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DISCHARGE

Elias Canetti?s analysis of crowds includes the description of a crucial point, termed "discharge," when all differences brought in from the outside world, e.g., of color, creed, or class, are temporarily erased, and a feeling of equality pervades throughout the members of a crowd (17-19). It is this moment which all three of the music-powered happenings being considered here accomplish at their best (although the discharge at Mustard?s was a limited one which did not eradicate gender difference, as will be taken up later in this paper).

Discharge at Mustard?s allowed men who were otherwise strangers to stand with their arms around one another and head-bang in unison. Under other circumstances many of these men would have removed the arm of another man who dared touched him. But as Canetti observes, once a person has surrendered to the crowd, there is no longer a fear of being touched (210).

The crowd at the NIN concert was so thick that full body contact on all sides was ineluctable. For me, contact with men, the sort of which would have in other circumstances been uncomfortable, embarrassing, and threatening, e.g., their groin against my rear end, went (almost) unnoticed. Contact with women which would have been salacious under normal conditions became neutral as it became inevitable. "No distinctions count; not even that of sex" (Canetti, 210). That this asexualizing occurred at the NIN concert but not at Mustard?s would seem to have been a result of the much greater density of the crowd at the concert.

In the thickest of crowds, especially with help of the phatest of beats and the purest of drugs, all individuality is lost, and the crowd becomes unity, a single being with a collective body.

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