We’re entering a “shitting on the floor at concerts” epidemic

Earlier this month, Olivia Rodrigo revealed that she’s often smelled her fans’ feces at the barricade, to the internet’s collective horror. (I don’t care if you miss “Brutal”! Pissing yourself is infinitely more brutal! Go to the damn bathroom!) This brave admission has seemingly opened the floodgates, with more and more musicians coming forward with horror stories of their own fans’ incontinence. 

Noah Kahan put out an impassioned plea on X this weekend: “If you have to poop at a show please dear god just go to the bathroom,” he begged. “I’ve pooped my pants as much as the next 29-year-old, but you guys gotta understand there’s a venue worker out there with a 1,000-yard stare after dealing with that.” Just last night, he made the audience at his Toronto show take an oath swearing they would use the bathroom and not the floor. “When you entered this building, you entered a social contract,” he declared. A big part of that social contract is the golden rule: “Don’t shit on the floor.”

Unfortunately, Rodrigo’s comments were not the sole catalyst for Kahan’s entreaties. The real culprit was none other than a video of literal shit smeared on the floor of Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park, taken during a Kahan concert (“Haircut” is audible in the background). To quote the girl whose face pops up at the end of the clip, “What the FUCK?!” 

Redditor u/FF007F came through with the full story: “The person who did this was one row in front of me in section AA. I guess they didn’t want to miss a couple songs to use the bathroom, so they just straight up shit themselves […] and started picking actual pieces of poop out of their butt and put it on the floor. She started trying to waffle stomp the turds and acted as nothing happened, but we flagged down security.” 

Frankly, I didn’t know Noah Kahan had shooters like that. No offense to Mr. Kahan; he seems like a great guy who is courageously taking a stand against the pungent minority of fans who want to pee themselves at his shows, but I reviewed The Great Divide earlier this year, and I truly cannot think of a single song that would warrant undergoing any form of voluntary bowel evacuations in order to hear. Like, really? “Haircut”? Are we shitting ourselves for “Haircut”?

This is not to say that there are songs worth pooping one’s pants for—I don’t care if John Lennon suddenly resurrects onstage and starts banging out a tear-jerking rendition of “Imagine,” go to the bathroom—but that it does kind of feel, at this point, like people would be down to fling poop on the floor for virtually anything. Remember 5 Seconds of Summer? The boy band from the mid-2010s who popularized American Apparel underwear and have been so irrelevant for the past five years that I didn’t realize they were still around? Turns out people have been shitting themselves at their shows, too.

A TikTok video went viral five days ago featuring venue workers—who are not paid enough for this (literal) shit—mopping up turds in Fort Worth’s Dickies Arena. Who knew 5SOS still had listeners so devoted they’d rather drop a deuce on the stairs than miss “She Looks So Perfect”? This was not the only incident, either: a Reddit post from three months ago begged 5SOS fans to “stop peeing in the tour.” Apparently, one girl told her friends “I couldn’t hold it anymore,” peed her pants, sprayed the area with perfume to cover the smell, and loudly declared that she “spilled her water” as a cover-up. 

Concert etiquette used to be “don’t block people’s view.” Somehow we’ve regressed all the way to “don’t defecate mid-song.” The bar is on the floor, people. So please, for the love of god, don’t leave anything else there.

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