Travis Scott shares new video statement about Astroworld incident
Scott says he's working with authorities to identify victims and help their families
Aux News Astroworld
The aftermath of the deadly crowd surge during Travis Scott’s performance at his Astroworld festival in Houston on Friday continues to unfold, with authorities still looking into the stampede that killed eight people—including two minors—and injured hundreds of others. Police are also continuing to look into reports of drug-spiking (as in, people being stuck with needles and injected with drugs in the crowd) in the lead-up to the incident, with Deadline saying that at least one person was injected, “resulting in a drug overdose.”
Scott, who was onstage when all of this happened and reportedly made a few attempts to stop the show when it looked like things were getting out of hand (though he did not fully stop it), released a statement yesterday in which he said he was “absolutely devastated” by what had happened. Now, in his first on-camera appearance since Friday, Scott has shared a video statement in which he—appearing very distraught—says that he’s working with authorities to “identify the families so we can help assist them through this tough time.”
In apparent acknowledgement of the people who have pointed out that he could’ve completely stopped the show when he saw what was happening, Scott reiterates a few times that he never could’ve imagined something like this happening and that he’s doing everything he can to support the people trying to figure out what happened.
Deadline’s write-up also says that Houston’s police chief has opened a criminal investigation “by homicide and narcotics detectives” over the drug-spiking rumors, with the prevailing theory being that it could’ve led to a panic in the crowd. The story also says that attacks like that have “recently cropped up in UK nightclubs.” Autopsies are apparently being done on the victims of the incident on Friday now, and authorities expect to release more identities at some point today.
42 Comments
Stop the show? Are you kidding?!All those people might demand a refund if that happened.
You joke but I do think if he would have stopped the, I don’t know if that of that would have been good either. I went to a lot of hip hop shows in 90s , in clubs and bigger venues, and a few times shit went bad if they cancelled or stopped a show once people were in the middle of it it was supposed to begin. So Scott was definitely in the wrong , but ending the show could have turned out a lot worse
I’ve been to a couple of shows where the venue cut the power without the artist’s direct approval (one was due to an unforeseen lightning strike, the other because it was past curfew) so I’m struggling to understand why that didn’t happen here.
Considering similar incidents at Who & AC/DC shows DECADES ago you’d think there would be protocols in place for these situations. Wait, stupid me, LEARN from others mistakes? Perish the thought.
It’s especially egregious seeing as they clearly anticipated a rowdy audience based on their promo video.
I’m not saying it’s right, but people have been lifted out of crowds unconscious for time immemorial. It probably wouldn’t have been possible to know the full extent of what was happening when you’re on a lit stage and the crowd is pitch black.
Look I know it’s fun to pretend Travis Scott was to blame for all this as he seems a complete whopper, but at the end of the day he’s just a thick popstar, not a health and safety officer. It was other people’s job to stop the gig, not his.
Yes. How did Travis Scott and his team create an “all ages” show and knowingly put people in danger? I hope they do not get away with this. I hope they are held accountable. I know the world is not perfect, but “all ages” shows are supposed to be a safe place. I cannot imagine how scary this must have been in person.
Eyewitness accounts say audience members were begging stagehands to stop the show and turn everything off and they were ignoring them. One woman said she climbed on top of a fifteen-foot scaffolding to talk to a lighting guy and he threatened to push her off if she didn’t go away.
It’s hard to believe there was no person or team with decisionmaking powers who was being attentive enough to what was happening. According to the NYTimes article today, I believe Scott played a good 30-40 minutes after people started getting injured. I think someone knew enough to know that the set should have at least been paused.At these big events, all the workers, organizers, including the artists should be aware of the risks posed by gathering big crowds. I remember footage of Eddie Vedder at Roskilde in Denmark stopping a song to tell the crowd to take steps backwards after seeing people get crushed. It was too late for some people but I’m sure it prevented further injuries and deaths. Everyone should be paying attention. Event security I think treats attendees as adversaries when they should be making sure everyone is safe.
See, like Travis Scott, Pearl Jam played for half an hour before stopping the show at Roskilde (where 9 people died). It’s hard to make that call from the stage. Sometimes it’s might be the wrong call (might add to the panic). I recall they (Pearl Jam) said they just couldn’t see how bad the situation is: from the stage it’s just a sea of people in front of you, all screaming and shouting, all the time.That’s for those who puts the blame on Travis Scott. Don’t jump to a conclusion too quickly.
Scott was encouraging his audience to treat security as adversaries as well (and possibly wasn’t cooperating with the show shutdown), and I’m sure we’ll find out exactly what share of culpability that amounts to. But it’s foolish to rely on the artist to handle security from the stage — their field of vision is limited, their actual vision may be limited (had a friend in a band who wouldn’t wear glasses on stage and couldn’t see a damn thing), they may not be sober so their judgment may be impaired, etc. — typically the artists really do help out but you can’t rely on that. If you don’t have an adult in the room who’ll flip the switch and have contingency plans if things go awry you shouldn’t be running an event.
Yeah, you’re right. I agree. Scott should not have been the primary person in charge of everyone’s safety. There were definitely people and teans there whose charge it actually was to keep people safe; Scott wasn’t that person.I do have an appreciation for bands who seem to be able to see, call out, and stop bad behavior in the audience (esp. women being poorly treated), particularly in pits where things are dangerous even if not typically deadly. The performer is in a special position of influence that can be really useful in trying to stop things from getting worse.
Don’t get me wrong, I think he’s an absolute scumbag who appears to have been aware of what was happening and the vast majority of artists in his position would have at least paused the show until the situation resolved. But this is not solely on him.
I’ve worked on camera risers at fairly large concerts, and the rule is that you do not under any circumstance let non-media onto the riser. A lot of times you’ve gotta be a hard headed asshole in enforcing that. I’d imagine this goes doubly for techs who’ve got union safety guidelines to follow.Think about it — one attendee is allowed onto the lighting truss to escape an emergency situation, others catch on and follow the first attendee, the riser or truss overloads and collapses with dozens clustered around the base, people get crushed and die and also now there’s probably uncontained electricity all over the place.
Personally, I’ll wait until it’s been confirmed that none of the ground-level employees walkied in any audience-reported crowd safety concerns before jumping down the throats of people who didn’t drop their workplace demeanor when someone yelled at them in a setting where yells are room tone.
I feel pretty sure threatening someone with death is outside the purview of the average union tech
Think about it — one attendee is allowed onto the lighting truss to
escape an emergency situation, others catch on and follow the first
attendee
Except that’s not what happened. They climbed the riser & told the camera operator that someone is dead and they need to stop the show, and the camera operator told them to get off the stage.
Yup. There’s video of this. It was a camera guy. She was begging him to use his walkie to get help.
There’s a video of that young lady –
that’s why this video rings hollow. They could have stopped it but decided not to and people diee.
While I blame Scott, he wasn’t the only one who could have shut the show down. The lighting and sound guys and the people in charge of those things, the directors ect. . . could have shut off his sound and directed the lighting into the crowd instead of the stage (or cut off some of his lights).
If the crowd is already riled up, that can make things worse. If they’re already drunk and mad, and then you give them something else to get mad about, they can get out of control in a hurry.That said, it’s standard to have some kind of plan. Usually there are security people tasked with keeping an eye out for this kind of thing, and they can communicate with the artist to tell them if they need to ask the crowd to move back, try to calm them down/take a break, or pull the show altogether. It’s clear none of that happened here, but it’s not clear why.
Yet another talentless, greedy POS associated with the Kardashian.
In that video he is as bad of an actor as he is rapper
It’s a match made in heaven since the Kardasians are also talentless, greedy POS’s.
That was implied, but it should also be spelled out.
Biden’s America — S U P E R M A N, Krypton, United States, May 2021
From what I have seen on Reddit, Scott made no attempt to stop the show. So after we put Trump in prison (because, let’shave priorities), let’s cancel Travis Scott and tbe Kardashians.
I’ve been in a panicked crowd and there’s nothing that feels worse than knowing that you don’t have the ability to escape as things are going sideways.
From what I’ve been able to piece together it seems that Travis Scott paused the set on at least one occasion so that medics could come assist people. It’s clear that event staff were aware that there were people in need of medical assistance. However, there are multiple videos of people attempting to get staff attention to the severity of the problem, and being ignored. It seems pretty clear that event staff willfully chose to not believe the audience members when they tried explain how bad it was in there. You don’t get to be “surprised” by how deadly a situation is when you blew people off trying to tell you how bad it was.
I can easily imagine why someone could ignore audience members “complaining” about crowd being rough. Basically, you get that at every general attendance kind of show. And the younger and less experienced the crowd is the more complaining you get.I once saw Linkin Park crowd clashing with Pearl Jam crowd. For the latter it was “mosh pit as usual”, for the former: horror. Luckily, this was perfectly secured gig (perhaps partly because 9 people died at Pearl Jam’s show a few years before) and the security smoothly picked every fainting teenager out of the crowd.
I can understand it too, but in an event this size there needs to be someone looking into any calls for concern, even if they turn out to be nothing. There’s one video in particular that highlights this, of two young people crushed up against a barricade begging nearby security for help and repeating that they can’t breathe. Whether or not their lives were in immediate danger, when you’re packed in that tightly your brain will start to panic. I don’t know that the venue was set up so that security could have helped them exit through the barricade, but I would guess that there are ways to set it up to do so. Even if it turns out that they were merely bruised and otherwise uninjured, just help them get the hell out of there.
Having worked security at events like this in college, I can almost guarantee that’s what happened. You reach a point where you no longer care about what the next drunk person is saying. Rarely are they ever serious.For example, I worked at Coachella a long time ago, and there was a shit faced Australian that couldn’t find his tent. He was adamant he needed help… or so we thought. He was so drunk I don’t think he realized he was fucking with security and the Indo Police. We ended up chasing him down after he starting peeing on tents and pretending like every few campsites we walked by was his, going so far as to open tents and tell people to act cool so we would leave (even though we could hear him).
Fuck this guy in half. The 2019 version was a catastrophe and they leaned into that reputation to promote 2021 as some sort of anarchic, anything-goes free for all. Who could possibly have seen this coming??
Plus once shit started turning ugly and unconscious people were literally being body-surfed out of the crowd, the result was a shrug? I’m sure Scott’s “distraught” – NOW.
Anyone familiar with Travis Scott, or who has been to a show or festival featuring him, knows that he encourages this kind of dangerous behavior at his shows. The buck stops with him and he is an absolute piece of shit.
Scott, who was onstage when all of this happened and reportedly made a
few attempts to stop the show when it looked like things were getting
out of hand (though he did not fully stop it)
When Barsanti says “he did not fully stop it,” does he mean that Scott continued to perform…?I don’t always know why the AV Club spins and slants how they do, but it’s nice that they’re so always transparent about it. If Barsanti were capable of subtlety or nuance, he might even be dangerous.
Scott, who was onstage when all of this happened and reportedly made a few attempts to stop the show when it looked like things were getting out of hand (though he did not fully stop it)
It’s gonna look great next to the “Good Trier Award”.
Scott reiterates a few times that he never could’ve imagined something
like this happening and that he’s doing everything he can to support the
people trying to figure out what happened.
I call bull on that. He has a history of pulling stunts like this that has caused actual harm to the audience. One fan got paralyzed from one of his antics.
He has done this time and time again and he is now acting surprised that something like this happened.
Scott has encouraged exactly this sort of behavior at just about every show he has ever been a part of. He is an absolute piece of shit and the fact that the AV Club is sneakily trying to absolve him of blame is shameful.
That video was such performative “grief” bullshit. He couldn’t even sit still long enough to record an honest statement, he
was just talking into his phone walking around his room and even took
the time to put a fucking filter on it. The only thing he appears sad about is losing the millions that he’ll be sued for.
Staff knew & didn’t give a shit.
The “drugged via injection” angle is dubious, to say the very, very, very least. Of course, I could be wrong (a regular occurrence), but the police routinely stoke panic about drugs (as illustrated best by the ridiculous “exposed to fentanyl and passed out” stories that have been popping up) to make themselves look braver than they really are.Some quotes from a recent Vice article…https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxdenq/heres-what-we-know-about-reports-of-women-being-spiked-with-needles-in-uk-clubs