Regardless of the performer, no one expects to come out of a concert injured, traumatized, or worst of all, dead. 

Eight fans ranging from ages 10 to 27 died at Travis Scott’s Astroworld concert in November after fans started rushing the stage and so many questions are left unanswered. The conspiracy community has already started to come up with answers themselves.

The majority of the conspiracies spiral from TikTok, whose users tend to be younger and around the age of Travis Scott followers’ demographic. Some of the videos I’ve seen have compared the concert to hell, from graphic visuals placed on screen to loud and unsettling frequencies played for hours before the concert. 

Comments under TikTok videos taken of the visuals suggest that Travis Scott and his team planned the horrors of the event. “Look at the symbolism!! A DOVE, a symbol of the human soul, ON FIRE?!?! They knew what they were doing. This is pure evil,” one comment read.

Another video analyzing the meaning behind his graphics stated, “For those saying this wasn’t satanic. 8 pillars of flames and 8 people dead.” This is suggesting that each pillar represented a sort of blood sacrifice for those lives that were lost. 

Many of the attendees reported getting sick, vomiting, and “dissociating” due to the eerie frequencies Scott had been playing prior to the start of his performance. According to the dictionary from Better Health, dissociating means “Disconnection and lack of continuity between thoughts, memories, surroundings, actions, and identity.”

It is crazy that some sound frequencies have the capability to have such an impact on an individual and an entire crowd, but what is crazier is that no one stopped it. Whilst these frequencies were being played the words “See ya on the other side” were also displayed on screen.

This alone made the conspiracy community question Travis Scott’s intention behind the concert. It seemed to be too much of a coincidence to choose such afterlife-like imagery and phrases while his fans in the crowd were dying.

Besides the awful frequencies and video visuals, Scott’s stage setup struck suspicion. His giant sculpture of his head with his mouth open which the attendees would walk through has seemed to be extremely similar to Hieronymus Bosch’s “Christ in Limbo” painting which represents the “mouth of hell,” as pictured below.

Many of the videos on TikTok have been taken down due to community guidelines, but the theories are still circling around on other platforms. There are also many users that are sharing videos of other performers’ concerts that show similar visuals during their shows where there were no fatalities or injuries.

It seems that a lot of the tragedy can be explained through crowd psychology. Emergent-norm theory is the idea that when like-minded people come together and one person does one thing, then the rest are most likely to follow along. 

While in less hostile situations, this could be shown as one person holding up a light at a concert and the crowd copying. This can be seen at the Astroworld festival as the crowd was pushing to the front and becoming aggressive.

Another theory explaining it all is the deindividuation theory. This is the idea that because an individual is in a crowd they may do things they would not do normally because they believe they will blend into the mob. They feel they will not reap the consequences of their actions because everyone else is doing it or because no one can point them out.

Although the crowd has some fault for what occurred at the Astroworld Festival, the question still remains: why didn’t Travis Scott stop the show?

Screams and shouts were heard from the crowd to stop the show. Fans had climbed onto stage screaming, “Stop the show, people are dying.” Yet Scott continued his show and had even egged the crowd on to “Go harder!”

He and other performers such as Drake are facing lawsuits regarding the tragedy and the conspiracy community is questioning it all. It seems that everything matched too well to satanic rituals to be mere coincidence.