End It‘s Akil Godsey has shown off a tattoo of a crossed-out banana, months after the Toronto costume incident.
Akil Godsey has a new tattoo, and it reads as a comment on the episode that dominated hardcore discourse in June. The End It vocalist posted it to his Instagram story: a banana inside a crossed circle, laid out like the Ghostbusters logo.
Whether it is a joke at his own expense or a statement of position, it complicates the peace he declared two months ago.
On 5 June, End It were opening for Terror in Toronto on a bill with Pain Of Truth and Start Today when Godsey singled out a man in the crowd wearing a banana costume. He offered the band’s setlist to anyone who tore it off him.
“We’re just gonna address, it, do you want to this now, or later?… Banana man, what the f**k is you doing my n**ga?” Godsey asked from the stage.
When a section of the crowd began to cheer at the mention of the fan’s outfit, Godsey quickly shut down the positive reaction.
“No, no, no, no, no, you don’t get rewarded for doing that s**t. He wanted the attention, and now he has it,” the vocalist stated.
The band’s bassist then chimed in over the microphone, adding: “And now, everyone here has to kill you.”
Godsey then said: “And now, if you strip the banana, you get this lovely setlist. I’m just saying, he was asking for attention, now you got it.”
The man later said he had not been there for End It at all. He had come to see Terror, had a long habit of attending shows in the costume, and received no apology from the band afterwards. He described the experience as the opposite of what hardcore is supposed to be, and asked what anyone else would do having been attacked and stripped at the direction of a band they had paid to watch.
He said at the time: “There was no pretext to it that I understood. I also didn’t do hours of research on this band before arriving to the show, cause like you said, I was there for the headliner”.
He noted that he initially thought the interaction was going to be friendly. “I think you can see my happiness as he calls me and I reach for a handshake and he goes, ‘No, no, no. You don’t get rewarded’. I was gonna say, ‘Hey, Scott welcome to Toronto,’ but that took a turn pretty quickly”.
“I don’t know that I really took it in until it started to get a bit more violent,” he recalled. “There was a point where someone pulled on my back and it started to restrict my neck pretty significantly. And at that point, in my head, I’m like this is kind of not going the way it probably should in the scene that I’m a part of. So I started hitting and I’m sure some people are more hurt than I am”.
Standing at 6-foot-4 and weighing 200 pounds, he emphasized the difficulty of defending himself at an all-ages event. “I’m a pretty big person, I’m 200 pounds and 6-4 and this was an all ages show, so I just can’t swing on kids. Now I’m the bad guy. So I kind of had to take it,” he stated.
Despite suffering a few scrapes and the total destruction of his banana suit, he maintained that he would have willingly participated in a planned stunt if the band had simply communicated with him beforehand. “At the same time, had the band approached me before, I’m all for antics. I love antics. I’m all in. But approach me, ask. If they would have said, ‘Now you have to crowd kill him for this next song,’ I would’ve been OK, but I think a few adjectives were misused there.”
Reaction split hard. Some found it funny; others took the view that a band had turned a room full of people on a single audience member over what he was wearing.
It cost End It work. The band went quiet, their Facebook page disappeared, and they were left off an announced autumn tour with Hatebreed and Life Of Agony, reportedly dropped from the billing at short notice.
Godsey broke his silence around 23 June, largely unrepentant, with the line “we’re a hardcore band, we do hardcore things.” He also said the previous weeks had brought him racist abuse and threats to his life.
“Thanks for the racism and death threats and dissertations,” he wrote alongside the video. “It’s all been very taxing. I’m gonna go raise my child now. Peace.”
Support came from within the scene, among it Aaron Heard of Jesus Piece, Nails, Geoff Rickly of Thursday and shoegaze band Nothing.
Four days later, at Jera On Air in Ysselsteyn in the Netherlands, Godsey brought a banana-costumed festivalgoer onstage and hugged him. The band captioned the photograph “The Great Banana Treaty of Ysselsteyn.”
“Do whatever the f**k you want at this show, yo I’m just f**king around,” Godsey told the crowd. Handed a banana from offstage, he threw it into the audience. “Who woulda thought doing something stupid at a show would get me a month of attention? Goddamn. Banana man, it’s your stage, yo. Do not say the N-word. You can do whatever you want. Do not say the N-word. Vaya con Dios, señor. Anyway, we’re End It from Baltimore. What the f**k going on!”
It was not the same man. Asked what he made of the treaty, the one from Toronto replied: “Yea. Nah.”
The costume has outlived the argument. At Bloodstock on 7 August, Party Cannon‘s set drew a circle pit full of people in banana suits and inflatables, a band who actively encourage that sort of thing, and a fair indication of how far the story travelled.
Godsey‘s tattoo lands three weeks after that.
