And there’s a clip of people begging for help—a camera operator livestreaming the performance for Apple Music waved them off.
On Thursday’s episode of What Next, I spoke to Stereogum senior editor Tom Breihan about what went wrong at Astroworld, whether Travis Scott is to blame, and why tragedies like this keep happening at concerts.
He co-produced some of the tracks on the Yeezus album that Kanye West put out.
Houston has this long tradition of what’s called screw music, where a legendary DJ named DJ Screw took tracks, slowed them way down, and made them sound alien and otherworldly and just super woozy and trippy.
And a lot of that has to do with his ability to create these brand partnerships, which are a huge part of his identity.
I saw him for the first time in 2014 in Austin, during South by Southwest, when he was a mixtape rapper.
It can make for an environment that is unpredictable and euphoric in some ways, but it can also be really unstable and potentially dangerous.
The energy that you’re describing at Travis Scott shows—it was notable to me how often it had gone wrong before this past weekend.
And then a while later, somebody fell or, he says, was pushed from a third-floor balcony and fell and was paralyzed on the ground and apparently then Travis Scott told people to bring him up onstage after he fell.
In the past week since Astroworld, there have been a lot of videos being sent around online of performers stopping shows to make sure that everybody’s OK and to get help to people.
I was struck by this piece of video from a documentary about Travis Scott, where you see the crew that’s getting ready to start a show openly talking about the fact that the crowd is going to get wild, people are going to have trouble breathing.
He has a line on one of his songs that says, “It ain’t a mosh pit if ain’t no injuries.” So this has been a point of pride, his ability to make things go crazy to set it off.
In Houston, early on, like 2 p.m., before anyone was really on the stage, a bunch of concertgoers rushed the barricades and they came through.
Yeah, and that, by itself, for a Travis Scott show, is pretty routine, where a bunch of people bust their way in.
So the people who have been lined up at the front of this stage waiting for him to start for a while, they get sort of crushed by the big, big groups of people who come running over to the stage when the countdown starts up.
And it also seems like, from everything that I’ve read, from the accounts of the people who were there, the promoters didn’t do anywhere near enough to be ready for that.
But it certainly seems like the people who put the show together should bear a real responsibility for not being ready for what was about to happen, for what they had engineered.
Even if the staffing was inadequate, there was one person who many argue could have stopped the show: Travis Scott.
There’s a part of the show in the video where he sees an ambulance out in the crowd and he says, Oh, it’s an ambulance.
Their specific fear was a riot, and a riot and a crowd surge are two very different things.
And the idea that the police didn’t necessarily trust this crowd to leave in an orderly way and so allowed them to keep getting crushed—that’s messed up, and that should be really, really reexamined at this point.
I know you want to keep the focus on the structure here and the fact that the people in charge of planning the concert did not do their job in gaming out what could have gone wrong here.
The trick with that stuff is to find a way to channel and harness that energy in a way that doesn’t kill people or hurt people.
And I think if he is sincere in those videos, and I have no reason to believe that he’s not, he’s going to have to do some really serious soul-searching about how he put these young people in danger, the responsibility that he bears for that.
A big festival like Astroworld, where people pay hundreds of dollars to get in and where they’re shuttled from checkpoint to checkpoint on their way and then made to feel like cattle—that does not lend itself to a spirit of community and to an atmosphere where everybody is looking out for each other even if they are moshing.
I think that if you’re going to put on a festival like this, you need to be ready for things to go badly wrong and you need to have plans in place.
You can tick off event after event—a Who concert in 1979 where 11 people died rushing the entrance, a Pearl Jam concert in 2000 where nine fans were crushed to death.
It kind of reminds me of the part in Gimme Shelter, where the guy is getting stabbed and the Rolling Stones are a few yards away singing.
Since the birth of popular music in the rock ’n’ roll era and since these large concerts started, people have been dying at them.
Every time that somebody has had something bad happen at one of their events, it seems like it affects those people deeply and it really traumatizes them.