Trying to make sense of the senseless Astroworld tragedy

IT’S difficult to find any clear meaning in the lethal chaos that unfolded at the Astroworld music festival in Houston on Friday night. Eight young people died in a crush between euphoria and panic, and now we want to know how it happened, and where to place blame, and how to prevent it from happening again. The ‘how it happened’ part feels especially incomprehensible, even for those of us who spend our lives in big crowds. Mass gatherings are intrinsically fragile but relatively stable things. To join one requires a collective step toward the edge of control without stepping over it. And when we’re talking about a concert, there’s so much to feel on that communal edge: impossibly vivid sensations of happiness, excitement, synchronicity and belonging. After 19 months of pandemic tedium, it makes a lot of sense that about 50,000 people in Texas would want to feel all of those feelings together. And together, their joyful abandon took them over that edge.

Have you ever been close? Nearly a decade ago, I attended a day-long music festival on a campus quad where the crowd rushed the stage during a surprise performance from a superstar. Before I knew it, I found myself under a pile of bodies a half-dozen deep.

Then, somehow, as quickly as we had fallen, everyone picked themselves back up and got on with enjoying the music. How – in that unpredictable rush of joy and fear – did the group mind know to ease up and help one another back to their feet?

I still don’t know. But comparing it to what happened at Astroworld feels cheap. I got some bruises and a scary memory. I do not know what it means to have my life pressed out of my body.