I am sure some of you will have experienced a chill of recognition when you first heard about the events in Houston, Texas last Friday, where nine people were killed, and many more were injured in a crowd surge at Travis Scott’s Astroworld festival. Granted, it’s unlikely you’ll have experienced anything remotely on the scale of that tragedy: those strange, horrifying scenes captured on video, recounted in Twitter threads or grimly confirmed in police news conferences.
Still, if you’re a regular concert attendee, you may well have been reminded by little moments in your gig-going past that felt fraught with peril: dangerous bottlenecks at major music festivals, collapsing circle pits at metal gigs, that general sense of a collective tightening as seemingly the entire venue inches forward for a better glimpse at the band.
Perhaps it is remarkable then that there haven’t been many more Astroworlds. Mass casualty events at concerts are thankfully rare enough that when they do happen they tend to enter the annals of notoriety: think The Who in Cincinnati in 1979, Pearl Jam at Roskilde in 2000, Germany’s Love Parade in 2010. That the vast majority of concerts proceed without anything like that level of tragedy is down to a chain of collective vigilance between event organisers, health and safety officers, security personnel, right down to the people picking up their fallen brethren when a moshpit suddenly goes south.
Clearly something went very wrong somewhere in that chain of collective responsibility at Astroworld. Determining what went wrong will take time, something that our breathless, extremely online culture doesn’t seem to have, and so we have already experienced a week of fevered speculation and finger pointing. Scott, and his particular brand of high-octane performance, is under scrutiny, as is a live hip-hop scene that has in recent years begun to incorporate the intensity of metal and hardcore. There are major questions too for promoter LiveNation over its planning for the event, and the emergency services who responded to it, to answer.
It feels particularly striking that this disaster has come hot on the heels of a global pandemic that already made mass gatherings seem a risky proposition. It is quite understandable that some people might be questioning whether they are even worth going to. For everyone involved in their creation, then, this has to be a moment to take stock. Safety codes need to be reinforced, venues made more secure, performers and their support staff need to know how to respond when things do go wrong. And the rest of us, well, we need to keep looking out for the person next to us.
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