Insert Foot: Why people died at Astroworld is inexcusable

Astroworld, Travis Scott

A street sign shows the cancelation of the Astroworld Festival at NRG Park in Houston on Nov. 6, 2021. Eight people died and more than a dozen others were taken to hospitals after a crowd surge at the festival, started by Houston rapper Travis Scott in 2018. Photo by Alex Bierens de Haan/Getty Images.

You’re in a crowd stretching to the horizon at Astroworld in Houston when something suddenly steals every molecule of air from your lungs. You can’t find oxygen, no matter how hard your lungs try sucking inward. You feel like someone took a jackhammer to your chest, or a fish suddenly tossed from the cool river onto a hot, dry granite shore.

INSERT FOOT, Tony Hicks

Rendering: Adam Pardee/STAFF.

Out of nowhere … you’re totally confused. You forget where you are.

It gets worse when you realize all your physical strength–something you’ve always told yourself will save you when everything else fails–doesn’t have any bearing whatsoever on where your body is headed. There’s no space anywhere to go, only sweaty human bodies, squeezing tighter.

The faces around you start showing signs of what you’re starting to feel. People use words like “panic” and “helpless” all the time. But you have no idea what they even mean until that very moment.



Then you hear people at the edge of the mob, laughing, exalting others to keep rushing forward. What?! Why?! Another wave of people slam into you, forcing you briefly onto one foot, teetering like a bowling pin … just get your other foot under you and you’ll be fine … the second foot hits … then they slam into you again.

Helplessness. Panic. Terror.

It’s what people felt Friday night, just before Travis Scott went on at the Astroworld Festival in Houston.

Only this time, where most of us end up back rebalancing on that second foot, finding some wind and recapturing conscious control of our brain that inexplicably slipped into true fight-or-flight mode, at least eight people didn’t rediscover their balance. That was the body count as of Saturday afternoon.

Their lives were literally crushed from them.

At least 22 people were transported to local hospitals, and an estimated 300 were treated at an on-site “field hospital.” As they’re still picking through the rubble and trying to figure out what happened, no one’s come up with an official cause of Friday’s stampede.



It’s probably safe to say bad planning played a part at Astroworld, as did someone deciding safety wasn’t as important as profit.

Accidents happen. Fires occasionally cause concert deaths. Stages sometimes collapse. People have medical emergencies. This didn’t have to happen.

It’s amazing that more deaths from surging crowds don’t happen more than every few years. The most infamous example, of course, being the Who concert in 1979 in Cincinnati. Eleven died when 20,000 people were let through just a couple doors to get to first-come, first-served seating, not long before the show started.

I started going to concerts just a couple years later, most of which were general admission, as promotors seemingly didn’t learn their lesson. Getting to the front of the stage became sport. My friends and I would go to a show, someone would point and yell “BARRICADE” and off we’d charge, heads down, six or seven (or more) idiots, cutting a swath through an already packed crowd. Most of the time people made way; sometimes someone pushed back. It was the behavior of kids knowing they weren’t supervised.

And it stopped once I became the guy standing on one foot, suddenly praying to stay upright.



That we’re still talking about this in 2021 is insane. The people up front are a minority, usually swollen with the invincibility of youth and sometimes bravery-inducing substances. They’re people who don’t know any better, believing they score points on an invisible survival scale for bullying their way to the front of a stage at a concert. It’s a short-term accomplishment, proving how much of a real fan they are.

If you can’t control a crowd, with reserved seating, better security, better layouts and strategy to get people out of a crowd crush, then you shouldn’t be inviting them to your music festival. I don’t have all the answers, but I’m also not claiming to be a concert promoter.

That this can happen now … during a pandemic, even … is just mind-boggling. Even in Texas.

This isn’t an anti-music festival rant. Some of my best days were spent at festivals. I’m just asking why we don’t learn from our mistakes to plan better. This was a preventable tragedy that shouldn’t still be possible. It’s a thought that occurs to me way too frequently, about way too many things, in 2021.

Follow music critic Tony Hicks at Twitter.com/TonyBaloney1967.

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