Travis Scott has finally addressed the Astroworld Festival tragedy in a new interview.
Speaking with radio host Charlamagne tha God, the rapper said he’s been on an “emotional rollercoaster” in the aftermath of the fatal event. Throughout the hour-long chat, he appeared serious and despondent.
“I’ve been on different types of emotions, an emotional rollercoaster, I mean,” he stated. “It gets so hard because, you know, I always feel connected with my fans. I went through something and I feel like fans went through something and people’s parents went through something. And it really hurts. It hurts the community, it hurts the city. There’s been a lot of thoughts, a lot of feelings, a lot of grieving, and just trying to wrap my head around it.”
Charlamagne tha God didn’t hold back from the tough questions, asking Scott to explain his “intention” for even doing the interview at one point. “I don’t personally have an intention, I just feel like something happened and I feel like it’s just, I needed a way to kinda like communicate, you know?” was his answer.
“One, families are grieving. There’s fans that experienced something, there’s fans that came to the show. I’ve always been that person to always see things through with the people that share experiences with me. … I’ve been trying to just really figure things out.”
Scott came in for intense criticism for continuing to perform at Astroworld even when people in the crowd were clearly in distress but he insisted he didn’t begin to learn the true severity of what happened during the concert until “minutes before” an initial press conference from the Houston authorities. “People pass out, things happen at concerts,” he said.
When the host mentioned witness accounts of concertgoers pleading for help in between Scott’s songs, the rapper said he would have stopped his performance if he had genuinely been aware of what was going on. “I’m that artist that – anytime you can hear something like that, you want to stop the show,” he said, adding that his attention was compromised by the combination of music, lights, and pyrotechnical elements of his show.
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When pressed on whether he felt a sense of responsibility for the Astroworld tragedy, he stated that his responsibility was more about figuring out what went wrong at the concert and how it could be prevented at similar types of events in the future.
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Watch Travis Scott’s full interview with Charlamagne tha God:
