Travis Scott and Astroworld: The Devil Went Down to Houston

the devil is in control. It's the story of a supposed Satanic sacrifice, an energy harvest wherein innocent souls were stolen. This is a story about Travis Scott's Astor World, a festival that contained some great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show. That wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my melotron called Barbarian Bolero MK One. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to Easy on Me by Adele And why would I play you that

specific slice of redemptive torch Cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on November fifth, twenty twenty one, and that was the day that a music festival organized by a hometown hero in Houston went horribly awry, plunging tens of thousands into what truly felt like hell on Earth on this episode, greed, satanic sacrifices, snatched souls. In Travis Scott's Astro World, I'm

Jake Brennan, and this this disgraceland hell. That was a word used to describe the COVID nineteen pandemic, especially by frontline workers who witness the worst of the infectious disease at close range. Here in the US. In January of twenty twenty one, just about a year after the first case was recorded in Washington State, cases suddenly surged nationwide. And it's not difficult to understand why social distancing mass is that type of behavior. It's not normal those restrictions.

Human beings aren't supposed to live with them. We require contact, interaction. We need to be around other people, whether it's at the movie theater or a concert venue, or a church or a ballpark. Shared experiences are crucial to the human experience. Coming out of COVID, what we wanted more than anything was to have those experiences again, to get our lives back, to feel that sense of normalcy. A sense of ourselves in social settings with other people, but we had to

relearn it. Months a year spent in isolation meant we were collectively rusty. So we conjured a spell, one we hoped would heal the pain of COVID, but instead we created a monster, a malevolent entity with a mind of its own. And for those unlucky enough to get in the path of this monster, they found themselves staring down the very thing we all thought we'd escaped from hell. November fifth, twenty twenty one, Houston, Texas, nine am. The

crowd outside Energy Park was growing restless. Some fans have been there long before sunrise, but the gates wouldn't open for another hour, so they were forced to wait. But what they really wanted was to be letting out all that emotion and aggression that they'd started up during the COVID nineteen pandemic in isolation. They wanted to rage. Check that they were under a directive to rage, per the organizer and headliner of the third annual Astroworld Festival, the

hip hop artist Travis Scott. Raging was Travis Scott's ethos, the kind shared by a hardcore or a punk audience or Travis's beloved world of professional wrestling. A Travis Scott show implied physical audience participation, mosh pits, crowdsurfing, stage rushing, and While part of the allure of Astorworld was the eclectic two day lineup with performances by Bad Bunny Dam and Paula Sizza, then Earth Went and Fired and name a few, Travis Scott was different. He was a hometown boy,

made good and all that. Two solo albums that debuted at the top of the Billboard Album chart, Birds in the Traps Sing good Night, and Astorworld, the latter named after the former six Flags amusement park in Houston that

once stood near the music festival's location. A compilation album called jack Boys also number one number one singles too, and don't forget the merchandise collaborations with Hot Wheels, with Nike, with Receis, and most famously with McDonald's, who just one year prior had made Travis the first celebrity to be featured on their menu since Michael Jordan way back in nineteen ninety two. My point is Travis Scott in November of twenty twenty one was huge, but back home in Houston,

Travis Scott was beyond huge. He loomed large, just like that giant statue of him now loomed over the growing crowd of hundreds, impatiently waiting for the gates to open and let them into Energy Park and into the Astro World Festival. Once inside, their eyes would be open to a whole new universe, or so promised the promotional posters. See you on the other side, the poster read, next to a sketch of a pair of hands with big eyes stuck in their palms, and what looked to be

a two lane road descending down a large tunnel. Above that tunnel was a crude drawing of a figure walking through a doorframe. A whole new universe the other side. Here tonight, the crowd that was assembled outside the gates understood the assignment at hand. To get to that other side, they had to push the party to the edge of total chaos. Only then would the experience be truly transformative.

The crowd had done this in twenty fifteen at Lallapalooza in Chicago, when Travis Scott encouraged fans to jump the barricades to give any and all security guards the finger and a chant we want rage. Travis got the boot just five minutes into his set, but not before a fifteen year old girl was injured in the resulting stampede, for which Travis Scott was charged with reckless conduct and

sentenced to one year of court supervision. Two years later, in twenty seventeen, Travis was charged with disorderly conduct in order to pay restitution to multiple people who were injured when he once again instructed fans to rush the stage during a show in Arkansas. In just weeks after that, at a show of Manhattan, Travis Scott, on stage at Terminal five, looked up at a fan dangling from the second floor ballot be about to fall into the audience below. I see you, but are you going to do it?

Travis asked from the stage. The kid hesitated, They're gonna catch you. Travis said, don't be scared. Don't be scared. The kid let go. It was dropped safely into the arms of his fellow concertgoers. Not so lucky was the next ban to fall from the same balcony, who did so not under his own volition, but because he was pushed as the crowd surged against his back. He tumbled over the edge, falling fast, hitting the floor with such force that he immediately broke several bones in his vertebrae

and was paralyzed. Now, on November fifth, twenty twenty one, at Astro World, those who had been injured and disabled at previous Travis Scott shows were a distant memory. COVID felt like a lifetime ago, a really bad dream that

everyone had since woken up from here. Now it was all about moving forward, onwards and upwards in the past year and through these gar and so even before the gates officially opened at ten am, that's what many were doing, crawling under fences, knocking over barricades, snapping the chain link fences with bowl cutters, even those who weren't supposed to be there, Literally thousands more showing up beyond the fifty thousand ticketed attendees. And when the gates did open for real,

it was like a swollen river bursting a dam. No order, no chill, just a swarm of bodies, mostly teenagers and young adults, feet pounding the pavement, some pushed, some pulled, some falling to the ground, trampled, entire sections of fencing flattened, They skipped security checkpoints, knocked over metal detectors. The first set by the first artist of the day wasn't for another three hours, but none of that mattered. Time right now moved just as unpredictably as it had during the pandemic.

But you you're moving with purpose. You're trying to get safely past the crush at the gate and get inside, which you do, and the first point of interest you encounter is the merch booth. Hundreds, if not thousands, of bodies are running straight forward. The barricade set up to maintain an organized line of commerce are being ignored. Kids are jumping them or just pushing them aside, cutting the line if there was even a line to cut. The

crowd grows, the bodies push forward. You're caught in the flow against your will, so you find a way out and take it, And just at that moment, the crowd gets really crazy. Kids, adults, normal human beings suddenly gone feral. They want what they want and they're going to take it. As you walk away, you watch as people start to pounce on the merch counter, grabbing t shirts, grabbing for registers full of cash, whatever they can get their hands on.

Minutes later, you hear some dude telling his girl that the merch area was shut down after multiple requests for police and medical attention. By this point, you've made your way through the giant whitehead statue of Travis Scott that leads into the main concert area. It's the same bust of Travis on the cover of his Astra World album.

You walk straight through his open mouth, which is kind of rad but also kind of gross at the same time, and then right up ahead you see it just like it was shown to you on the Astra World posters, that long road descending into a large tunnel. But this road is actually a stage which looks not unlike an inverted cross, And the large tunnel that this inverted cross sprawls into is actually a circle constructed in layers to create depth. That circle is drilled into an even bigger backdrop,

which is shaped like a mountain. Right now, the mountain is black with a tan outline, nondescript, just another man made structure in broad daylight. But tonight, at nine pm, to be exact, it will change. Everything will change because that's when Travis Scott will take the stage. That's when that nondescript man made structure will become possessed. That's when the monster will take over, and you and every other person here willingly or not, will be taken kicking and

screaming to the other side. By eight point thirty that evening, the mountain backdrop on the Astor World stage was glowing yellow, then orange, and then red. The audience was well beyond capacity. Remember that's fifty thousand people due to all the gay

crashers who overwhelmed Astor World's infrastructure. The incredibly bright colors radiating from the stage cut through the dark Houston night, bleeding all over the fences staring back, and the layered circles at the center of the mountain began to glow red too. Then the words Sea on the other side were followed by a timer. It started at thirty minutes

and immediately began to count down. Fans had spent the last seven plus hours watching sets by Master p by Don Tolliver, by Little Baby, and others, but they were beyond sight for their hometown hero. Each minute that the timer counted down was a minute closer to Travis Scott, closer to Rage, closer to that other side. Twenty five minutes, twenty fifteen, Around the ten minute mark in the front left quadrant up near the stage. A huge surge in the crowd came from It was violent and quick, and

there was no choice but to be carried along. People were packed in so tight that you either had your arms straight up in the air or straight down by your side. It was like you looked directly into the eyes of Medusa, turned to stone with a snap, arms pressed against your chest, fists clenched into your neck, your head leaning back, face angled up to the open sky,

gasping for a few tiny breaths above the fray. The air of anticipation and excitement so often present at the start of a show like this, suddenly blotted out by a feeling of dread. Someone screamed, and then another. War cries and sounds of warning. The blood red light from the stage intensified. Five minutes four three, two one. An organ rang out, started low and then building ancient history

reanimated but still rotten. The layered circles in the center of the mountain on stage began to glow deep red. The monster was alive, now taking shape. It sent forth a messenger to announce its arrival. An image of a bird or a dragon was flapping its wings in a cloud of fire at the top of the mountain, and the organ music became auto tuned inverted, just like that

cross of a stage. Without warning, Travis Scott jumped from out of nowhere, his feet landing hard, the music hitting even harder, bass, treble, organ fire, huge flame shot into the sky all around him. Travis's first song was called escape plan ironic, seeing as there was no escape as the crowd once again surged forward. This time the surge was harder and more forceful than before. Body sandwiched into other bodies, so tight that you could feel your lungs

compressed and the air lead out of you. Ever been in a crowd crushed before, you know how frightening It is not just the realization that your oxygen supply has been cut out, or of the adrenaline and the survival instinct that kicks in to save you, but the feeling that you've completely lost control. Thousands of bodies all becoming one, moving as one, ebbing and flowing as one. Your feet literally lift off the ground, you removed from one spot

to another. It's like you're being carried away on a gigantic wave in the ocean, only the ocean is other people, just like Hell is, other people that make no mistake, Hell was here on Earth, at astor world. The monster's voice was in the base frequencies, so loud that it felt like the ground was about to split open and swallow everyone whole. The monster's tongue was in the flames that continued to erupt all over the stage. Darkness devoured

the light. The mountain was a volcano. The center of the layered circle morphed into a giant eyeball, darting to the left and then to the right, looking at all fifty thousand plus people out there, looking directly at you, all seeing, all knowing. The crowd crush swelled again as the inverted church music mixed with an ear splitting hip hop beat, and the intended effect was one release in catharsis, But in reality, the effect it created was one of

pure panic. Some couldn't handle it. They crouched down on one knee, attempting to catch their breath. Instead, they were plowed over by the bodies surrounding them, knocked to the ground, stepped on trampled mash pits, were collapsing in on themselves, broken feet, broken hands, dislocated shoulders, blood running from the noses, and blood pouring out of mouths, eyes rolling into the backs of heads, blue lips, gray skin. A college student

displayed out on the ground, unconscious, maybe dead. Someone started CPR on her while others screened for a medic. A nine year old on top of his father's shoulders, thrown forward when his dad was caught up and the crowd crush, the boy was launched into a massive arms and legs. One second he was right there and the next he was gone. Things were going very, very badly, but not everyone knew it. If you watch videos taken by those in the crowd, you can hear people screaming help and

stop the show in between the songs. The footage is chilling. You can see people climbing up on risers to get the attention of camera operators, yelling to them that the show had to be stopped, that people were dying. But you can also hear other fans making fun of the whistleblowers, telling them to calm down. The crowd was just too big. The music, the lights, the pyro, all of it was waging a constant, all out assault on the senses on stage. Travis Scott was hoisted in the air on a riser

of his own. He looked down on the mass of flesh watched one kid escape the crowd and climb up one of the trees there on site. It was like the guy hanging from the balcony in Manhattan all over again. Taking his cue from the kid in the tree, Travis asked, who wants to rage. Some of the crowd roared their approval, while others went horace, calling for medical attention. Voices of terror mixed in with voices of rapture, no telling the two apart. But then, for a brief moment it seemed

like things would turn around. Travis noticed an ambulance pushing its way through the audience en route to someone who was passed out and needed medical attention. He stopped the show. He watched silently as the fan was helped. The smartphone video of this moment shows actual concern in Travis Scott's face, but also confusion, almost like he's stuck in a moment, as if he went somewhere else slowly, though he came

back thirty seconds later. He asked everyone who was okay to stick a middle finger in the sky, and the fingers went up, and then just sixty seconds after he stopped the show, it was back on. The music blasted, the flames erupted, the ambulance slowly made its way out while Travis was screaming, I want to make this motherfucking

ground shake. God damn it. He was the quote unquote maestro directing the chaos, as The Washington Post once wrote about him, exhibiting that trademark unhinged leaping, as Rolling Stone magazine put it when they compared Travis Scott's frantic stage presence to Michael Jackson's iconic Moonwalk. But Travis Scott didn't do Moonwalk's. He didn't glide on the ground. He shook it.

At nine thirty eight pm, a little over a half hour into Travis scott set, the Houston Fire Department had seen enough, way too many calls for people being trampled, passing out in need of CPR or another urgent medical attention. At that moment, Houston Fire officially declared Asterworld a mass casualty event. Houston PD informed the festival's promoters that the show had to end right now, but the show didn't end. The monster wasn't ready to go back in its box.

We'll be right back after this. We're We're where ten pm, twenty two minutes after the Houston Fire Department declared Astorworld a mass casualty event, Travis Scott continued to perform, and he was doing so now with a surprise guests, the Toronto rapper and singer Drake, who joined Travis on stage to euphoric applause from the crowd below. Meanwhile, in that same crowd, medics made a desperate search for those who

needed help. The cries of the wounded and the dying rang out, only to be drowned out by the throng. Bodies were being hauled over barricades and passed over her shoulders as if they were crowdsurfing, But these bodies were limped, and in many cases the medics on hand were ill equipped, no defibrillators, no oxygen, just to their bare hands. One medic did have a backboard to transport an unconscious woman,

but the backboard had no straps. It was a struggle to carry the body through the crowd of people, and many didn't move aside. Others were oblivious. Two caught up in the sight and sound of Drake and Travis on stage, the medics lost their grip and the unconscious woman began to slide out of the backboard with no straps. She hit the ground directly on her head. Elsewhere, another ambulance made of a labored slog through thousands of people. A couple of fans jumped on top of the vehicle and

began to dance on it. One concert goer later compared the sight of people trapped to the crowd the pigs in a cage. Others said they were literally in hell. At ten fourteen pm, fourteen minutes after Drake's arrival and now over half an hour since the mass casualty event declaration, Travis Scott finished the last song of the night. Pastor World was officially over, just one minute after a twenty three year old attendee, the festival's first fatality, died at

a nearby hospital. Ten people in total died from injuries sustained at Astorworld that night, all of them in their teens or twenties, with the exception of a nine year old boy. I told you about him earlier. Ezra Blunt fell off his father's shoulders when the crowd surge hit them from behind. His father could not find him, and did not find him until much later, when Ezra turned up as a John Doe at the hospital. He was put into a medically induced coma and died shortly thereafter.

The News of the Astor World tragedy quickly hit the wires. The next morning, Travis Scott issued a statement that read, in part, I'm absolutely devastated by what took place last night. My prayers go out to the families and all those impacted by what happened at astra World festival. On TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, survivors posted videos they had taken during the

show that clearly documented the harrowing sequence of events. With those videos came not just outrage and shock from other users online, but some extremely disturbing interpretations of what was really going on or so some were saying. The search term Astoral World sacrifice began to trend on TikTok. The so called interpretations followed Astor World was a Satanic ritual, astra a World was a quote unquote energy harvest in which Travis Scott put people under a spell and snatched

their souls. Just look at the demonic imagery, the flames, the giant I stage that looked like an inverted cross, the shirt Travis was wearing with cartoon figures walking through a portal and emerging with what seemed to be horns on their head. And this is the sampling of what people were writing on TikTok and Twitter and elsewhere. If you don't believe that there was nothing demonic about the whole concert, you are spiritually blind. And I pray that

God opens your eyes. I'm a big fan of Travis Scott, but this is some demonic ass shit in this one, which referred to the fact that Astor World attendees were required to have proof of a negative COVID test or a COVID vaccination quote jab plus five g in frequency at concert equal dead unquote, just to reiterate the imagery and the video in the first hand accounts coming out of Astor World were so fucked up that people were saying jab plus five g and frequency at concert equal dead.

In other words, that this was some mass conspiracy involving the government and the music industry to kill people at a Travis Scott show. Coming out of the COVID pandemic didn't bring us together, it started to pull us even further apart. Consider this. The very next day, November sixth, Troy Finner, Houston's chief of Police, held a press conference, a portion of which was spent addressing these wild rumors

that were circulating online. He reminded people to be respectful of the families of those who had been killed and to follow the facts and the evidence. He said there were a lot of narratives out there, including one in which Astorworld had been a targeted attack by an individual

who was running around and injecting people with drugs. TMZ was one of the news outlets peddling this narrative, saying a source connected to Astorworld told him that the crowd crush was due to the panic that ensued when we're got around that some crazy person was stabbing people with a needle and shooting them up. At the press conference, Houston's chief of Police did not shut down this particular story. Instead, Chief Troy Finner went on to essentially confirm this story.

He said that, according to medical staff, one of Astor World security guards was reaching over to restrain someone in the crowd when he felt a prick in his neck. Immediately he went unconscious. He needed to be revived with narcan, which, as you probably know, is used to treat narcotic overdoses, and the medical staff that examined him confirmed that there was a mark on his neck consistent with a needle prick.

So here you have the top ranking official in Houston's police force seemingly confirming one of the wild rumors floating around online and in the press, which in turn caused even more panic and even more confusion. Panic and confusion two things now keeping the monster of Astor World alive.

Novem twenty twenty one, five days after the tragedy at Astorworld and four days since Houston's chief of Police spoke about a festival security guard getting pricked in the neck with a needle, Chief Troy Finner, was now giving another press conference, this one in which he walked back his statement from four days prior. During that time, he had spoken directly to the security guard in question, and what the guy had to say for himself was far less

sinister than previously believed. Turns out, the security guard was not injected in the neck, but instead hitting the head

and knocked unconscious. He woke up shortly afterward in the medical tent, and there was no needle and no narcan and no faceless, nameless demon running around the Astor World grounds shooting up unsuspecting attendees with drugs, which begs the question who provided this targeted attack narrative in the first place, Who is the quote source connected to astorworlde who provided TMZ with this information in the first place, information which

TMZ had since taken down from its website. And speaking of questions, why didn't the show end at nine thirty eight pm that night when the Houston Fire Department declared it in a mass casualty event. When the Houston PD told the promoter to shut it down, why did Travis Scott keep performing for more than another thirty minutes? There were no clear answers offered to these questions. The cops, the promoters, the security, the County, Travis Scott, everyone involved

passed the buck. The Houston PD said they didn't have the proper authority to shut the show down. Security guards spoke of poor training and worse communication. One Houston City Council member stressed that the event was technically not held on city properties, so you know, not their problem. Of course, no one wants to admit they played a part in creating a monster, especially one that takes the lives of

ten people. But someone would be held accountable, and the families of victims were going to make sure of it. Two years later, in twenty twenty three, Travis Scott sat in a room in Houston where he was grilled for eight hours during a civil deposition. A Texas grand jury had declined to indict him on criminal charges, but three hundred and eighty seven lawsuits were brought against him, against

Live Nation Entertainment and against various subcontractors. Three hundred and eighty seven lawsuits, representing nearly twenty eight hundred victims and totaling billions of dollars in damages, all rolled into a single legal action. These were in addition to the ten wrongful death lawsuits filed by families of the deceased. Travis Scott maintained his innocence. He said he didn't know how bad it was out there in the crowd, and he wouldn't know the extent of the carnage until the next morning.

He did admit that someone spoke to him during his performance shortly before ten PM, right around the time that Drake joined him on State A voice that came through as in your monitors and said, you, Trav, you gotta wrap it up. It's getting got of hectic out there. Not people are getting crushed, stopped the show. Not people can't breathe, they're passing out, maybe dying. Just it's getting kind of hectic out there. And so Travis Scott wrapped

it up. It just took him another fourteen minutes, give or take to do so. Attorneys representing the plaintiffs were skeptical. They couldn't prove if the voice coming through Travis's any your monitors had more explicit instructions. But there were other things that were hard to write off, like the fact that if Travis wanted to pocket an additional four point five million dollars coming to him from the concert's live stream, he had to finish his complete set as planned. In

other words, ending early meant losing a massive payday. It sounds cynical, I know, but attorneys are paid to be cynical. So these attorneys filed in an emergency motion to obtain Travis Scott's phone records, the thinking being that by doing so, perhaps it could uncover some evidence to prove that he knew more than he was letting on. There was just one problem. There was no phone. Travis Scott's phone, his cell phone, the one he owned at the time of

Astor World in twenty twenty one. It was gone, like long gone in just months after the festival. In January of twenty twenty two, while on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, Travis Scott's cell phone fell into the water and sank all the way down into the murky depths below. But a phone wasn't all Travis Scott lost.

In May of this year, twenty twenty four, it was reported by The Houston Chronicle that all ten lawsuits filed by the families of the ten Astor World victims had been settled, including the one on behalf of nine year old Ezra Blunt, Travis Live Nation, other companies and individuals. They settled those lawsuits for undisclosed sums and under confidential terms, in many cases just days before the suit were scheduled

to go to trial. The news came mere months after the revelation that Astorworld organizers miscalculated a state fire code when planning the event. According to that fire code, each person at the show needed seven square feet to prevent overcrowding, so by that math, capacity should have been about thirty four five hundred people. Instead, the organizers mistakenly settled on five square feet per person, resulting in the fifty thousand fans that were ticketed. That's a difference of more than

fifteen thousand people. Fifteen thousand extra people. That's no small detail. But the devil is in the details. That may be true, but for thousands of people on a warm Texas night in November, the devil was that Astorworld. Then that was a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan in This is Disgrace slaand all right, guys, thanks for checking out this incredibly dark episode on Travis Scott. Before I get to the question of the week, I want to remind you guys, we're

doing this live stream event. I want you to be a part of it. It's on October ninth. I'm me tell them a story of Blink one eighty two's Tom DeLong and his work with UFO disclosure. And there's a lot of creepy government cover up and conspiracy attached to this. Go to moment dot co slash Disgraceland to get your tickets. Sets for October ninth, You guys can be a part

of the show with me. Thank you for checking out this episode on Travis Scott and ask World where ten people died ten So a question of the week for you guys is what is music's darkest day? Was it this disaster? Was it a plane crash, a riot, a murder spree, serial killing? What was? There is so much evil in the history of music that the choices here are kind of endless when you think about it. So let me know what day or event was the darkest

for music history. Six one seven nine oh six six six three eight, Leave me a voicemail, send me a text, and let me know. You can also reach me at disgrace lampod as well on Instagram, X and Facebook. Leave a review for the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and win some free merch. All right, here comes some credits. Disgraceland was created by Yours Truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelampod dot com.

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Visit disclampod dot com slash membership for details, rate and review the show, and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook at disgraceslampod and on YouTube at YouTube dot com slash at Disgraceslampod, rock a Rolla he the bed Don Man