Travis Scott has given his first interview on Astroworld and the crowd surge during his performance that left 10 people dead.
Sitting down with The Breakfast Club co-host Charlamagne tha God, the rapper claimed he was unaware attendees had died until “minutes before the press conference.”
Scott also claimed he couldn’t hear concert-goers screaming at him to stop the show.
“I really just go off the fans’ energy as a collective — call and response. I just didn’t hear that,” he explained, adding that he briefly paused the set to check on attendees: “I got a response everyone was okay.”
Segueing into Scott’s plans for preventing future fatalities, Charlamagne stated that “no one plans for these things to happen” at concerts — though, surely, event organizers have methods of preparing for possible crushes or violence.
Scott suggested heart-tracking bands as a method for keeping fans safe or “finding out the solution for what that exact problem was.” However, the artist suggested that, once he returns to the stage, his approach to safety will largely remain the same.
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“I’ll do the same thing I’ve been doing, just making sure everybody’s on post and… double down on just making sure that everyone is locked in,” he said. Still, he admitted that he needs to “address ways to fix these things in the future.”
Addressing the entirely ridiculous claims that Astroworld was a Satanic ritual, Scott responded: “I’m a man of God, that’s the first thing first.”
Charlamagne also pressed Scott regarding his well-documented history of encouraging “raging” at his shows.
“That’s something I’ve been working on for a while, is creating these experiences and trying to show these experiences are happening in a safe environment,” he said. “Us, as artists, we trust professionals for when things happen that people can 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 just to 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.”
Scott didn’t directly address the hundreds of lawsuits naming him as a defendant, nor his attorneys’ move to dismiss 11 of them.
He did, however, say it was “understandable” that families of the deceased have rejected his offer to pay for funeral expenses. “They want answers and I’m going to be here to… help them. I just wanted to make sure they knew I was there for them.”