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What Next: The Astroworld Tragedy

Slate News

Slate Podcasts

News, News Commentary, Politics

4.66K Ratings

🗓️ 11 November 2021

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Last Friday, a surging crowd killed at least eight people and left hundreds injured at Travis Scott’s music festival Astroworld in Houston. Public uproar over the needless deaths has placed responsibility at the rapper’s feet - and at those of police officers who failed to intervene and shut the show down. How did Scott’s signature “raging” spill over into a mass casualty event? And how do we tease out blame between Scott himself, and the way music festivals are run? Guest: Tom Breihan, senior editor at Stereogum. If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get benefits like zero ads on any Slate podcast, bonus episodes of shows like Slow Burn and Dear Prudence—and you’ll be supporting the work we do here on What Next. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to help support our work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hey there, this episode has a bit of adult language in it.

0:09.4

Even if you wanted to avoid talking about what happened at Travis Scott's astroworld last week,

0:16.0

it would be hard to do. The algorithms simply won't let you.

0:21.4

I saw the videos on Saturday morning after everything happens. They were pretty much all over

0:27.6

the internet. My wife woke me up with it. Tom Bryan writes for StereoGum.

0:32.5

My kids barely know who Travis Scott is, but they're on TikTok, and they definitely

0:37.5

head opinions about it by like Sunday.

0:46.0

At least eight people died, and hundreds were injured last Friday, when a surging crowd

0:52.2

pushed the breath out of astroworld's audience of thousands. Two of the dead were high schoolers.

0:59.2

The oldest victim was just 27, and the entire show was caught on tape.

1:09.9

There is video of Travis Scott singing while an unconscious concert goer is carried out,

1:15.2

just yards away from him. There's video of fans dancing on an ambulance,

1:19.7

as medics try to reach someone who's in trouble,

1:27.8

and then there's tape of people begging for help.

1:37.8

This clip shows a man and a woman who've climbed up on a platform. That is where a cameraman

1:43.5

is live streaming the performance for Apple Music. Their screams get cut off by the show,

1:50.0

as the camera guy waves them off.

1:56.9

They're yelling at him. They're saying, stop the concert, but also just there's someone dead

2:03.1

down here. Stop the concert, and he sort of brushes them off. Did that surprise you?

2:08.6

Yeah, it does surprise me, but it also makes its own morbid kind of sense.

2:19.6

These things are these sort of fast beasts, these concerts, and this cameraman who's trying to

2:26.4

film his thing for Apple is probably not thinking about the safety of the people underneath it.

...

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