The name Travis Scott has circulated all over the world from his music, collabs with Nike, high-energy concerts, and even a collaboration with McDonald’s. Travis Scott is a Billboard-charting rapper, songwriter, and singer. He has been highly acclaimed for his work; he was all the rage for his sound in the last 10 years. But not all the talk about him has been positive. His responsibility in what’s been deemed the “Astroworld Tragedy,” where 10 people unfortunately lost their lives at his festival, surely should have been a fatal event in his career. However, years after this event, he remains a popular artist with a loyal fan base. So, what tragic thing caused such a fatal event, and how has the media forgotten this tragedy only 5 years later?
In 2018, Travis Scott released his third studio album ASTROWORLD, which quickly became a fan favorite for its experimental trap and psychedelic sound. Later that same year, Travis Scott founded and announced the Astroworld Festival. The festival was to be a one-day event in Houston, Texas, featuring various popular artists and theme park items like a Ferris wheel, swings, carousel, and carnival games. The inspiration for the festival stemmed from the former Six Flags theme park named Astroworld, where Scott had grown up visiting as a child. Scott’s goal was to invoke nostalgia and create a high-energy, fun event. Travis Scott was able to put on this one-day festival both in 2018 and 2019. Each time it went relatively well. There were issues with crowds rushing when the doors opened and other minor things. But overall, the event had been positively received by the public. The festival had no choice but to skip taking place in 2020 due to COVID-19, but was brought back to be bigger and better in 2021.
On his birthday, April 30th in 2021, Travis Scott announced the return of the Astroworld festival. This time, the festival would be a two-day event with performances from artists such as Tame Impala, Bad Bunny, SZA, Don Toliver, and many more. Fans went absolutely wild for this announcement, as when tickets went on sale, the venue sold out completely in under an hour, with an estimated 50,000 people attending. And thus, the Astroworld festival was back in full swing and was going to be unforgettable.
On Day 1 of the event, November 5th, 2021, around 5 AM, concertgoers began camping outside the venue so they could be first in line to enter the festival. From the beginning, it seemed fans were urged to lean into chaos and high energy with the promo video for the festival. The promo video included clips from the 2019 festival, where fans had broken down fences in order to get in and stormed the place, and other clips of vibrant mosh pits. Was this the fuel for the chaos that ensued as the doors opened for the festival? At 10 AM, the gates to the venue opened, and immediately, fans began running towards the entrance of the festival. At the entrance, there had been multiple checkpoints for security checks, COVID-19 tests, etc. However, it did not stop anyone. Between 10 AM and approximately 4 PM, the chaos continued with fans rushing the checkpoints and breaking down fences and barricades at once, all while knocking over checkpoints, people, and security. People were getting injured and taken to hospitals, others were detained for trespassing, but nothing was able to stop them. Control over entry points was completely lost; people from outside with no tickets were able to climb over fences and able to enter. With this situation, the number of people at the festival quickly became unknown, and the danger only increased.
As Travis Scott was the main headliner for the festival, his show was scheduled to be at 9 PM. SZA was the last performer before Travis, so as her set ended around 8:40 PM, all at once the crowd of people headed to the special stage that was made just for Travis’ show. Like many concerts, on the stage, there was a countdown timer to create anticipation for the show. Concertgoers featured on the Netflix documentary “Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy” explained that as the timer went down, it began to feel tighter and tighter in the mosh pit. Eventually, there would be basically no room to move or even breathe normally. Like a ripple effect, as Travis comes out on stage and the crowd gets very hype, people feel their whole bodies move forward before the wave comes back and pushes them backwards. Not even 10 minutes into Travis’s set, and people were already fighting to get out of the pit. One security guard who worked the event said on the Netflix documentary that “Everywhere you looked, someone was either hyperventilating, changing colors, or wanting help out of there.” The people were being stuffed together and losing control over their bodies and breath.
As mentioned earlier, there was a special stage made specifically for Travis only, and this is where the crowd rush problem began. The stage was built like an upside-down cross, which left room for 4 sections for people to watch. However, each side of the pit was built like a rectangle, missing a line on the far end, leaving only one way in and one way out. An unsettling fact is that the tragedy only took place on the left side of the stage, so while the people to the right were having a once-in-a-lifetime experience, just to their left, people were losing their lives. At 9:07 PM, the first distress call was made to 911. By this point, people were being pushed all the way; some people were even pushed down to the floor. The heartbreaking part is that it was layers of people falling on top of each other with little oxygen or room. The crowd tried to help each other while also trying to keep themselves up and breathing. People were screaming for help, and one concertgoer who was featured on the Netflix documentary even stormed up to a cameraman and continuously screamed at him, saying that the show needed to be cancelled and that people were dying. But no one listened to him. A little after 9:30, a person is pulled out of the crowd with no pulse. And quickly, many people are being transported to the medical tent. Around 9:42, Travis stopped the show because he saw someone to the right side had passed out. There’s footage of this kid being carried out by the crowd, and he looked almost lifeless. And the eerie thing is, during that process, Travis continued humming in the background even as this kid is receiving medical attention and many others are chanting “stop the show”. And then, he just started the concert back up. By this point, the police were on the hunt for the people in charge of the show, Live Nation, to try to stop the show. According to Live Nation, only 2 people of theirs had the power to pull the plug on the show, but both were nowhere to be found. Eventually, someone from Live Nation is documented talking to an audio engineer where Netflix shared the transcript of what was said “We have four active CPRs going on. Two are most likely dead. It’s very very bad. There are more crush victims than I have ever seen in my 25 year career” Then they said they will shut it down in 8 minutes at exactly 10 PM. Now, the audio engineer has the ability to speak to Travis through his in-ears, but no one knows what they may have or may not have said to Travis. But somehow Live Nation made it so the concert could keep going. At 10:13 PM, Travis Scott’s performance finally ended. There were ambulances and panic everywhere.
Around 2 AM, there were officially 8 victims, and day 2 of the event was cancelled. There were rumors that drugs had been the reason for the deaths, with some people even saying there had been a shooting. Travis Scott denied that he heard any pleas for the show to stop. He apologized through an Instagram story filmed at a bad angle in black and gray, where he said a whole lot of nothing. It was an apology that was highly criticized for its lack of empathy in his apartment. Around 5 days after the tragedy, 2 more victims succumbed to their injuries and passed away. All victims’ cause of death was deemed compressed asphyxiation. With thousands more injured. December 9th, 2021, Travis did an interview where he denied accountability, saying he never heard anything from fans or Live Nation about ending the show. Of course, no one really believes that; this was all on Live Nation and Travis for their poor planning and lack of care. It should have been preventable. Live Nation had sold more tickets than the stage could safely hold, and they knew that, as in now publicized messages showing a staff member saying there was no way they were going to fit 50,000 people. Then, the stage was built in an odd T-shaped contraption, which led to a crowd rush that ended up being trapped with no way out. With this kind of planning, it was no longer an accident waiting to happen; it was inevitable. In more publicized messages, a member from Live Nation was seen expressing concern over what was happening in the crowd and ending the message with “Someone’s going to end up dead.” But no one ever put a stop to the show. In 2023, a jury found no sole person responsible for the deaths at Astroworld, but by June 2024, Travis Scott and Live Nation had settled in court with the victims’ families for an undisclosed amount. To this day, Travis continues to produce music and be a public figure. Rarely does anyone talk about what happened that night. And in 2024, Travis Scott broke a record for the highest-selling solo rap tour. A tour that was hosted by Live Nation.
