2024-07-24 11:59:05
Rome experienced seismic activity last August when 60,000 people went wild at a Travis Scott concert. The 33-year-old rapper from Houston, USA symbolically presented his fourth album Utopia at the ancient sports venue, the Great Circus, where more than 2000 years ago Julius Caesar watched the chariot races.
One track from the album, Circus Maximus, is named after the racetrack. And Scott’s current tour, which stopped this Thursday at the sold-out O2 Arena in Prague, also bears the same name. She was shaking all over, too: bass lines made people’s guts vibrate, flames shot into it, and beats drowned out choruses like ballistic missiles. For the first few seconds it was always hard to tell which track was playing. A direct physical experience.
One of the most successful rappers today, whose individual songs have billions of plays on the Spotify platform, revels in monumentality. In the Modern Jam track from the current record, Travis Scott promises to “blow the roof off” and trigger an earthquake. At the same time, he includes biblical references in the lyrics and addresses the “creator” – it’s hard to say whether it’s God or the rapper Kanye West, who supported him in his career and whose greatness Scott often reminds of.
Track Modern Jam in Prague fell off the “prophetic hill”. At the same time, the “rocky” scene on the stage resembled the Aztec pyramids – perhaps a small compensation for the fact that his planned concert last year at those in Giza, Egypt, was canceled.
The capacity of Prague’s largest roofed O2 arena had to be reduced from 20,000 to just over 14,000 people due to the size of the stage. Queues have been forming in front of the hall since early morning. Crowds of mostly young boys between the ages of ten and eighteen, who make up Travis Scott’s strongest fan group, were impatiently sitting here. He goes to his famous concerts to “discharge” the accumulated energy, sometimes it resembles a sports match and the discipline is a mosh pit, i.e. a more or less controlled “punk” rampage in a crowd of people.
Scott calls the listeners “ragers”, leaving it unclear who or what the rage is directed at. It’s more about venting emotions and a sports match, when at the end points are distributed, tactics are discussed in the boys’ cabin and you go home. After all, before he became famous in rap, Travis Scott dreamed of a career as a professional wrestler.
Travis Scott quickly sold out Prague’s O2 arena. | Photo: Gareth Cattermole
Getting ahead of him is not an easy task, because this energy is hard to match. On the current tour, the American invited the Swedish rapper Yung Lean, who collaborates with him and is also a guest on the Utopia record. But typical fans of the Houston star find Yung Lean’s emo rap too mellow and depressing, like from another universe, compared to Scott’s high-octane delivery. Both of them have a sense for experimenting with codeine-type drugs and with sound and are generally somewhat “strange”, but otherwise they represent opposite poles.
On the TikTok social network, a week old videos from London where Scott’s fans insulted Yung Lean during the concert were circulated. In Prague, he played a shortened twenty-five-minute set with the biggest hits such as Kyoto or Yoshi City, which shot him to fame in the middle of the past decade. Although he seemed absent, the audience heard and responded to him, especially in more aggressive tracks like Hoover with over-bass beats. It has been confirmed that sports halls do not suit his music.
A pointless hour-long break followed. When Travis Scott marched onto the stage in light rugby gear at half past ten, the audience could feel the impatience. His arrival was documented by a camera and the journey through the corridors from backstage was projected on the screen in the hall. The music didn’t even start playing and two circle pits started in the crowd, when the audience went crazy in circles.
The focus of the concert was on the album Utopia. But Travis Scott also digressed to the breakthrough recording Astroworld, which catapulted him to the top of pop culture in 2018, or to the even older album Rodeo. He more or less stuck to the setlist from previous stops and rapped with playback, which is standard for such performances.
The most fascinating thing was working with people – the crowd at his concerts is an imaginary instrument that Travis Scott plays like a drum machine. The weight of bouncing bodies supports the beats, circle dances convey the choreography, and people listen to Scott at his word like a preacher.
The Prague concert included the hit Sicko Mode, which Travis Scott recorded with Drake. It has over 1.2 billion views on YouTube. Photo: Gareth Cattermole | Video: Epic Records
The Circus Maximus tour is haunted by the tragedy of 2021, when ten people died in a stampede during his Houston show and hundreds more were injured after the rapper misread the situation and failed to stop the show.
The incident led to increased security measures at concerts, and big stars from singer Billie Eilish to the band Slipknot today do not hesitate to stop the show at the slightest sign of conflict, as The Guardian wrote. In Prague’s O2 arena, the sale of hard alcohol was prohibited at the Travis Scott concert, as confirmed by a spokesperson of the organizing agency Live Nation, and in addition to security, the organizers strengthened the medical team that distributed bottles of water. Otherwise, there were no visible incidents.
In the same way, in the sold-out hall, there was not even a hint to feel that the current record belongs to Scott’s weakest and was torn down by critics. Compared to the Astroworld album, where he pushed the boundaries of psychedelia using the studio’s auto-tune, the new album seems much more conservative. So many stars have participated in it, including Beyoncé, Kanye West or the singer The Weeknd, that the rapper acts more like a sophisticated curator.
He did without guests in Prague and it was admirable how well he pulled off the whole show by himself. Visitors found themselves on stage with him. At one point, he pulled several young men out of the audience and bounced a few tracks with them; at other times he instructed the cameramen in the hall to zoom in on the audience, then interacted with the people on the big screen.
In Prague, Travis Scott, among other things, combined the tracks No Bystanders and Fein. Photo: Gareth Cattermole | Video: Ondřej Matějka
The concert felt like visiting an amusement park, which is a motif that Travis Scott consciously works with on Astroworld – he named the album after the now defunct Six Flags AstroWorld amusement park in his native Houston. For him, it is a semi-utopian space full of attractions that show visitors things beyond their reach, something like copies of temples from ancient Rome or the Aztec pyramids. When history is shown here, it is only as a copy and exotic.
For the rapper, amusement parks are “cathedrals of consumption”, where time runs differently and shopping is done at one hundred and six. The imagination is occupied by empty symbols and somehow it all goes away too quickly, just like a ninety-minute Travis Scott concert. All that’s left is sensory overload, an elevated heart rate from the roller coaster, and the temptation to repeat the ride.