Despite falling from a lower mezzanine balcony to the first level of the NYC venue, the fan was allegedly unharmed.
Will Drake take care of you when the chips are down and it truly counts? During a Monday night event at New York’s Apollo Theater, a fan fell from a balcony into the orchestra section halfway through the rapper’s set, putting his promise to the test.
Drake is seen pausing his performance in camera footage acquired by Entertainment Tonight to check on a fan who fell from a lower mezzanine balcony to Apollo’s first floor during the event. The incident happened roughly 90 minutes into the series, just after Drake introduced his longtime partner 21 Savage to the stage.
“I just have to make sure someone’s alright,” Drake says, staring out into the throng with 21 as the house lights dim. Fortunately, neither the guy who fell nor the audience members they collided with were injured; the music was halted for around fifteen minutes before restarting.
A representative for the Apollo Theater said in a statement published after the incident that Drake, the Apollo, and concert sponsor SiriusXM “stopped the event immediately,” and that all “normal measures were followed” to safeguard audience members. Finally, the statement acknowledged that Apollo is still investigating the incident.
The incident and Drake’s reaction remind me of a similar—and much more mishandled—occurrence at a Travis Scott concert in 2017 when fan Kyle Green got paralysed after falling from a second-floor balcony at New York City’s Terminal 5.
Despite the permanent physical harm, it caused Green, the event (not even the night’s only balcony dive) immediately took over a place in the history of Scott’s high-octane live concerts. Scott even addressed the event in the Astroworld single “Stargazing”: And it ain’t a mosh pit if ain’t no injuries/ I had ’em stage idin’ out the nosebleeds). The carefree lyric foreshadowed the tragedy of Scott’s 2021 Astroworld event when 10 individuals died from compressive asphyxiation due to a crowd crush.
Although no one was seriously injured during Drake’s concert, his worried reaction seems to signal a growing vigilance among big-name musicians about the audience climate at their events. Astroworld proved how rapidly anger culture can lead to tragedy; ideally, the magnitude of the aftermath guarantees the event will not again.
