By Nour Majdalani | Staff Writer
Imagine: After two years of being confined by COVID-19’s quarantine, you finally get the chance to see your all-time favorite artist play live. Despite being worried about the overcrowded venue, you’re excited to be there and you’ve never felt more alive. The lights are up, the music is loud, and the crowd is cheering. However, this fever dream starts turning into a nightmare when you start suffocating and feeling lightheaded. The neon projections become nothing but flickering ambulance lights and the music slowly mashes into the sound of sirens.
Is this Astro-World?
As of today, 9 people have been pronounced dead as a result of the recent Travis Scott concert. To put the events that occurred in short, on November 5th, a crowd crush occurred at Astroworld in Houston resulting in the wounding of over 300 people. According to Rolling Stone, 528 police officers and 755 private security personnel were present to be in charge of around 50,000 people. Thousands of people rushed to the front lines while Scott performed, resulting in deaths and injuries. Ambulances slowly started swarming the scene during the altercations, but to people’s surprise, Scott only momentarily paused the performance to cater to any of the injured attendees. This has generated multiple conspiracies as to who is to blame for this tragedy and why the concert itself was not halted.
As videos are still circulating and lawsuits are being filed, the internet is not holding back from spreading some theories regarding the horrific event. The crowd rush prompted the majority of the injuries and deaths at Astroworld. The absence of adequately trained and numbered medical and security staff in contrast with the number of people there definitely conjured the spirit of a dangerous situation. A few conspiracies revolve around a sinister trend. That being said, some believe that prior to the concert, the audience were hypnotized to go and others have tied the event’s date to the founding of the Church of Satan as they believe that the rapper’s songs are similarly Satanic in origin.
Post tragedy, the words “Astroworld sacrifice” have been trending online prompting many conversations towards the controversial issue at hand. However, videos regarding these theories have since been taken down by social media platforms such as TikTok, as the app’s regulations state that users must not promote conspiracy theories to legitimize hostile views. These beliefs, though, aren’t simply proliferating on TikTok, but are also being extensively shared on Twitter and Instagram. The reason most people are pinning this tragedy on Travis Scott himself is that he can be seen simply ignoring a worried crowd. Videos have circulated showing fans chanting that the show be stopped, and others going as far as climbing on stage to grab the rapper’s attention about a dead victim. All these attempts were unfortunately disregarded creating more room for new victims. However, it is worth noting that other snippets of the concert have been circulating that show Scott calling onto medical staff to take care of injured individuals, but were still critiqued due to Scott’s minimal follow up on their state of well-being.
Nonetheless, despite the conspiracies and controversial conversations, lives were lost and people were hurt. Thus, we must take this issue seriously and respect the victims and their families. We must let this experience raise awareness about situations like these in the future and not merely act as a social trend to be debated.