Travis Scott is breaking his silence and commenting on the Astroworld tragedy.
In an interview published on Thursday, the 30-year-old rapper spoke about his Houston music festival in which a chaotic event took place that killed ten people and injured hundreds of others.
Speaking to Charlamagne tha God, Travis denied that he knew people were hurt and in distress while he was playing his set. He stated:
“It wasn’t until minutes before the press conference that I figured out exactly what happened. Even after the show, you’re just kind of hearing things, but I didn’t know the exact details until minutes before the press conference.
And even at that moment you’re like, ‘Wait, what?’”
He also declared that he did not hear or see signs of distress from the audience amidst his set:
“It’s so crazy because I’m that artist too. Anytime you can hear something like that, you want to stop the show. You want to make sure fans get the proper attention they need.
Anytime I could see anything like that, I did. I stopped it a couple times to just make sure everybody was OK. And I really just go off the fans’ energy as a collective, call and response. I just didn’t hear that.”
Travis explained his reasons for not noticing anything amiss at the time, saying:
“You’ve got a venue filled with 50,000 people… You’ve got lights, you’ve got sound, you’ve got pyro, you’ve got in-ears, you’ve got your sound, you’ve got your mic, you’ve got the music, you’ve got your band, stuff going on.
Everything kind of sounds the same. At the end of day, you just hear music… When you’re in the show, you’re just into the show. Any time you can feel anything close to you, you try to definitely get to that. You can only help what you can see… Whenever somebody tell you to stop, you just stop.”
He commented on the accusations following the tragedy that he fosters an environment of “raging” during his concerts, saying that he has actually been working on it being the opposite of that:
“That’s something I’ve been working on for a while, of just creating these experiences and trying to show these experiences are happening in a safe environment. Us as artists, we trust professionals to make sure things happen and people leave safely.
And this night was just like a regular show, it felt like to me, as far as the energy… People didn’t show up there to just be harmful. People just showed up to have a good time and then something unfortunate happened, and I think we really just got to figure out what that was.”
Travis revealed that in the wake of the tragedy, he’s been on an “emotional rollercoaster”:
“It gets so hard, because I always feel connected with my fans… It really hurts. It hurts the community, it hurts the city.
You wish you could kind of just hold everyone, kind of just heal them, talk to them, have conversations. It really just hurts, man. You do these shows, honestly, for people to have the best experience. Just to think that something like this happened, you’re just trying to figure out [what happened]… Figure out the bottom solution of what’s going on, and just try to ensure people’s safety.”
