The thing to know about Travis Scott? There doesn’t seem to be very much to know about Travis Scott. The 32-year-old rapper and producer is a profoundly uncomplicated star with a complicated public persona – owing mainly to the 2021 tragedy that saw 10 people die during his headlining performance at Astroworld, the festival he put on in his home town of Houston. But unlike his collaborator Drake or longtime mentor Kanye West, or indeed any of the other rappers who have achieved a similar level of superstardom, Scott doesn’t seem driven by a spiritual need to prove his artistry to the world, or a desire to reshape art in his own image, or even an urge to understand his experience through music.
Instead, Scott is a bricolage artist who seems content to make hits with prefab components, pulling together proven ingredients in the hope of alchemising them into something intoxicating. He may not possess West’s nervy charisma, or his Wonkaesque production talent, but he certainly learned one thing from him: sometimes, being a pop star is as much about getting the right people in the room with you as it is about having the best idea possible.
I may be in the minority on this one, but I actually don’t think that’s such a toxic strategy: Scott’s skills as an A&R have yielded some of his generation’s most walloping hits. Sicko Mode may just be a Travis Scott song stitched on to an entirely separate Drake song, but it’s an exceedingly high-quality Drake song; even if 2016’s Pick Up the Phone was “stolen” from Young Thug, as some suggest it was, Scott’s anarchic, serrated additions still make the track. Even on his earliest singles, Scott displayed a magpie-eyed awareness of how to cobble together disparate elements into a diamond-played smash: Don’t Play, a song from 2014, builds a gothic fantasy around the hook of the 1975’s Money, an unlikely but winning combination. Now, on his long-awaited fourth album Utopia, his cadre of co-producers dig out some superb samples from English prog, outsider folk and more to create dramatic, idiosyncratic backings.
The downside of this A&R-forward approach to pop, of course, is that you run the risk of sometimes becoming the least interesting thing about your own music. That’s been a persistent problem throughout Scott’s career – the lack of a distinctive identity in a field that privileges intense idiosyncrasy – and it’s got worse since the Astroworld tragedy. His main image is of a raging bacchant encouraging total abandon, which now doesn’t sit quite right – even if you feel the Astroworld crush speaks to systemic issues of cost-cutting and ill planning in the live industry, which I tend to.
There are moments on Utopia where he addresses the disaster – “The things I created became the most weighted” is a sharp line on My Eyes – but he mostly continues his previous lyrical mode: a vision quest through sensory pleasures where he’s always just out of your grasp. The punchlines often lack finesse or fail outright (“I like a bi girl on a bicycle”) and even as he’s become one of the most famous rappers in the world, Scott hasn’t managed to rid himself of his tendency to imitate or outright crib from other artists; the best moments of Utopia find him ceding space entirely to other musicians, a troubling state of affairs for any pop A-lister.
Much of Utopia finds Scott attempting to recreate the highs of West’s catalogue, to decidedly limp effect. Modern Jam feels like an AI recreation of I Am a God, from 2013’s Yeezus, the album that gave Scott his big break as a producer. Produced by Scott with Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, the track is grand and gothic, Scott’s preferred mode, but pales in comparison with its 10-year-old antecedent. A decade later, few have managed to combine abrasive electronics and dick jokes quite like West, and a line such as “Dick so hard, pokin’ like the Eiffel” just isn’t as funny or as blithely stupid as anything on Yeezus (not to mention the fact that Kendrick Lamar famously did that metaphor with much greater wit and self-awareness over a decade ago).
Circus Maximus, essentially a retread of Black Skinhead featuring the Weeknd, dampens the pummelling qualities of the older song, and although Scott does sound a great deal like West, he feels like a void at the centre of the song, lacking the supernova intensity required to anchor such a darkly toned, militant track.
Utopia’s highlights are often the songs that least involve Scott: Delresto (Echoes), a collaboration with Beyoncé, finds Scott’s fellow Houston native still inhabiting the imperious ballroom announcer posture of her 2022 album Renaissance, Scott’s production adding a tension and grit sometimes absent from that album. The first half of My Eyes, a collaboration with Bon Iver (who also appears on Delresto), seems to have been made from the same reference track as Over There, a Vernon-written cut from the latest album by London musician Amber Bain, AKA the Japanese House. Here, it’s rendered as a gorgeously hazy lullaby, Scott pitching up his voice in the style of Frank Ocean’s Blonde – but the reverie is broken halfway through, thanks to the invocation of one of Scott’s now-trademark beat-switches.
Utopia’s most interesting moments arrive as it comes to a close: Parasail, a collaboration with Dave Chapelle and cult Swedish rapper Yung Lean, is an entrancingly diffuse folk-rock ballad that drifts along with the lightness and ease of a bedroom-pop song; K-Pop, a megastar team-up with the Weeknd and Bad Bunny, rides an intriguingly slippery beat that drifts between sharply punctuated funk carioca and swaying Afrobeats. Both these songs are testaments to Scott’s agility – although he’s rarely a front-and-centre presence in his songs, he’s a canny grounding force, and has a sharp ear for bringing together seemingly disparate ingredients. Utopia could have used more of that sure hand.
