The Crowd, the Brand, and the Dead: Astroworld and the Economics of Chaos

I didn’t remember the deaths. Or more precisely, I didn’t remember them as they happened. As Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy began, the mobile cam footage jittering through strobes, the bassline compressing the air. I found myself scratching at the edges of memory. Ten people crushed to death at a Travis Scott concert in Houston, November 2021. Hundreds more injured. Surely I’d have remembered that. And then, about thirty minutes into the documentary, it hit me: the rumour. A lone man, sprinting through the crowd, injecting people with an unknown substance. That was what had stuck. Not the victims. Not the crowd crush. Not the security failures or emergency response delays. Just the fantasy. The made-up panic. It wasn’t true, of course. But in the murky, twitchy atmosphere of the post-Covid moment. Where lockdowns had primed us for paranoia and every tragedy bred a theory—it took root. That this grotesque fiction became the dominant narrative tells us something about the way conspiracy colonises the space where grief and accountability should be.

The documentary makes clear that what happened at Astroworld wasn’t a mystery, and it wasn’t a freak accident. It was a failure of planning, of oversight, of care. It was the entirely predictable result of a concert designed to maximise hype and profits, while minimising safety. Live Nation, the event organiser, oversold the venue and underprepared the site. Security staff were outnumbered, undertrained, and in some cases barely awake. The stage design channelled thousands into choke points with no means of escape. And when things went wrong, there was no clear chain of command to stop the show. Worse, the footage suggests that Travis Scott (performing just metres from the chaos) either didn’t notice, or didn’t care. He kept going for another 37 minutes. In the days that followed, his team’s PR effort focused less on the dead and more on brand salvage. Apologies were awkward, delayed, at times perfunctory. The machinery of celebrity ticked on.

The documentary is unsparing in how it handles culpability. This wasn’t just a case of chaos at the ground level: The Astroworld Tragedy uses damning text message exchanges between key staff to show that those at the top. The executives, organisers, production leads, knew full well what was happening as the crowd began to buckle and break. Messages about people collapsing, about CPR being administered, about possible deaths, were circulating while Scott was still on stage. The decision not to stop the show wasn’t a failure of information. It was a failure of will. Or more precisely, a calculation. What’s a few lives against a livestream, a brand partnership, a multi-million-dollar performance? The documentary makes clear that only two people had the authority to pull the plug, and neither acted. They didn’t just fail to protect the crowd, they protected the event from interruption.

One of the most haunting sequences in the film shows two young people from the audience. Clearly terrified, breathless, visibly shaken, one had just been pulled from the crush. Climbing onto a platform near the stage and begging a cameraman to stop the show. “People are dying,” they shout. “You need to do something.” The cameraman waves them away. He doesn’t look indifferent, exactly—more confused, caught in the inertia of a system that rewards obedience and penalises intervention. This is not someone with the power to halt the performance, but what’s revealing is how insulated the stage had become from the crowd. The spectacle had closed in on itself. At the centre stood Travis Scott, auto-tuned and backlit, suspended above the carnage like a prophet unaware. The perimeter was ringed with subcontractors, freelancers, security gaps, broken lines of authority. Everything outside the show was noise. And inside the show, the script carried on.

Scott’s brand was never about safety. From the start, his aesthetic has been one of engineered disorder: a curated chaos in which the audience is encouraged (almost instructed) to lose control. In July 2015, while performing at Switzerland’s Openair Festival, Scott stopped the show to accuse a fan of trying to steal his shoe while he crowd-surfed. He pointed the fan out and incited the crowd with chants of “Get that motherfucker” and “Fuck him up!”—before appearing to spit on him as security dragged the fan away. A month later, at Lollapalooza in Chicago, he was charged with disorderly conduct after urging fans to jump barricades and chanting “We want rage!” The situation became so volatile that police tried to detain him mid-performance; he fled the scene and later pleaded guilty to reckless conduct, receiving a court supervision order. These weren’t isolated lapses. This was the sell. At Astroworld, that carefully cultivated image collided with negligent infrastructure and an abdication of responsibility. The documentary doesn’t need to editorialise. Scott’s record speaks for itself, and the footage of him continuing his set as people scream for help is damning enough. When he finally does respond, it’s through filtered Instagram grief and soft-lit PR, an influencer eulogising his own brand.

To its credit, the documentary doesn’t just tally the dead, it lingers with the living. The directors give space to a number of young survivors who recount, in precise and painful detail, how the night unfolded. There’s joy at first, even awe: the thrill of being at a real concert again after the long dislocation of Covid lockdowns, the sense of collective release. These are fans who adored Travis Scott. A local boy made good, a symbol of Houston swagger and success. They’d saved up, bought the merch, planned the night for months. The film captures that naïve excitement just long enough to sharpen the contrast when everything goes wrong. For some, the crush begins early, long before Scott even takes the stage. They describe the slow, sick realisation that they can’t move, can’t breathe, that the show they’d dreamed of might kill them. And then come the names of those who didn’t come home: a high school student, a computer science major, a nine-year-old boy. The survivors’ guilt is palpable, and the film refuses to sanitise it. These are not just statistics or talking heads. They are the ones left to carry what the organisers, and the artist, refused to bear.

What’s most chilling is how the documentary leaves us suspended in the same absence that haunts the survivors: the absence of closure, of accountability, of anything resembling justice. Live Nation, the event’s promoter and corporate behemoth of the live music world, declined to appear on camera, offering instead the cold varnish of a prepared statement. One imagines the filmmakers tried—tried to bring someone, anyone, into the frame to explain why the barriers were built that way, why the gates were breached, why no one stopped the show. But the silence is structural. And so were the failures. The layout of the site was already flagged as a problem: Scott’s separate stage was positioned in an area that couldn’t safely accommodate the crowd. Trees blocked the space. Fencing funnelled people into a dead-end. One internal text message sent before the show even started notes that “this space isn’t big enough for what’s planned.” The warnings were there. The crowd safety expert in the film, calm and clinical, lays it out plainly: this didn’t need to happen. The risks were known, the failures identifiable. But most of the lawsuits were quietly settled out of court. No executive was forced to testify. No senior official was charged. The logic of the market prevails: liability is absorbed, reputations are managed, the show goes on. Once the bodies were cleared and the headlines faded, the system reverted to type. When capital kills, no one at corporate is ever to blame.

Nobody should go to a concert and not come home. That’s not a radical demand. It’s the bare minimum. But in a culture where fandom is monetised, where chaos sells, and where corporate giants like Live Nation operate with near-total impunity, even that minimum proves too much. Astroworld leaves us with the sinking realisation that unless the system itself is held to account, the conditions for the next disaster are already in place—stacked like speakers, waiting for the drop. Netflix has carved out a niche for itself in these forensic, hour-long autopsies of catastrophe. I’ll be reviewing its upcoming Grenfell fire documentary soon. There, too, the warning signs were clear. And there, too, the dead are still waiting for justice.