the pit like a massive fight is completely unacceptable, and if you hate Joyce Manor now just because they recognize that and try to put a stop to it, you probably need to rethink why you're even at this show in the first place.










