“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility,” said Neil Postman in his 1985 fire-and-fury treatise “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.”
Postman spoke of death in a figurative sense. But, as the tragedy of Houston’s Astroworld festival indicates, the frenzy inspired by entertainment and pop-culture iconography, the compulsion toward new thrills and new highs, has a physical death toll as well. In this case, it was a toll of eight; all of whom were under the age of 28, all of whom left their houses looking for a bit of fun, and all of whom died savagely in a crush of panicked bodies.
Being huge masses of people, concerts ― and particularly festivals ― cannot help but take on larger narratives about culture and society if something goes spectacularly wrong, or right, at one of them.
The greatest concert-as-a-cultural-spectacle is arguably Woodstock. It told the story of a maligned generation of hopefuls who, when gathered en masse, braved rain, mud, and terrible food for a chance to peaceably dance and make love; Woodstock told the world that these supposed menaces to society had simpler, gentler designs at heart.
Unbeknownst to denizens of Woodstock, that giant love-in was probably the last time the hippie crowd was afforded any leniency by the general public. Five days before the first night of the fest, Charles Manson’s “family” enacted its infamous murder spree in Los Angeles, heralding the beginning of the end of the counterculture’s reputation for peace, supplanting it with an affinity for unhinged violence.
Five months later, the Altamont Free Concert affirmed this new narrative.
Woodstock’s third iteration in 1999 told a similar story of a lost generation that, when gathered together, began to consume itself.
Plagued by a disillusionment unthinkable to the peaceniks of the ’60s, Generation X-ers have very little in common with their baby-boomer predecessors, save for the fact that they both possessed an active counterculture that drew criticism from the Powers That Were. Fans of the grunge and rap-metal artists that headlined Woodstock ’99 were seen as degenerate, unwashed, drug-addled, dangerous. They responded to this by rolling around in human excrement, inciting acts of sexual violence, and creating clouds of toxic smoke via the burning of plastic water bottles.
What I’m getting at with this interlude is the fact that a massive crowd of like-minded youth is a challenge: Prove yourselves or fall victim to the stereotypes imposed upon you. From the exasperated distance at which outsiders have typically viewed millennials, it looks like we failed at that challenge. But it’s not that simple. Or at least I hope it isn’t.
Images of that fateful night speak louder than words, and in our day and age, there were images galore. Phone videos posted on Twitter, TikTok, and the like abound; some were taken to document the pandemonium, and some, chillingly, were taken with bemused detachment, as if this were a viral video of a woman having a meltdown at the Apple Store.
But they were horrific. The frenetic pace was set early in the day, when concertgoers stormed the ticket gate, climbing over walls and knocking over barriers. Later, during headliner Travis Scott’s set, as the crowd crush worsened, revelers were seen dancing on top of emergency vehicles making their way through a sea of bodies. In an AP story, concert-goer Niaara Goods described people laughing at her and others as she tried to escape, falling over stacks of bodies knocked down in the fray. A Vulture article described a setup erected carelessly by the venue staff where two abutting barriers, which separated areas for different classes of ticket holder, created a “closet” in the mosh pit. Concertgoers were thrown into the closet against their will, and the door was shut on them
There are reasons for this behavior that jibe with what’s been assumed about millennials and Generation Z:
Certainly social media fluency and COVID-19 restriction has compounded the FOMO (fear of missing out) that’s unique to the internet generation into something ugly and crazy. But there’s more. Postman was concerned with the trivialization of real life, as are the younger generations’ most ardent (and obnoxious) critics.
There’s an idea of a reality split that accompanies media overconsumption; it’s seen when people take Instagram photos of their food instead of eating it, tweet their ideas instead of speaking them, and live stream their lives without living them. Beyond Postman’s assertions, that’s mostly harmless. But there are elements of this distancing, or desensitization, from real life that can turn dangerous quickly. Consider the girls who killed their classmate as a sacrifice to the internet urban legend Slenderman. The TikTok challenges that land kids in the hospital. Dancing on an active emergency vehicle while your friends film you.
Let me be clear:
Nothing about the bad behavior of the Astroworld crowd is acceptable, in times of crisis or otherwise (and this is saying nothing of the alleged drug spiking by someone in the crowd that night, which is still being investigated). We will address the culpability of the organizers and the talent in a second, but those entities did not rape anybody at Woodstock ’99, and they didn’t laugh while people scrambled for their lives at Astroworld. That was us. That is us.
Postman said that “we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.” So what was this significance that we were willing to risk our lives, and the lives of others, for?
Looking at the who, what, when, where, and why of Astroworld, the who is undeniably Travis Scott, as it was during his performance that the mayhem occurred. In fact, he has a history of inciting mayhem at his concerts; at this show and others, he has encouraged attendees of previous Astroworld events to storm the gates and bum rush the stage, once even challenging a fan to jump from a balcony. Scott is a millennial too, but the producer/consumer relationship between him and us is too-clearly defined. He has the capability to whip people into a frenzy and the privilege of later, on social media, acting like he couldn’t have any idea that his actions had consequences. Will he be spared the consequences? We’ll see.
The what, when, and where are the designs of the promoters and ― including oft-sued Live Nation ― who overbooked the festival, undersupplied necessary event infrastructure, and employed undertrained and insufficient support staff, crucially the medics. These organizers let the show go on too long, literally ignoring the pleas of the attendees, which caused the crowd crush that caused the deaths.
And the why?
The why might be our social-media/COVID FOMO turned rabid, it might be our overeagerness to consume entertainment media, it might be the genuine desensitization, crisis of spirit, and absence of humanity generated by cultural overconsumption, as portended by Postman. Whatever the reason, it made it so that my generation wasn’t able to prove itself. I don’t have the answers. I hope some of the guilty parties take responsibility, and I hope the grieving families find some peace. But there’ll be new generations, new festival disasters, and new deaths, regardless of who ― or what ― is ultimately to blame. If Altamont and Woodstock ’99 are any indication, I fear that this type of incident will not end with us.
