Travis Scott has said he didn’t notice concertgoers pleading for help, during his first interview since the devastating crowd crush at Astroworld that left 10 fans dead and hundreds injured. “It’s just been a lot of thoughts, a lot of feelings, a lot of grieving,” he said, “just trying to wrap my head around it.”
Over the course of an hour-long interview with Charlamagne tha God, the host of the Breakfast Club radio show, Scott was serious and downcast. He said he wasn’t aware of anything amiss until a news conference was called after his set. “People pass out, things happen at concerts – but something like that?” he said, his voice trailing.
When Charlamagne mentioned witness accounts of concertgoers pleading for help in between songs, the rapper said he would have stopped his performance if he had been aware. “I’m that artist that – anytime you can hear something like that, you want to stop the show,” said Scott, adding that his attention was compromised by the music, lights and pyrotechnical elements of his performance.
An eight-time Grammy nominee, Scott is renowned for high-energy concerts that he stokes by encouraging fans to “rage” along. In a 2015 GQ video titled How to Rage with Travis Scott, he traces that exuberance to a longtime love of wrestling. “Since I was six, I wanted to be a fucking wrestler,” he says. “So in performances I always wanted to make it feel like it was the WWF.”
But in Houston the excitement clearly boiled over. Fan footage shows Scott appearing to coax the crowd to form mosh pits during his set. Before the show, video of masses of Astroworld patrons trampling over one another while overwhelming security barriers and bypassing checkpoint areas trended on social media.
Scott took exception to attempts to characterize raging as intentionally sinister. “That’s something I’ve been working on for a while, is creating these experiences and trying to show these experiences that are happening in a safe environment,” he said. “Us as artists, we trust professionals for when things happen that people can leave safely. And this night was just like a regular show, it felt to me, as far as the energy. It didn’t feel like, you know … people didn’t show up there just to be harmful.”
In the month since that disastrous opening day, Scott has been named a defendant in more than 200 lawsuits, many of them citing him for “negligence” and the “encouragement of violence”. One Houston-based law firm representing more than 1,500 audience members is seeking $10bn in damages.
On Monday Scott’s attorneys filed a dismissal request for 11 of those lawsuits, a motion that elicited negative feedback from fans. Publicly, Scott’s representatives absolve him of legal liability while leaving the possibility of more dismissal requests.
Scott rebuffed the suggestion that he was participating in the interview to head off the mounting litigation.
