*Trigger warning: save your breakfast for later.
It started when the completely mid singer Noah Kahan was forced to address a problem no artist should ever have to confront. On June 28, someone seated at Kahan’s Philadelphia show allegedly pooed their pants. “This person straight up shat themselves,” alleges a concert-goer in this Reddit thread. They then pulled out the turds, placed them on the ground and “started to waffle-stomp” them. On social media, Kahan reminded fans of the appropriate place to do number twos. “If you have to poop at a show please dear god just go to the bathroom lmao,” he wrote on X.
Sounds like a one-off. It should have been. Dear lord, if only it were so. Since then, shitting and pissing at concerts has just kept happening. Olivia Rodrigo, surely pop’s nicest person, admitted the smell from fans’ diapers had been wafting up from fans in the mosh pits at her shows. “I have been to certain concerts and certain festivals where people wear diapers so that they can be front row of the show, and that’s been an experience as a performer that I have smelled,” she told Kiss Breakfast. “They sit there all day. I think about it kind of often … it's a real thing.”
I tried to forget I had read that, but the headlines kept coming. Next up was a show by crooner Morgan Wallen in Baltimore, where a dispute between fans ended with one peeing all over the other – and his family, including, allegedly, an eight-year-old. “I literally feel something on my leg. My wife feels something on her leg … And my wife says, ‘Whatever that gentleman is doing, it’s all over my leg,’” concert-goer Troy Grevelding told Fox 45. “So, I turned to look. He has his genitalia hanging completely out and he’s urinating all over the back of my seat, my wife’s leg, my leg, my niece.”
Three incidents is a trend so that means increased media coverage. If anything, that coverage has spurred others to join in on the action. Yesterday came another headline from another Noah Kahan show. A fan who’d spent big bucks on tickets alleged someone turned her seated section into a “biohazard”. “Spending $1000 on tickets wasn’t supposed to end with replacing my belongings due a feral creature turning a section into her personal toilet,” she wrote on Threads. “The tix are so expensive nobody wants to miss it,” suggests someone about the reason why one might do this. Are concert tickets so pricey we’re soiling ourselves now?
I would love to say this is a truly American experience, something that can only happen as the USA continues its pathetic slide into the toilet. But I have been to concerts and festivals around Aotearoa and have plenty of experiences to rival those. Drunk fans slipping down a urine-soaked ravine at a Whitianga New Year’s festival. A sea of dicks at Bay Dreams in Nelson. A Laneway Portaloo that I’ve never truly recovered from. Vomit at the Black Eyed Peas and EsDeeKid shows. Don’t forgot the poo smell that enveloped Lower Hutt’s Juicy Fest in 2024, or the Christchurch Hospital patients who could see these guys out their window during this year’s Electric Avenue…
Remember selfie sticks? Blow-up animals? Fruit suits? Banana costumes? Circle pits? Bubble machines? Old school phones? Whenever a festival trend happens overseas it almost always makes its way down under. It’s entirely possible that public shitting and pissing is coming soon to a concert near you. You have been warned. There’s only one saving grace: we have barely any festivals left for people to shit and piss themselves at.
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