The EDM community has never seen someone quite like Shaquille O'Neal.
It's rare to see such unbridled enthusiasm for the genre from someone like Shaq, a decorated NBA champion and Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame member. And the community has responded in spades, embracing him as a "dubstep dad" who tirelessly champions rave culture.
O'Neal, who is affectionately known as DJ Diesel to fans of electronic music, appeared in Ohio over the weekend to perform at Excision's Lost Lands. It's prevalently regarded as the nation's leading dubstep festival and a breeding ground for the next generation of bass music stars.
So naturally there's mosh pits. And at one point, Diesel paused his set to address the crowd and diffuse one. Sources tell us that he could see a fan being "trampled" in a mosh pit and was in need of assistance, so he cut the music and hopped on the mic.
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Watch Shaq Pause His DJ Set to Help a Fan Caught In a Mosh Pit
It all went down over the weekend at Excision's Lost Lands festival in Legend Valley, Ohio.
Mosh pits are embedded in stateside EDM festival culture, but they sometimes go too far. Back in February, Kayzo abruptly halted his performance to call out a man who appeared to be shoving women in a mosh pit that had formed. He went on to denounce the man as "aggressive" before speaking out about the safety of women at electronic music shows.
In September 2021, a 16-year-old was swept up in a mosh pit at Reading Festival, one of the largest music fests in the U.K. After she was slammed into a fence, her hand had become "clamped in between two of the fences" in a gruesome incident which caused a partial amputation of her middle finger.
Lost Lands took place September 23-25 in Legend Valley, Ohio. The festival attracted roughly 47,000 people, per NBC 4 Columbus.
FOLLOW DJ DIESEL:
Facebook: facebook.com/shaq
Twitter: twitter.com/djdiesel
Instagram: instagram.com/djdiesel
Spotify: spoti.fi/3zoP9WO
