‘Must have been a wild day’: Man couldn’t even make it two days into Lollapalooza without breaking both of his legs

Let’s face it; what happens at music festivals stays at music festivals. You ditched your friends at a critical moment so that you could go check out the Russian ska act? That’s your business. You decided in the moment that $20 was an acceptable fee for a bottle of water? Live your life. You consumed a mysterious powder contained in a baggie labeled “no joy, no joy?” That’s between you and God.

But sometimes you get a little too excited, or you party too hard, and you have to bring those consequences with you. At that point, privacy is no longer an option; the people need to know how the hell you ended up here.

And folks, we all want to know what happened to TikTok‘s @joey__rat here. All the information we have is that Joey made a beeline for Chicago’s Lollapalooza music festival earlier this summer, and by the second day, he was in a hospital bed sporting a pair of casts across his two broken legs. This is insufficient and unacceptable; was this a moshing incident? Did he pick a fight with the sidewalk? Did he lose a twerk-off with Megan Thee Stallion that badly? Was this self-inflicted so that he didn’t have to eventually listen to Skrillex? We need answers!

Of course, anyone who regularly attends music festivals knows that Joey’s situation isn’t actually that outlandish, even if the specificity of this injury begs more questions than others. According to Graham Law, one study found that, across roughly 300 musical festivals between 1992 and 2002, nearly 70,000 festival-goers experienced major injury, while another 232 lost their lives. Even from an anecdotal standpoint, the highly-scrutinized Astroworld crowd crush back in 2021 still haunts the music festival zeitgeist to this day.

Besides Megan Thee Stallion and Skrillex, Lollapalooza’s 2024 lineup consisted of the likes of Hozier, SZA, Stray Kids, The Killers, Future, Metro Boomin, Blink-182, and Melanie Martinez as the headlining acts. Chappell Roan, Reneé Rapp, and Black Tiger Sex Machine were just a few of the many other performers.

Now, we know from Joey’s description that he didn’t even make it two days, which narrows down the possible sites of his injury by about half. That is to say, we can rule out the prospect of Joey’s accident occurring from going too hard during “Mr. Brightside” (a common incident for white people), but the odds of this stemming from his inability to contain his K-pop stan persona are still in play.

Perhaps we’ll never know. Indeed, maybe what happens at music festivals really does stay at music festivals.