Travis Scott to headline Rolling Loud Thailand festival
American rapper Travis Scott will headline Rolling Loud Festival set to take place in Pattaya in eastern Thailand during Songkran next year.
Rolling Loud’s inaugural three-day party in Thailand, held from April 13-15 at Legend Siam in Pattaya, marks the festival’s expansion into Asia for the first time.
Scott is one of three headliners, according to Rolling Loud’s website. Festival organisers promised hip-hop fans the festival would feature 66 artists in total.
Jacques Bermon Webster II, better known by his stage name Travis Scott, has achieved four No.1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100. He’s been nominated for eight Grammy Awards and won a Billboard Music Award, a Latin Grammy Award, and several BET Hip Hop Awards.
In November 2021, Travis Scott came under fire after a crowd crush killed at least ten people on the first night of his festival Astroworld in his hometown of Houston, Texas. A further 25 were hospitalised and around 300 received treatment for minor injuries at the scene.
Scott was criticised for continuing his show for 37 minutes after the festival was declared a mass casualty incident. Scott claimed he wasn’t aware of what had happened.
The victims ranged from nine to 27 years old.
Travis Scott was accused of inciting the crowd, asking the audience, “Who wants to rage?”
Moments later, Scott spotted an ambulance trying to make its way through the crowd of 50,000 people and said “There’s an ambulance in the crowd, whoa whoa whoa.”
The music momentarily stopped. Scott said, “If everybody is good, put a middle finger up in the sky.” As the music resumed, Scott urged the crowd to make the “ground shake.”
In 2019, Scott was criticised for allegedly “causing a stampede” during his performance at Rolling Loud Festival. A lawsuit claimed that Scott was negligent by encouraging the crowd to become aggressive while people were “injured, suffocating, losing consciousness, fighting and being trampled.”
Scott shows are known for their chaotic energy, as is Rolling Loud Festival.
Billboard magazine called Rolling Loud “the be-all of hip-hop festivals” and Complex called it “one of the biggest rap-only festivals in the world.”
Kendrick Lamar, Nicki Minaj, Future, A$AP Rocky, and Action Bronson are just a few artists who have headlined the festival in the past.
However, the festival has been criticised by NPR as a “hotbed for arrests.” The New York Times said, “Rolling Loud events have been connected to arrests and violence in the past.” Insider described the 2019 Miami festival as “plagued by chaos.”
On the first day of Rolling Loud Miami 2022, multiple objects were thrown at rapper Kid Cudi from the crowd, including a water bottle that hit his face.
