Was the deadly tragedy at Travis Scott’s ill-fated Astroworld Festival at Houston’s NRG Park on Nov. 5 an aberration in a concert industry with a mostly admirable safety record, or a horrific wake-up call about flaws in planning and execution that could have led to disaster much sooner?
With eight dead and more than 300 injured as the crowd stampeded before and during Scott’s set, most industry sources declined to comment, saying investigations — and a rapidly growing number of lawsuits — will reveal the causes. But the general public and lawyers representing the victims are pointing to countless videos posted online that show the concert continuing, and Scott riling up an already unruly crowd, well after the festival had been declared a “mass casualty” event.
Many are placing the blame primarily on Scott, whose shows have a history of being rowdy; he has been charged with incitement to riot and disorderly conduct at two of his past concerts. One of the initial lawsuits against him — and against promoters Live Nation and Scoremore Shows, the venue and Scott’s climactic guest, Drake, among others — cites a tweet from the rapper promising that, despite Astroworld’s early sellout, “we still sneaking the wild ones in,” a vow that seemed to be borne out when people without tickets successfully broke down entrance gates earlier in the day. His song “Stargazing” contains a lyric Scott’s lawyers may wish he could redact: “It ain’t a mosh pit if ain’t no injuries.”
One top concert-security veteran with decades in the business tells Variety: “I have never been more frightened than at the Travis Scott shows I’ve worked. His concerts are infamous [for unruly crowds] — they’re young, aggressive and already riled up when they get there — and he does nothing to lessen it. I’ve worked with other rappers who’ve said, ‘I’m not going to dial back my show, but I watch the crowd and if something’s happening, I’ll deal with it.’ But the vibe from [Scott] is, ‘It’s my show.’ This was a ticking time bomb.” Representatives for Scott did not respond to requests for comment.
Kevin Lyman, founder of the long-running punk-rock Warped Tour and now an associate professor at USC’s Thornton School of Music, points to a broader issue. While declining to comment specifically on Astroworld, he notes that hip-hop’s enormous popularity has brought in many fans who aren’t experienced festival-goers. “The 2005 Warped Tour, when we had pop fans coming to see My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy, was scary every day. Those kids would run to the front of the stage when the doors opened. They didn’t eat or drink water or realize that by the time the [artist] went on, there were thousands of people behind them, and they’d pass out. We had to develop a lot of techniques, like a kind of triage center where we had water and wet towels, to keep the crowd safe.”
But the central question remains: Should Scott have stopped the show in an effort to calm down the crowd? It was unclear at the time of this article’s publication whether the rapper, who is seen in video footage shooing away staffers attempting to talk to him during the set, had been made sufficiently aware of the extent of the disaster. He claimed in an Instagram video on Nov. 6 that he “could never imagine anything like this happening,” although he did pause the show briefly a couple of times, as the live feed showed an ambulance making its way through the 50,000-plus crowd — certainly a sign of something amiss. But then he fired up the next number and said he wanted to “hear the ground shake.”
SOURCE : variety
