Is Travis Scott a Satanist?
By Ulysses Grenot
“Let’s go!” Travis Scott screamed as he catapulted on stage at the Astroworld Festival in Houston, Texas on Friday, November 5. Scott unknowingly catalyzed what would soon become a mass casualty event that would leave at least ten people dead and hundreds injured.
Despite an ongoing criminal investigation by both the Houston police and the FBI, some online communities have already claimed to have found their culprits: Travis Scott and Satan himself. “The Travis Scott concert was a ritual,” declares one Tik-Tok video with over 2.8 million views.
Scott, a widely popular 30-year-old rapper and pioneer of the aptly named rage rap subgenre, has been long known to embrace and even encourage reckless behavior at his live performances. “It ain’t a moshpit if there ain’t no injuries,” Scott boasted on his 2018 track “Stargazing.”
Scott first took the stage at approximately 9 p.m., and at 9:38 pm, a mass casualty event was declared by city officials. However, the show continued on until 10:10 pm. Currently, the rapper maintains that he had no knowledge of the severity of the chaos taking place during his performance.
In an Instagram video, Scott stated, “any time I could make out anything that's going on, I just stopped my show and helped them get the help they need.” While the artist did in fact stop the show on three occasions to help members of the crowd, each time he promptly hopped back into his performance, thus reigniting the chaos.
According to Houston police chief Troy Finner, there was "discussion between promoters, the fire department, the police department, and [site] officials" about halting the performance, yet the artist played his set in its entirety. Nothing is yet known about what information was relayed to Scott by these officials.
What exactly caused the catastrophic “crowd crush”--a phenomenon that occurs due to overpacked crowds leading to mass injuries and even death caused by compressive asphyxia and trampling--is still up for debate and under investigation. According to experts, the reality of this phenomenon makes it very hard to assign blame to one culprit, and often it results from a combination of a collision of crowds, poor venue design, and negligent event management.
The uncertainties surrounding the tragedy have allowed conspiracy theories to flourish. The “evidence” most of these online posts cite is the one well-planned and executed aspect of the entire performance, Travis Scott’s stage design. Scott has been known to employ a decidedly dark and ominous aesthetic style, an artistic choice that has now put him in the crosshairs of Satanic-Panic style online conspiracy theories.
“The dove on fire is mocking god” another Tik-Tok post claimed in reference to the images projected on the LED screen that accompanied the rapper’s performance.
Conspiracy theories pertaining to this devastating event aren’t just isolated to young music fans desperately searching for answers in lieu of an obvious culprit, as they have also circulated in conservative groups. “Travis Scott is a satanic weirdo,” tweeted Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire.
The virality of this unsubstantiated information among both young people and conservatives demonstrates both these groups’ susceptibility to conspiracy theories. According to a Guardian interview with Joseph Russo, a professor of anthropology at Wesleyan University, “In a moment in which young people feel they’re living in a really chaotic world where not much makes sense, certain conspiracy theories can feel like a security blanket, because they tell us there is actually an order underneath it all.”
And we all know that security blankets are hard to take away.