People in Banana Costumes at Hardcore Punk Concerts

what is your take on this vital issue

https://stereogum.com/2501693/end-it-concertgoer-in-banana-costume-tears-hardcore-community-apart/news

C-Man no longer posts so the foremost authority on this topic can not weigh in.

personally i get why people at hardcore concerts would be annoyed at people being "wacky" but when fans get all territorial and aggro against people who aren't causing any real harm, it makes them look like cops. i wouldn't wear a banana costume to a hardcore concert but i also wouldn't listen to a band who got that upset by some jagoff wearing a banana costume at their show. it's not like he was fuckin' abbie hoffman or anything.

WWNWD?

baltimoreans can be pretty aggro

are we sure this guy isn't a character in a Tim Robinson sketch

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HKKeLdxXkAABgvs?format=jpg&name=large

Egg punk vs chain punk turns violent

While, policing what people wear?

i want to say that i don't care, but ultimately i have to side with bananaman unless something surfaces where he was being confrontational etc

aggro punks espousing radical leftism but acting like cops though is a story as old as time tho

can you see the band over the top of the banana costume?

Everyone complaining about this is such a fuckin hall monitor.

You’re laughing. A man’s banana costume is destroyed and you’re laughing.

Gen Z is pretty hall monitor-ish in general compared to millens y/n

hardcore punks once again turning out to be conservatives

This is real "let them fight" territory

One side is bullying and threatening violence and the other side is wearing a banana costume.

Team banana obviously.

“Asking people to destroy a banana costume is violence, actually”

Come on, of course it’s violence

It’s just that in this instance, the violence is kind of funny

^ this

generally I am on team egg punk here tho, the band were being dicks and the venue is pissed as well since the dude was a regular

still a world away from the "beat up the longhairs for real" stuff happening in the early 80s

“Asking people to destroy a banana costume is violence, actually”

― EsBeeKid (Whiney G. Weingarten), Tuesday, June 9, 2026 1:28 PM (twenty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Did you miss the "Now everyone here has to kill you"?

I’m in the morally suspect position of agreeing that this attack was wrong but also giggling every time I think about it

You guys sound like the MAGA dudes who claim BLM was “violent” because they burned a car a car or whatever. Destroying a banana costume is not violence.

Watch your fucking mouth

They still have Hardcore punk shows? Fucking losers.

Trashing a banana costume isn’t violence. Getting a load of amped up punks to trash a banana costume while the guy is wearing it looks a lot like violence to me.

pretty much, yeah

The guy standing near the stage at a hardcore show must have been quite surprised when things got a little rowdy!

Post through it, it’s the only thing you know

Fucking loser

People have been trying to dim my sparkle my entire life. It sucks, but I'm used to it.

lol c'mon there's some difference between going to a hardcore show and being part of the camaraderie of smashing into people vs. being the target of the band and the entire audience. For the record I also think it was funny.

i just don't understand how being the guy in the banana costume doesn't lose its novelty after the first 10 minutes, especially if you're going to see music that involves a lot of movement.

if you insist on being the main character, well sometimes bad things happen to the main character

That shit-ass band incited violence against a fan in order to police his clothing before *checks notes* yelling without irony "fuck the police."

And yes, it was violence. Tearing clothing off someone is assault.

Wtf is with all this conformist "main character energy" bullshit being used to justify violence? If someone is being a bit of a dick but not actively bothering anyone, just ignore them.

Guy in a banana suit tripping balls somewhere on the lawn at Dead show: sure, why not.

Guy in a banana suit at a hardcore punk show in a tiny club: gtfoh, dude.

what's punk all about if it's not sticking to a rigidly defined uniform and encouraging violence to any weirdo who breaks ranks?

gtfoh with “violence”

0 people got hurt

Judd Apatow says Will Smith ‘could have killed’ Chris Rock in #Oscars slap. pic.twitter.com/C5Ai06TqrF

— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) March 29, 2022

“Asking people to destroy a banana costume is violence, actually”

― EsBeeKid (Whiney G. Weingarten), Tuesday, June 9, 2026 10:28 AM

they're just paying tribute to those who came before them

peel slowly and see

thank y'all for bringing the snark to this thread. my friends were all "god how could those people be such dicks" but also i think a lot of my friends think these guys are hardcore punk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-HKqN3WM54

like i feel like it would be unusual if _nobody_ wore a banana costume to a sex machineguns concert

anyway seriously thank you because my brain is hopelessly nuance-pilled and i can't think of a controversy _less_ deserving of nuanced takes than this one.

everyone== he’s a dork but he didn’t deserve that
whiney==dorks get swirlies
kate== ????

Punk is truly dead if you can’t dress up as a Velvet Underground album at a show.

loooooook

honestly i'm on team djp

i'm probably _supposed_ to be on the side of "egg punk", which apparently did _not_ get its name from the way that people who play in egg punk bands tend to look like every fucking egg i have ever seen, but c'mon dude. dude. why the fuck are you gonna dress up like a banana at a hardcore punk show. were you hoping they would invite you up on stage to rap about pizza? i'm in favor of tolerance and diversity and even cringe but look. ian mackaye wouldn't have done anything like the people in this boring band did, but also i can well imagine ian mackaye saying something _completely_ eviscerating about this dude and i'd fucking applaud him for it.

Punk is truly dead if you can’t dress up as a Velvet Underground album at a show.

― The Quaker Gurvitz Army (President Keyes), Tuesday, June 9, 2026 5:45 PM (four minutes ago)

no see this is my point

if this dude was a REAL punk he'd be wearing a penis costume _under_ his banana peel costume

ok it was literally a pink banana but c'mon. it's 2026. wear the fuckin' penis costume.

^^^ the best answer

bananaman obviously a dork who wanted to bait people but the End It guy is 100x dorkier for taking the bait, people used to whip glass bottles & batteries at hardcore singers and this drip is triggered by a polyester banana, absolutely corny af

whether or not its violence its just lame letting a banana run you like that, turn in your hardcore card

The banana that defined a generation

who looks more ridiculous at hardcore shows, a guy in a banana suit or slamdancers

Has anyone considered the dangers of banana peels in the moshpit?

“hardcore was founded on violence” also sounds like some boys club shit. i know some women can be ruthless in the pit, but still

― ivy., Friday, June 12, 2026 9:49 AM (thirty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

hey ivy i should have provided more context, so really a major theme of that John Doe book (made up of individual chapters written by people who were in the scene: Doe, Jane Weiland, Chris D., Watt, El Vez etc), and really the main theme was the original Hollywood scene of punk was far more arty, more female, more multi-racial that was sort of ended by the hardcore scene and bands like TSOL (who really did seem to move as a youth gang)....the real "hinge" bands were Black Flag and Germs who were friends with and admired by the Hollywood bands but started it moving to a much more violent, more macho, more white male thing.

So when I made that comment I was trying to tie back to what Neanderthal was saying, that there was a strong element in hardcore even as early as then where being a venue for young males to act out violence or a least a kabuki of violence was really inherent to the whole thing, as much in a lot of cases as the music.

I remember going to a place called the Bomb Shelter on Lake Street when I first started going to see bands in Minneapolis and the guys were out on the outside of the pit just punching people and throwing them back in the pit if they tried to get out. I did not like it at all and never went back.

to be clear, this is not my idea of punk or hardcore and I don't really like anything that's descended from NYHC or the whole Cro Mags, Harley Flanagan tough guy shit. But in terms of End It or Hatebreed or whoever, I do think it might be smart and Neando said to realize it has very little to do with whatever I think of as punk.

it’s ironic the ice cream eating motherfucker monologue got brought up because that was about a guy who was being too violent to the people around him

― ivy., Friday, June 12, 2026 9:46 AM (thirty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is also a great point I was going to talk about and forgot but Fugazi was really active in trying to protect people at their show from this type of shit.

re schism between hardcore and punk - Sam McPheeters (Born Against) talks about this in his book Mutations - he went to see Youth Of Today support GBH in about 1987, and Ray Cappo launched into an on stage rant denouncing punk rock, and sees this as the point where hardcore began to see itself as something separate to punk. he says this also brought in a load of conservative attitudes to the scene

Also Hare Krishna attitudes

well yeah. I do like 108 but that's despite of that

oh yeah i totally agree with that ums!!!

and i’d also think i’d characterize my experience at good, recent modern hardcore shows as one of “positive aggression.” “take care of your people in the pit” etc.

I still remember this asshole going to an Obituary show in 2015 and trying to crowdkill the front row for a solid half hour, including a woman who had screamed to knock it off. my friend grabbed him with one hand and threw him to the ground.

No punches, no fight afterwards, nothing other just showing the aggressor enough humiliation that he got the fuck out of dodge and left everyone alone.

I also recall an Incantation show where people were launching full, 20 pound steel reinforced bar stools at each other in the pit. Amazed nobody was hit in the head

I got headbutted once at a Cannibal Corpse show and a big muscular guy pulled me to safety. In my youthful naivety I went to go back into the pit and I felt his hand on my shoulder pulling me back, wagging his finger at me acting as my protector

Then Whitney Houston "I Will Always Love You" came on

aren't Incantation a panpipes band?

Ray Cappo launched into an on stage rant denouncing punk rock

ha I remember thinking all the bullet belt/liberty spike bands were total poseur has-beens back then... and then Rancid brought all that shit back

I think its interesting that at least according to banana guy's post, his motivation for wearing the suit isn't to fuck with the vibe or tweak the over-serious sensibilities of uptight hc guys, but as a kind of safety signal to first-time or non-veteran showgoers that he's not a toughguy, the idea that someone can spot him and quickly discern that he's probably not going to suckerpunch you or kick your knees out. Now, he might be spinning to make himself look good and/or he might not be entirely self-aware about his own motivations, but still an interesting detail imo.

I know folks that have suffered life-changing injuries at hc shows, not from tragic-accident type stuff but from intentional acts that in any other context would earn the perpetrator an easy 7-10 years, and the amount of "condolences but what do you expect at hardcore show, stay home if you cant handle it" type responses from the community eventually made me pretty much never want to be in a hc crowd again. The inevitable debates about what this or that band, behavior, or type of fan have to do with the nature of punk or the ideals of hardcore always end up in academic "no true Scotsman" territory for me

>i can well imagine ian mackaye saying something _completely_ eviscerating about this dude and i'd fucking applaud him for it.
oh absolutely. Have you listened to Fugazi live shows or seen them live? Ian has no problem picking fights with the audience about lesser stuff than this.

I think calling him out was a bit far especially when he's a valued local but I also totally get an artist being frustrated with how endlessly ironic and meme-y shows have to be nowadays. We were all so stoked on the Death Grips return to touring and then it got ruined because the fans wouldn't stop showing up in banana costumes or propellor hats and throwing glowsticks on stage and the guys got fed up and re-retired. I'm sure that, to guys who take their craft really seriously, people showing up and making such a joke of it felt like a real slap in the face. I don't find it particularly surprising that a hardcore band would also take it that seriously.

yeah, there's absolutely something pernicious about this particular sort of obvious memeing that goes well beyond innocent whimsy, it's one short leap from this to dicks out for harambe style trumpjugend pageantry, even if it isn't directly racist it's a sort of bad-wacky irony poisoning that i fucking detest on instinct and i'm really surprised the thread has defended the banana guy so staunchly, if i saw him at a gig dressed like that i wouldn't attack him personally but any non-physically-injurious comeuppance he received would be inwardly or perhaps even outwardly cheered, world doesn't need cunts like that imposing their own moronic and almost certainly disgusting narrative onto others' art

perhaps i go too far - perhaps the guy isn't actually a horrible person with disgusting politics - but he's playing with the same aesthetics that the new right are, with absolutely no sense of deconstructive or personalised remove, and that makes him a fellow traveller in my book. it's probably he's just an idiot. 'dim my sparkle' lol fuck off

corollary to all of the above: i am a bit of a prick tbf

don't put yourself down, you're doing all you can to fight the rise of fascism, rolling your eyes at people in costumes at gigs

You are really reaching here. Lame or not, the banana costume thing pre-dates the existence of the alt-right significantly and has more to do with goofy cosplay than anything pernicious. It's no different than the guy I used to see at Maryland Deathfest who was dressed as a chicken.

It's just that this particular hardcore scene is a bit hyperserious, gatekeepy, and attracts an element of toxic masculinity to their shows.

Perhaps most telling to me was watching where the cheering was coming from regarding banana beatdown in hardcore discussion group threads. Alt-right kids, "anti-commies", people who use homophobic slurs, misogynists and people mock safe spaces were some of the loudest voices.

I'm not one of those "guilt by association" guys when it comes to the spectrum of views on a topic and I'm not saying by any means that there weren't also people who objected on your grounds or more neutral reasoning, but just saying many of the people I described regularly go to shows and are really not the type you want hearing someone on stage issuing an attack command.

A lot of this version of hardcore isn't even particularly political, End It were probably the anomaly of the lineup from what I can see. And there's a heavy NYHC influence in this scene and that was a scene that was more right wing than other hardcore.

So alls I'm saying is have a chuckle at banana guy if you want, but I'm much more concerned about the idea of weaponizing some of the scenes less stable fans, even if this time it resulted in a shredded costume and some soreness at worst

I guess I don't really know the scene that well, and none of this reflects well on anyone involved really. Including me, so I'll be off

https://i.postimg.cc/3Rd3Kykx/au9874.jpg

the moronic and almost certainly disgusting narrative of "I’ve surfed hundreds of people in this suit, all genders, all ages, safely. Especially, a lot of first timers that felt safe to approach me for their first surf."

What a monster

good quote by Cappo on the jockiness inherent to the whole thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veMDodDaXvY

so reading up on LoA I guess the main guy transitioned and then detransitioned and is now militantly anti-trans? idk anything else about End but if I'm them I'm very happy to be off this tour

― J Edgar Noothgrush (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Wednesday, June 10, 2026 4:34 PM (three days ago)

"choice between transition and Life of Agony"? yeah sums up my experience pretty well

Even if that did come up, I would not be surprised if it was subsumed by “this is so stupid”; dressing up as a banana to racially taunt someone falls squarely into my “is that really the best you’ve got” zone and I feel like that can’t be a uniquely me reaction

― Whatwhawhawhaehawhahwawhawwww (DJP), Thursday, June 11, 2026 5:45 AM

i think it would fall in the same category as "christian vander making up a fictitious language and science fiction mythology about an alien planet so he can slip a line that phonetically sounds kind of like 'fuer mein fuhrer, adolf hitler" somewhere in the middle of side b of a prog-rock concept album where all the other lyrics literally sound like complete gibberish

the funniest part is they have basically guaranteed they are going to see banana suits in their crowds for the rest of their career

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

"crowds"
"career"

i can well imagine ian mackaye saying something _completely_ eviscerating about this dude and i'd fucking applaud him for it.

I saw you eating a banana split, pal. Don't deny it! Banana split-eating motherfucker that's what you are!

― Philip Nunez, Thursday, June 11, 2026

ian, love you dude, but you fucked up

that was a buffalo soldier

I think its interesting that at least according to banana guy's post, his motivation for wearing the suit isn't to fuck with the vibe or tweak the over-serious sensibilities of uptight hc guys, but as a kind of safety signal to first-time or non-veteran showgoers that he's not a toughguy, the idea that someone can spot him and quickly discern that he's probably not going to suckerpunch you or kick your knees out. Now, he might be spinning to make himself look good and/or he might not be entirely self-aware about his own motivations, but still an interesting detail imo.

― waste of compute (One Eye Open), Friday, June 12, 2026 11:58 AM (yesterday)

oh that is a good detail, i don't really follow the socials so i wasn't aware. yeah so ok i'm on Team Banana now. this is a very real concern for, like, anybody who's not a cis white dude. one of my friends, her dad is this big intimidating looking older dude and he dyes his hair blue, just to kinda... like a form of flagging. and it does work. i've gone to places and seen people who i didn't expect to have blue hair or whatever and it makes me feel a lot more at ease.

idk i did start it as a shitposty thread but it has been good cuz it's helped me question my own assumptions. the person who posted that they were disappointed in me, i really do take that seriously and saw it as cause for self-reflection. there's part of me who gets annoyed at people who are different, part of me who wants to be like "this isn't about you my friend". and i mean, i've been around enough to know that when someone hates something, a lot of times it's a reflection of something they hate and/or fear about themselves. it's a reflection of my fear of making myself the center of attention, of distracting from other people, of making shit that's not about me all about me. so i didn't come in blind, i came in with my own assumptions, and based on the context you provide, oeo, i mean, i was wrong. banana guy, sorry for making that assumption about you.

the larger stuff about the hardcore scene, i mean, i can't comment. i don't know that much about hardcore. i've heard of hatebreed, but i haven't really listened to them since the parrot who was singing lead for them left. i did grow up with "nazi punks fuck off", "trash a bank if you think you got balls". whether, i mean, "hardcore" or "jock" or whatever word one wants to use, it's pretty weaksauce.

the moronic and almost certainly disgusting narrative of "I’ve surfed hundreds of people in this suit, all genders, all ages, safely. Especially, a lot of first timers that felt safe to approach me for their first surf."

― waste of compute (One Eye Open), Saturday, June 13, 2026 9:16 AM (two hours ago)

see i'm definitely not hardcore, i looked at that sentence and my brain read the word "surf" as "fuck". the crowd i hang with are far more likely to fuck hundreds of consenting adults, of all genders, in a banana suit than they are to surf.

the funniest part is they have basically guaranteed they are going to see banana suits in their crowds for the rest of their career

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

ok i've thought about it

the funniest part is that pretty much all the banana suit people will be more hardcore than they are

"end it" put banana suits on notice, you show up at one of their shows you better be ready to defend yourself

next banana suit guy they see is gonna be jacked like old-school henry rollins

i've heard of hatebreed, but i haven't really listened to them since the parrot who was singing lead for them left.

if this is a joke it's a good one (the parrot band was hatebeak, in case it's not)

thanks, it was a joke :)

Welp

https://loudwire.com/end-it-akil-godsey-banana-man-controversy/

Seems like his sparkle got dimmed a bit.

He wanted the attention and now he has it

lol won't someone think of the crowd surfing 6'-4" 200lb man this whole thing is so stupid

They should form a band together and milk the viral moment for all it's worth.

"Don't let's be beastly to the Bananas"

lol won't someone think of the crowd surfing 6'-4" 200lb man this whole thing is so stupid

― brimstead, Wednesday, June 24, 2026 9:14 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Please explain this me. Are you saying he's too tall to be crowd-surfing?

I love the fact that this guy's name is apparently now "Banana Man"

he brings shame upon a noble title

He's actually Banana Duke

Respect nobility plz

"We're a hardcore band. We do hardcore things."

This story just keeps on giving.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7JYQ7vjrRI

Slammed In The Butt By A Guy In A Banana Costume At The Concert of My Hardcore Band

surely surely Slammed In The Pit

Slammed in the End This

He loves antics, provided they're pre-arranged

would love to see an episode of Morse about a guy in a banana suit being murdered in a moshpit

"Were the bruises there before or after?"

you just can't put a banana in a rucksack

or can you?

plot twist: human trafficking