New Hip Hop News

Those who attended Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival on Friday expected to have a wild time, but not this wild. As we’ve previously reported, eight of the over 50,000 patrons at the event were killed, and over 300 were injured when a crowd surge took place. 

According to HipHopDX, Scott’s set, the penultimate show of the evening, began around 9:04 PM Houston time. By 9:38 PM, emergency personnel had declared the festival a “mass-casualty incident” after responding with approximately 55 units who began performing CPR upon arrival.

While medical personnel did arrive on scene eventually, there have been reports from attendees who said that they spent their night performing CPR on multiple people. Videos have also surfaced online showing a woman and a man rushing one of the camera men, hoping to get his attention so he might stop the show and prevent more deaths from occurring – reports say this happened around 10 PM.

“There is somebody dead in there! There is someone dead,” she can be heard screaming. The woman has since been identified is Seanna Faith, and has shared a heartbreaking account of the trauma she endured while attending Astroworld Festival.

At one point during his set, Scott took notice of an ambulance with its lights on, making its way through the crowd. “What the fuck is that?” he asked, before checking in with audiences by saying, “If everybody good, put a middle finger up to the sky!” A large portion of the audience were not good, but that message obviously didn’t get relayed to the rapper, who launched into a performance of “UPPER ECHELON” that saw two of his friends hop off the stage to crowd surf.

Scott has spoken out about the tragedy that occurred twice – once in a Twitter statement written in his notes app, and again last night, on his Instagram story. “I want to send out prayers to the ones that was lost last night,” the 30-year-old said, rubbing his face in obvious distress.

“We’re actually working right now to identify the families, so we can help a system though this tough time. My fans really mean the world to me, and I always wanna leave them with a positive experience and anytime I can make out anything that’s going on, I stop the show and help them get the help they need, you know? I could just never imagine the severity of the situation.”

The “Ok Alright” artist then shared that he’s fully cooperating with Houston PD and everyone else involved to make things right and help further the investigation. His video has gotten plenty of reaction from fans online, many of whom are expressing outrage. 

Check them out below.

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If there’s one album that everyone is gushing over this week, it’s Summer Walker’s Still Over It. The singer has been steadily preparing her sophomore album, and teasing its release, for months. Inevitably, it would hold down several spots on this week’s R&B Season playlist with songs like “No Love” ft SZA and “Unloyal” ft. Ari Lennox.

One of the most anticipated projects this year is Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak’s joint effort as Silk Sonic. The duo has been teasing its release for months now before initially revealing that their album would only drop in 2022. Plans changed, and they’re revving up for a November release. On Friday, they blessed fans with the latest single, “Smokin Out The Window” — a certified banger that claims a spot on the R&B Season playlist this week.

Post Malone’s been on somewhat of a hiatus since the release of Hollywood’s Bleeding but it appears that a new album could be coming soon. In what appears to be the beginning of a rollout, Posty linked up with The Weeknd for their new single, “One Right Now.”

Serpentwithfeet’s newly released project, DEACON’s Grove, a 5-song companion piece to March’s DEACON, arrived on Friday. This week, serpentwithfeet claims two spots on the playlist with “Fellowship (Remix)” and “Amir – Reprise.”

Peep the latest playlist update below and subscribe to HNHH on Spotify for more playlist action. 

Last night, the Los Angeles Lakers got destroyed by the Portland Trail Blazers. While the Blazers won by 15 points, it seemed like much more of a blowout throughout the game. With Anthony Davis out with a stomach problem and LeBron out with abdominal issues, the Lakers struggled to put together a winning effort, and it was quite embarrassing to watch at times.

After the game, Carmelo Anthony spoke on the team’s struggles and how they just weren’t good enough. According to Clutch Points, Melo admitted that the team just isn’t playing hard and that they can’t do that against teams who are coming out of the gate hungry.

Christian Petersen/Getty Images

“I think for the most part tonight we just didn’t play basketball,” Anthony said. “We did go out there and compete. We didn’t play hard. We’ve only played in spurts. Those guys came out hitting on all cylinders. It’s going to be like that. This is part of the game. We don’t know who’s going to be in there. We can’t control injuries. We can’t control what guys are going through physically. So it is next man up.”

The Lakers are now 5-5 this season, which puts them in pretty mediocre territory amongst the other teams in the Western Conference. If they don’t pick things up soon, then they could very well find themselves in a passive hole come crunch time.

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11 white people and one Black man — that’s the racial makeup of the jury selected for the trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder, approved by Glynn County Superior Court Judge Timothy R. Walmsley last Wednesday.

Early 2020, 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery was murdered at the hands of three white co-conspirers while he was out jogging in his suburban Georgia neighborhood. Video of Arbery’s death was leaked not long after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis and right before Breonna Taylor was murdered by Louisville police. The world was enraged, taking the movement for Black lives, abolition, and anti-racism to an international stage.

Now, more than a year after Arbery’s death, the opening statements in the trial of Travis McMichael, his father Gregory, and their neighbor William Bryan who are accused of killing Arbery has just begun. The outcome of the jury selection process has demonstrated nothing more than an ongoing pattern in the racist legacy of the American justice system. 14-year-old Emmett Till’s murderers were acquitted at the hands of an all-white jury back in 1955. 17-year-old Trayvon Martin’s murderer was acquitted at the hands of a predominantly-white jury (five of six total jurors being white) in 2013. Racial discrimination in the jury selection process is a well-studied, ongoing issue. 

Attorney Ben Crump, left, and Marcus Arbery Sr., the father of Ahmaud Arbery, second from left, arriving at the Glynn County courthouse on October 18th, 2021; Sean Rayford/Getty Images

According to reports verified by the New York Times, Linda Dunikoski, a special prosecutor from the Cobb County District Attorney’s Office, attempted to challenge the defense attorneys’ removal of eight potential Black jurors, referencing a Supreme Court ruling that specifically prohibits racial discrimination in the selection of jurors. 

To this, Judge Timothy R. Walmsley admitted that “quite a few African American jurors were excused through peremptory strikes executed by the defense” and acknowledged “intentional discrimination in the panel.” Yet, he eventually ruled that for each of the eight potential jurors, the defense had provided a “legitimate, nondiscriminatory, clear, reasonably specific, and related” reason for why the juror could not be seated. 

“This has been the strangest jury selection process I have ever seen,” Lee Merritt, a lawyer for the Arbery family, has commented. “There’s very few people who wouldn’t have heard about this case. Most have developed an opinion about the case, so I understand that the attorneys, in general, will have some questions that we’re not used to.” However, he proceeded to describe that the defense lawyers were “badgering” potential jurors in their screening. 

It should be noted that the jury selection process for the trial for Ahmaud Arbery’s murder lasted two and a half weeks, compared to the jury selection process leading up to the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, who murdered two men and injured another with a firearm at a Wisconsin protest last summer. It took one day to seat that jury. 

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