08/12/2021
This morning I appeared on FOX 26 KRIV in Houston to discuss crowd issues at Astroworld. If you're interested in finding out more about my work, there is a link to my book, "Half a Million Strong: Crowds and Power from Woodstock to Coachella" in the first comment. And if you'd like to get a flavor of it, here are the opening paragraphs:
It’s a fine summer day sometime in the latter part of the 20th century, and you are standing in a field smack dab in the middle of America – a beautiful field, a rural idyll, far from the ravages of civilization. It is the kind of field where novelists and filmmakers sets their best scenes, where Tom Sawyer hides from Becky Thatcher, and Shane gallops off into the sunset.
This field is a little different today though. There are no bulls in this field. No cowpats, no flowers, no locusts, no amber waves of grain. Instead, the earthen floor has become a cesspool of loamy garbage. Also, the field is far from empty. All around you are other people, and they are wearing hardly any clothing because it is very, very hot. Let me repeat that. It is very, very hot. You’re packed in tight together with them, elbows locked to your body. It smells like teen spirit: sweet sweat, mown grass, suntan oil and w**d, an odor that will forever after remind you of this moment in your youth. The taste in your mouth is the stale beer you drank an hour and a half ago and now wish that you hadn’t because you have to p*e so badly. As for sound? It sounds like the skies are splitting open with noise – not exactly music, but a medley of different audibles, echoes, rhythms, fuzz, guitars, melody, and underlying it all, the low-buzzy monotone voices of the people behind you who are having an argument about where they parked their car and who is going to drive home and where to find their friends when this is all over. “This” is a music festival. In the angry distance there is a stage, so far off that the people on it look like tiny ants dancing about under a large, brightly colored set that’s vaguely shaped like a dragon, or a castle, or a forest, shooting fire at you.
And for all that, it feels like utopia. Later tonight, you’ll be stumbling about some other nearby field with your ears ringing, looking for your own car alongside the neighbors you will never see or recognize again, horribly sunburnt and tired and feeling like your eyeballs are stuck to the inside of your skull. Nevertheless, you will go home and tell everyone what a great time you had, and you won’t even be lying. It will be true. Having been at that concert will have changed you, and that’s not the only thing that will have changed. After today the very landscape will have changed its tone. Before today, this was the kind of field that, on other days and in other circumstances, was called ‘the middle of nowhere.’ But today and forever after it will be somewhere. From now on in, people will drive by the exit you took on the freeway to get here and look out at this field with faraway eyes, remembering today. Forever after, there will be an imaginary geo-tag on this site, marking it for historical purposes, as a place where something important happened.
