Worst ever festival line up?

'may have thought'

The video of the cameraman being approached by two distraught attendees screaming and gesturing to stop the show and him angrily shooing them away was infuriating.

Sure, I doubt he could hear what they're saying, but their body language and mannerisms were pretty hard to mistake and he kept telling them to essentially fuck off

If you’re wondering how seriously Scott or his team took the gravity of that incident or their role in it….STARGAZING premiered the next year in 2018, while the lawsuits related to the case were ongoing. pic.twitter.com/gL6P06sI4u

— Cupcake Posting Their Ws (@lorenacupcake) November 6, 2021

what a nightmare

Earlier in the day at around 2 p.m. local time, hundreds of eager and rowdy concertgoers had stampeded the entrance of the festival, just outside of NRG Park, knocking over fences and metal detectors, and appearing to overwhelm understaffed security teams guarding the perimeter. No major injuries were reported from the rush.

So they basically had warning 7 hours earlier that the crowd control in place wasn't adequate?

Video of that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9W_njKnR6Q0

Sorry, I didn't think that would embed.

Not only that, but there was major crowd incident AT THE SAME VENUE two weeks ago that should have been used as a teachable moment, but wasn't.

Apparently, that’s from the guy who was dancing on top of the ambulance, and just… *sigh* Let’s try to be less sociopathic. https://t.co/vgeRvIOAyo

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) November 6, 2021

The incident a couple weeks ago was a cancelled Playboy Carti show. This venue is in the same complex as the AstroWorld fest, probably used the same security ops and cops, and was attended by a lot of the same people.

https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2021/10/24/concertgoers-create-chaotic-scene-at-nrg-arena-after-rapper-playboi-carti-cancels-houston-show/

It's been a long time since I worked around/near performance contracts, but if the show was stopped early would they still have been paid?

I have to think it was a financial decision to try going just 35 more minutes and then deal with it. I'm sure we'll hear more about who was making the call. The idea of having the conditions that were going on at 9:30, pushing toward the stage already, and then sending Drake out into that as a surprise guest...

This is from when the merch line opened earlier on Friday:

Damn merch line lit astroworld 📸 @Ovrnundr @swellberry pic.twitter.com/WCIeY8GfOU

— NTWRK (@NTWRKLIVE) November 5, 2021

Man, they really needed sturdier barricades, something with some weight.

a lot of anecdotes about travis scott just not giving a shit about the well-being of others have come up. I don’t know, that probably plays into it, but it’s not as if the people running the festival had no idea that he’s known for encouraging the crowd to be chaotic, mosh, rush the stage

just such a total shitshow

Remember like three months ago when Bill Simmons released a whole HBO documentary about how a concert tragedy was caused by nu-metal bands and white male “rage” and not, say, the concert industry’s unchecked underregulated vampiric *greed*?

How’s that theory holding up?

— Christopher R. Weingarten (@1000TimesYes) November 8, 2021

one of the cameramen purportedly told panicked fans trying to ask him to stop the show "we're aware of the situation. we can't stop the show, it's streaming live."

the decision had zilch to do with safety.

Hey maybe they can stream their trial as well?

Cameraman also getting all kinds of death threats which is not fucking cool at all.

definitely not. you can ask questions and hold people accountable without going nuclear, esp in this era of mistaken identity.

especially when they are not the string-pullers with that decision making

I'm not even sure what people expected a cameraman to do

I'm not even sure what people expected a cameraman to do

Speak into the headset they use to communicate with the production booth and explain that there's a medical emergency, that people are being crushed?

use their radio to alert other members of staff? at this point I think people were looking for anybody that had an electronic device they could talk through that would cut through the din

xpost

Tom B weighs in https://www.stereogum.com/2166670/travis-scott-astroworld/columns/sounding-board/

I think that piece nails it.

In a 2011 New Yorker piece about the attempts to stop deadly crowd stampedes, John Seabrook mentions a column that ran in the Chicago Sun-Times after the disaster at the Who show in Cincinnati: “Barbarians… stomped 11 persons to death after having numbed their brains on weeds, chemicals, and Southern Comfort.” I’ve seen a lot of tweets in the past few days that look a lot like that.

blaming the crowd, which some are doing, seems the weirdest of all, as the people doing the crushing don't always know that they are crushing people, and a collective group of people lacks a singular autonomy. at the Who show, there were people standing atop of other people that didn't even know they weren't standing on the ground. people ran onto the field with blood on their sneakers without being the wiser.

which isn't to say there aren't individual bad actors or even clumps of them (see ambulance dancers), but blaming something as complex as a mob of people whose collective actions/reactions aren't the same as that of an individual sentient person is weird. but, kinda like Breihan said, easier to have a bogeyman

The mysterious injection attack angle fading away?

i've heard more people talking about people that are talking about it than people actually talking about it

already seeing usually friends of mine sharing these stupid "at metal shows, we pick people up in mosh pit" takes, which a) comes across as pretty racist or adjacent to it ("of course fans of HIP-HOP would be like this!", but b) completely misunderstands the mechanics of crowd crushing and how this shit happens to begin with. have had to call them out on it.

not to mention, it's not even universally true - I've seen more people than I like to count at metal shows getting thrown out for cheap shotting someone in a pit.

I dunno, as someone who was excited to see Travis at Coachella in April, I have to admit he doesn't seem to "take care" of the audience the way I've seen most punk/hardcore/metal frontpeople do.

Sure, Travis has a history of incitement. I'm referring to the fans, though. If the average metal show actually got attended with Travis numbers, which for obvious reasons is unlikely, the same crowd crush could easily happen.

I almost got trampled at a Bad Religion show in 2000 that had an overfilled floor and had to ask security to pull me out. I was screaming at the people around me after I got knocked down and stepped on and somehow managed to get to my feet.

But they didn't know what was happening. They were just dancing on an already crowded floor. This was mild compared to what happened at Travis.

I almost got trampled at a Bad Religion show in 2000 that had an overfilled floor and had to ask security to pull me out. I was screaming at the people around me after I got knocked down and stepped on and somehow managed to get to my feet.

Same thing happened to me at a Red Hot Chili Peppers show in 1989. My glasses fell off while I was down there, too, and I had to reach into the mass of stomping feet and grab them before I could even start fighting to get upright again.

Neanderthal otm. The blame lies with the organizers of the festivals, not the fans.

Didn’t know all that much about Travis Scott before this but he seems like an asshole.

I went to a show on the first Def Jam tour in the mid-80's, which was at a big arena. The main floor was general admission/standing only, and was packed. I was in the middle of that crowd, and throughout the show fights would break out (not really fist-fights, but yelling/shoving altercations) which would cause the immediate crowd to back up and send a wave throughout the entire mass of bodies. It was really hard to stay upright when this happened. In retrospect, I probably never fell because we were hemmed in so tightly (at point I lifted both feet off the floor and was able to "levitate" briefly) that there was literally no room to fall unless everybody did so at once. Still, packing that many people together so tightly struck me as a seriously bad idea, but I'm sure somebody else saw only a teeming mass of dollar signs.

i have see the “at punk/metal shows we pick each other up” take on tumblr and neanderthal otm it struck me as frankly both wrong and fucking racist

i spent some time reading firsthand accounts from attendees on the travis scott subreddit, one thing that struck me was how often 'people passing out is normal at a travis scott show so i didn't think anything was wrong' came up. seems like this was an inevitability. so much trauma and survivor guilt also- sounded like an absolute nightmare. (one kid said he was 'off a tab' even)

also, one less remarked-on angle i think is covid- his fanbase skews young, and two years without being with friends/going to shows is a long time if you're now 18. so i think concert inexperience and pent-up energy could play into this, but again, that's hardly the fan's fault- just may have exacerbated the situation. the organizers should have taken this into account

also, not sure how accurate this is, but it's certainly believable, that live nation utilizes drones to monitor the crowd. so if that's the case, someone absolutely calculated that a few deaths were worth it

I mean this happened in 1985 at the UK Monsters of Rock festival:
https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/local-news/guns-n-roses-legend-my-nightmares-248861
Someone who attended a festival (Sonisphere?) at the same place in about 2010 told me fencing divided the crowd area off into sections now, making surges far less likely. Which is how I imagined all venues did it nowadays.

I've never been in many amped up crowds numbering in the tens of thousands - I think I've always been aware of the need for an escape route and situated myself accordingly - but the one time I saw Rage Against the Machine at Lollapalooza some years back (2008?) the crowd surged forward multiple times and from my perch it seemed pretty precarious. Indeed, the band stopped the set a few times and made people back up and chill out a tad.

I don't think I've ever heard Travis Scott, but the more I read, the more I learn that making the crowd go nuts is sort of his thing, so I imagine a lot of these kids went to the show with the very intention of going crazy. I'm not sure how you prepare for that, but hundreds of shows, from club sets to massive festivals, go on every year without a hitch, let alone fatalities, so there must be a way to do it that this show did not do.

Was thinking about that 1988 Monsters of Rock festival (where two died during Guns N' Roses set)...and how GNR made the "Paradise City" video from that same concert. If anything (as potentially with Travis Scott), it certified the intensity of their music.

Selfishly I do appreciate ILM generally going for the "blame Live Nation" over "blame Travis" angle.

Though, as with most/all things....there's blood on everyone's hands.

Yeah... in that article above, Breihan has a paragraph arguing, "Travis Scott didn’t kill eight people. I would put that blame elsewhere" - but Astroworld is Scott's fest, it's all organized around him, surely he and his management etc. bear more responsibility than, say, Limp Bizkit did for Woodstock '99 (the comparison Breihan makes). Surely the buck has to stop with all the organizers, including the artist who named the fest after his album and preceded it with a week of events tied to his interests? Anyway, sounds like he is one of many defendants in the lawsuits.

Jason Huckabay, who is described in his LinkedIn profile as a Houston-based security director for CSC, said in public Facebook posts that he oversaw a security team at the event. On Friday, Huckabay posted criticisms of festival attendees even as the event was in progress.

The day after the event, Huckabay said in another Facebook post it was “sad that all those kids inside died and others are still in the hospital because this generation has no value in other peoples lives.” He said his guards had spent 10-hour shifts trying to stop “waves of dumba---s breaking down fences trying to rush in,” adding: “A lot of these idiots were from 15-22 in age.”

Reached by phone Monday, Huckabay declined to comment, citing advice from an attorney.

seeing the footage of travis pushing away the two worried-looking entourage dudes who tentatively approach him onstage before immediately going back into 'lets all rage' mode is chilling. obv live nation is responsible in basically all of the most important ways, but travis did not exactly cover himself in glory here.

Yeah, I'm not exactly ready to free him of any blame at this point. Obviously there were a huge number of failures along the way that went into this, but I don't think Scott shouldn't share in some of the blame himself. When he saw ambulances trying to get through the crowd, he was absolutely the one person powerful enough to at least pause the show for a minute. There's dozens, if not hundreds, of examples being shared of bands and artists stopping their show then they see shit isn't right in the crowd.

Saw a clip of him, like, sic'ing the crowd on someone who tried to steal his shoe when he jumped into the crowd. Yeah, not a good look.

(from a prior show, not Astroworld)

I went to the first (or second?) Who show after Cincinnati, and forget how many times Townshend stopped the show to get the main floor crowd (also general admission) to settle down, and it worked.