Travis Scott and Astroworld: The Devil Went Down to Houston (Rewind)

DISGRACELAND

This episode of Disgraceland explores the tragic 2021 Astroworld Festival disaster, where ten people died and hundreds were injured during T

Key takeaways

• The Astroworld Festival was dangerously overcrowded due to miscalculated capacity limits—50,000 attendees instead of the safe limit of 34,500.
• Travis Scott's history of encouraging crowd chaos at past shows foreshadowed the disaster, with prior incidents involving injuries and fatalities.

Main topics

• Travis Scott's concert culture and crowd manipulation
• Astroworld Festival disaster of November 5, 2021

Notable quotes

"We conjured a spell. One we hoped would heal the pain of COVID. But instead, we created a monster."

"The devil was at Astroworld. And that was a disgrace."

Conclusion

The Astroworld tragedy was not a single failure but a convergence of systemi

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) This is exactly right. Double Speaker 2 (0:11) Elvis. Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. This is the story about a music festival. And not just any music festival. A disastrous music festival led by one of the biggest musical stars in the world, Travis Scott. But this is also a story about, well, hell. And one of the dirtiest of the seven deadly sins, greed. And this is also a story about the devil. And what happens when the devil is in control. It's the story of a supposed satanic sacrifice. An energy harvest wherein innocent souls were stolen. This is a story about Travis Scott's Astroworld, a festival that contained some great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show. That wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Mellotron called Barbarian Bolero MK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to Easy On Me by Adele. And why would I play you that specific slice of redemptive torch cheese, could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on November 5th, 2021. And that was the day that a music festival organized by a hometown hero in Houston went horribly awry, plunging tens of thousands into what truly felt like hell on earth. On this episode, greed, satanic sacrifices, snatched souls, and Travis Scott's Astroworld. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. That was a word used to describe the COVID-19 pandemic, especially by frontline workers who witnessed the worst of the infectious disease at close range. Here in the U.S., in January of 2021, just about a year after the first case was recorded in Washington state, cases suddenly surged nationwide. And it's not difficult to understand why. Social distancing, masks, isolation, that type of behavior, it's not normal. Those restrictions, human beings aren't supposed to live with them. We require contact, interaction. We need to be around other people. Whether it's at the movie theater or a concert venue or a church or a ballpark, shared experiences are crucial to the human experience. Coming out of COVID, what we wanted more than anything was to have those experiences again, to get our lives back, to feel that sense of normalcy, a sense of ourselves in social settings with other people. But we had to relearn it. Months, a year spent in isolation, meant we were collectively rusty. So, we conjured a spell. One we hoped would heal the pain of COVID. But instead, we created a monster. A malevolent entity with a mind of its own. And for those unlucky enough to get in the path of this monster, they found themselves staring down the very thing we all thought we'd escaped from. Speaker 2 (4:27) November 5th, 2021, Houston, Texas, 9 a.m. The crowd outside Energy Park was growing restless. Some fans had been there long before sunrise, but the gates wouldn't open for another hour. So they were forced to wait. But what they really wanted was to be letting out all that emotion and aggression that they'd stored up during the COVID-19 pandemic in isolation. They wanted to rage. Check that. They were under a directive to rage. Per the organizer and headliner of the third annual Astroworld Festival, the hip-hop artist Travis Scott. Raging was Travis Scott's ethos, the kind shared by a hardcore punk audience or Travis's beloved world of professional wrestling. A Travis Scott show implied physical audience participation, mosh pits, crowd surfing, stage rushing. And while part of the allure of Astroworld was the eclectic two-day lineup, with performances by Bad Bunny, Tame Impala, SZA, and Earth, Wind & Fire, to name a few, Travis Scott was different. He was a hometown boy, made good and all that. Two solo albums that debuted at the top of the Billboard album chart, Birds in the Trap, Sing Goodnight, and Astroworld. The latter named after the former Six Flags amusement park in Houston that once stood near the music festival's location. A compilation album called Jack Boys, also number one. Number one singles, too. And don't forget the merchandise collaborations with Hot Wheels, with Nike, with Reese's, and most famously with McDonald's, who just one year prior had made Travis the first celebrity to be featured on their menu since Michael Jordan, way back in 1992. Speaker 2 (6:22) My point is Travis Scott in November of 2021 was huge. But back home in Houston, Travis Scott was beyond huge. He loomed large, just like that giant statue of him now loomed over the growing crowd of hundreds impatiently waiting for the gates to open and let them into NRG Park and into the Astroworld Festival. Once inside, their eyes would be open to a whole new universe, Orso promised the promotional posters. See you on the other side, the poster read, next to a sketch of a pair of hands with big eyes stuck in their palms in what looked to be a two-lane road descending down a large tunnel. Above that tunnel was a crude drawing of a figure walking through a doorframe. A whole new universe, the other side, here tonight. The crowd that was assembled outside the gates understood the assignment at hand. To get to that other side, they had to push the party to the edge of total chaos. Only then would the experience be truly transformative. The crowd had done this in 2015 at Lollapalooza in Chicago when Travis Scott encouraged fans to jump the barricades to give any and all security guards the finger and to chant, we want rage. Travis got the boot just five minutes into his set, but not before a 15-year-old girl was injured in the resulting stampede, for which Travis Scott was charged with reckless conduct and sentenced to one year of court supervision. Two years later, in 2017, Travis was charged with disorderly conduct in order to pay restitution to multiple people who were injured when he once again instructed fans to rush the stage during a show in Arkansas. And just weeks after that, at a show in Manhattan, Travis Scott, on stage at Terminal 5, looked up at a fan dangling from the second floor balcony about to fall into the audience below. I see you, but are you gonna do it? Travis asked from the stage. The kid hesitated. They're gonna catch you, Travis said. Don't be scared. Don't be scared. The kid let go. It was dropped safely into the arms of his fellow concertgoers. Not so lucky. was the next fan to fall from the same balcony, who did so not under his own volition, but because he was pushed as the crowd surged against his back. He tumbled over the edge, falling fast, hitting the floor with such force that he immediately broke several bones in his vertebrae and was paralyzed. Speaker 2 (8:51) Now, on November 5th, 2021, at Astroworld, those who had been injured and disabled at previous Travis Scott shows were a distant memory. COVID felt like a lifetime ago. A really bad dream that everyone had since woken up from. Here now, it was all about moving forward, onwards and upwards from the past year and through these gates. And so, even before the gates officially opened at 10 a.m., that's what many were doing. Crawling under fences, knocking over barricades, snapping the chain-link fences with bolt cutters. Even those who weren't supposed to be there. Literally thousands more showing up beyond the 50,000 ticketed attendees. And when the gates did open for real, It was like a swollen river bursting a dam. No order, no chill, just a swarm of bodies, mostly teenagers and young adults, feet pounding the pavement, some pushed, some pulled, some falling to the ground, trampled, entire sections of fencing flattened. They skipped security checkpoints, knocked over metal detectors. The first set by the first artist of the day wasn't for another three hours, but none of that mattered. Time, right now, moved to... just as unpredictably as it had during the pandemic. Speaker 2 (10:07) But you,