![]() On Wednesday, the death count rose to nine, after 22-year-old Texas A&M student Bharti Shahani succumbed to her injuries. The account Lira shared with Insider reflects what many Astroworld attendees said they experienced on November 5, when a crowd of more than 50,000 surged toward the stage. I was holding another person's hand and I was just accepting that I was going to die." Then she passed out. "There was no light left of the concert at all," Lira says. She lost sight of the lasers, strobe lights, and pyrotechnics that made up Scott's performance as other people fell on top of her. Knowing the song would trigger jumping and moshing in the crowd, she resigned herself to being crushed to death. "I was like, 'I'm going to die because this man is not stopping the concert,'" Lira recalls. At one point, she heard Scott start in on the song "Stargazing," which includes the lyrics: "And it ain't no mosh pit if it ain't no injuries, I got 'em stage divin' out the nosebleeds." Lira screamed, but the music was too loud for anyone to hear her. "I was trying to get up as fast as I could, but people were landing on top of my legs and I couldn't move," she says. "In my mind, I was just like, 'Are you kidding me?' People are going to trample … they're going to fall over each other." She describes a "sinkhole of people" opening up around her as bodies fell to the ground and started piling on top of each other. Lira and her friend moved back a few rows from the stage before Scott started hyping up their section of the crowd. "We tried to move, we were like, 'Please, we're trying to leave.' This other girl was screaming and crying." "Our chests were cramped up, you could not breathe at all," she says. Just as the two turned to leave, Scott began playing the song "Escape Plan," and they were pushed back by another wave of people pressing towards the stage. "I'm going to pass out if I stay here," she told a friend. I hope he doesn’t play more shows like that because it is clear that they can’t keep happening.Lira decided she had enough about a minute before the rapper started performing. I don’t think it will destroy his career. I think this will affect him on a personal level. I certainly think a lot of his corporate partnerships will go away. So I think this will affect Travis Scott in the short term. Pearl Jam, what happened at Roskilde has not affected their standing in the world. So The Who are still considered rock legends after Cincinnati, the Rolling Stones are widely beloved after Altamont. Every time that somebody has had something bad happen at one of their events, it seems like it affects those people deeply and it really traumatizes them. With Travis Scott, I don’t know where his career goes. They’re potentially very dangerous places. Since the birth of popular music in the rock ’n’ roll era and since these large concerts started, people have been dying at them. There have been disasters at music festivals, big concerts, for decades. … He has made himself and other people very rich through these sort of sponsorship deal things that he does. And a lot of that has to do with his ability to create these brand partnerships, which are a huge part of his identity. He creates a lot of excitement around just the release of a single. He is, or has been up until now, probably one of the five or six biggest rappers in the world. His music is sort of built out of classic Houston rap sounds, but it brings in different things. … Travis Scott integrated little bits of it into his music without going the full screw style. Houston has this long tradition of what’s called screw music, where a legendary DJ named DJ Screw took tracks, slowed them way down, and made them sound alien and otherworldly and just super woozy and trippy. He likes to create this sort of woozy, mystical sound. What do you mean when you say that, a psychedelic figure?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |