15 November 23-29, 2023 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com New Times | Contents | Letters | news | night+Day | CuLture | Cafe | Music | Month XX–Month XX, 2008 miaminewtimes.com MIAMI NEW TIMES | CONTENTS | LETTERS | RIPTIDE | METRO | NIGHT+DAY | STAGE | ART | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | Hell on Earth Travis Scott has become a problem for hip-hop. BY DOUGLAS MARKOWITZ T ravis Scott is one of the great showmen of our time, dedicated to stagecraft and extravagance unrivaled in hip-hop. Even be- fore he was selling out arenas, he would do things like perform in a tree and ride around on a massive animatronic eagle while opening for Kendrick Lamar. Scott’s Astroworld – Wish You Were Here Tour in 2018-19 took things to another level, with a stage incorporating a roller coaster and carni- val games in front of venues, along with pyro- technics, massive video boards, and other hallmarks of modern concert design. Lately, however, Scott has hit some stumbles. In pursuit of Wagner-esque live entertain- ment glory during the rollout of his Astro- world follow-up, Utopia, he attempted to organize an album release concert at the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. The show never happened. Scott had his performance license canceled by the Egyptian Musicians Syndicate. A follow-up show at the Circus Maximus in Rome resulted in reports of doz- ens of injuries and concerns over damage to cultural properties, with some even saying the crowd of 60,000-plus made the ground shake as if it were an earthquake. Sixty thousand people for one show is sig- nificant, and Utopia was a commercial hit, de- buting at the top of the Billboard 200. But there are indications that Scott’s appeal and ability to culti- vate spectacle are diminishing. Ticket resellers have reported “low demand” for his Utopia Tour, which stops at the Kas- eya Center in downtown Mi- ami on Monday, November 27. (A second date that was scheduled for Wednes- day, November 29, has been moved to Janu- ary 28, 2024.) Scott has also courted controversy for his support of Kanye West (lately calling himself Ye mononymously), disgraced after his embrace of Trump-era conservative politics and a litany of anti-Semitic statements. West worked extensively on Utopia, which rap music site No Bells speculated is culled heavily from his own old, repurposed production demos, and Scott has gone as far as declaring, “There is no Utopia without Kanye West. There is no Travis Scott without Kanye West.” There is also, of course, the specter of the Astroworld Festival disaster. Ten people died and more than 300 were injured as a result of a crowd crush during Scott’s performance at the festival in Houston in 2021. Although Scott and the other organizers, including con- cert promoter Live Nation, avoided criminal charges over the incident, more than 500 lawsuits have been filed since the event, some of which have been settled. Scott, who, along with fellow performer Drake, has said he was unaware the crush was occurring until after the show, also suf- fered blowback in the form of reputational damage. Videos from his performance showed him seemingly ignoring cries for help from the crowd, and a video apology, widely seen as insufficient and disingenuous, sparked further backlash and generated reac- tive internet memes. There was even a brief Satanic panic over the crush, with TikTok us- ers generating conspiracy theories stating the show was part of a demonic ritual sacrifice. (It wasn’t, obviously, but that didn’t stop Egyptian officials from citing “peculiar ritu- als” in their license denial.) Still, such a hysterical reaction tells us something about who Scott is and why he’s suddenly struggling to rebound from the tragedy. In many ways, Scott represents the triumph of pop, consumerism, and the com- mercial music industry over the historically radical elements of American music. When Scott, born Jacques Webster II, rose to fame in the early 2010s, it was thanks to a novel synthesis of hip-hop and trap with ele- ments of punk and psychedelic rock, all genres born in moments where political strife and music intertwined. His major innovation — or degradation — was to strip these move- ments of politics and emphasize the aesthet- ics. Throughout his discography, Scott has distanced himself from expressing actual thoughts or telling stories about his life. In- stead he has relied on cliché and spectacle in lieu of craftsmanship in his writing, building songs that function as hazy, frictionless realms of drugs and sex that read as psychedelic and transgressive, but only on the surface. On the opening track of Utopia, “Hyaena,” he shoehorns a sample of the famously caus- tic poem that opens Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” (“Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time/For y’all have knocked her up”) into a song namechecking celebrities and the Met Gala. Even when he does attempt to my- thologize himself, as on 2015’s Rodeo opener “Pornography,” he farms it out to T.I., who in- troduces him as “a young rebel against the system/Refusing to conform or comply to the ways of authority/He chose the mood of ‘Fuck this shit’/At that moment, the one known as Jacques turned to Scott.” “Fuck this shit” isn’t a political slogan. It doesn’t have a target or express any action other than a general, nihilistic dissatisfaction with everything. But Scott’s music is still polit- ical in its negation of what hip-hop has repre- sented for most of its history, the creative expression of a politically disenfranchised Black America. The genre’s greatest moments, from Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” and Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” to modern records like Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, have always been mindful of the legacy of racism that continues to infect the United States, blending the personal and political to extraordinary effect. At the height of his creative power and influence, even West was decrying the embrace of luxury consum- erism by hip-hop on “New Slaves” and analyz- ing his fatigue and discomfort with celebrity on “No More Parties in L.A.” None of that is remotely present in Scott’s work. Out of all the prominent rappers of the 21st Century, he’s the one whose actual per- sonality, not his artistic persona, is hardest to trace, and that’s what makes him enticing commercially. He’s a perfect cipher for the music industry to completely penetrate and defang hip-hop, a genre once rife with radical- ism and politics. He has all the aesthetic signi- fiers of rap and rock but none of the ideological underpinnings, and he is totally comfortable, enthusiastic even, with collaborating with ma- jor corporations. He’s the guy who started the celebrity McDonald’s meals, after all. Yet, after Astroworld, that fundamental emptiness has become a burden. Fans have begun to realize that Scott’s concern for them begins and ends at the edge of the stage. Ultimately, one figure cannot substi- tute an entire culture or community, and this is why, for a genre like hip-hop, Scott’s suc- cess and the reliance on figures like him for relevance represent an end state and an au- gur of doom. The rough edges have been washed away, resulting in a floating world of commodity fetishism — the all-consuming spectacle, as defined by French theorist Guy Debord. As Jason England wrote earlier this year in Defector, the celebrations of the genre’s 50th anniversary and the intense press coverage surrounding it symbolize the absorption of a once countercultural form of folk art into mainstream (read: white) Amer- ican culture: “At best, it was absorbed into the world — and here the ‘world’ means mainstream America. Hip-hop assimilated. And that always comes at a cost.” That cost seems to be a rapid loss of relevance and creative energy. No rap releases were nominated for any of the Big Three categories at the 2024 Grammys, and until Doja Cat’s “Paint the Town Red” peaked on September 23, no rap releases hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 this year. The longest-running, number-one song of 2023 was Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night,” a country song. If Scott represents what hip-hop has become, then it seems as if people are beginning to leave it behind. Travis Scott may be a great showman, but every show has to end sometime. Travis Scott. With Teezo Touchdown. 8 p.m. Monday, November 27, at Kaseya Center, 601 Biscayne Blvd., Miami; 786-777-1000; kaseya- center.com. Tickets cost $56.75 to $246.75 via ticketmaster.com. [email protected] ▼ Music Travis Scott has built a career in showmanship while avoiding expressing anything truly transgressive. Photo by Pieter Hugo SCOTT REPRESENTS THE TRIUMPH OF POP AND CONSUMERISM OVER THE RADICAL ELEMENTS OF AMERICAN MUSIC.
