Two years after his performance at Houston’s Astroworld Festival turned into a deadly crowd crush that killed 10 people and injured hundreds more, rapper Travis Scott has made some rare comments about the tragedy.
In a GQ Man of the Year cover story published on Wednesday, Scott discusses the fallout of the devastating 2021 concert. Footage from the festival showed Scott continuing to perform even after he appeared to see that a fan had passed out, and hundreds of lawsuits were subsequently filed against him and Astroworld organizers. Earlier this year, it was reported that the rapper will not face criminal charges.
Scott told GQ he thought about the Astroworld disaster while making his latest album, Utopia, particularly on the song “My Eyes.”
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“Making music, you think about things that go on in life and things that happen in your life, and you dial in on things,” he said.
“That moment for families, for the city, you know, it was devastating,” he added. “And when it came to making, like even finishing the album…I got back into it probably like, I don’t know, months and months and months after. And the idea of just even getting back into music, working on music and just even getting into that, was therapeutic of being able to channel some of the energy into production and sounds and finishing it.”
When asked about his mental state following the tragedy, Scott responded, “I mean, I was just overly devastated. I always think about it. Those fans were like my family. You know, I love my fans to the utmost. It has its moments where it gets rough and…yeah. You just feel for those people. And their families.”
On “My Eyes,” Scott directly references Astroworld with the lyrics, “I replay them nights, and right by my side, all I see is a sea of people that ride with me / If they just knew what Scotty would do to jump off the stage and save him a child.” Those lines, he told GQ, “came out when I was writing... it was a real moment. The song is emotional to me. It’s one of my favorite songs on the album.”
The rapper said that he hopes when people hear the song, they “know I have pain too. I have concerns, things that I think about, and the things I see on a day-to-day basis I think about them. And every day I want to find change in the things, to make things better, make myself better. It’s just like: I go through things like everyone else.”
Scott’s GQ interview marks the first time he’s spoken publicly about Astroworld since December 2021, when he told radio host Charlamagne Tha God that he wasn’t aware that audience members were in distress while he was performing. “Even after the show, you know, you’re just kind of hearing things, which I didn’t know the exact details until, you know, minutes before the press conference,” he said at the time.
“And even at that moment you’re kind of just like, ‘Wait, what?’ You know, you just went through something.”
