Travis Scott’s launch plan for his long-awaited Utopia album concerned a release-day live performance on the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt, which was canceled on account of “advanced manufacturing points” after experiences of pushback from the Egyptian authorities. Effectively, he discovered one other historic web site to carry out at, and he introduced alongside Kanye West for the event.

Scott carried out his first live performance in assist of Utopia at the moment at Circo Maximo aka Circus Maximus, an historical Roman chariot racing monitor that gave its identify to the film Scott launched in tandem with Utopia. Though the set started with the primary three tracks from Utopia, he didn’t carry out the album straight by way of, as an alternative mixing in hits from all through his profession. Early within the set, he introduced out Kanye West to carry out “Reward God” and “Can’t Inform Me Nothing.” It was Ye’s highest-profile public look since he pivoted exhausting into antisemitism final yr, then walked again his stance months later with out actually apologizing for it.

Onstage, Scott introduced, “There is no such thing as a Utopia with out Kanye West. There is no such thing as a Travis Scott with out Kanye West. There is no such thing as a Rome with out Kanye West. Make some noise for Ye.” The primary assertion, about how Utopia couldn’t exist with out Kanye, appears true; Kanye has at the least one manufacturing credit score on the album, and as No Bells has reported, discarded beats from Kanye songs are all around the tracklist. The second assertion, that there’s no Travis Scott with out Kanye West, additionally appears proper; Scott has lengthy functioned as Kanye’s mini-me, creating albums that match peak Kanye’s bloat and bombast with out a lot semblance of human emotion. As for Scott’s ultimate declare in regards to the origins of Rome… it appears specious.

In different Travis Scott information, Utopia simply debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 with 477,000 equal album items, the third largest monitoring week of 2023 and the largest for a rap or R&B album. Of these items, 243,000 derive from streaming (330.68 million on-demand monitor streams), 252,000 are precise gross sales, and 1,000 stem from particular person monitor gross sales. The album bought 79,000 vinyl copies, the most important for a rap or R&B album since Luminate (previously Nielsen SoundScan) started monitoring gross sales in 1991.

Two songs from the album debuted within the prime 10 of the Sizzling 100: the Drake collab “Meltdown” at #3 and the Playboi Carti collab “FE!N” at #5. Morgan Wallen’s “Final Night time” returned to #1 for a fifteenth nonconsecutive week, tying Harry Types’ document for the longest run at #1 by a solo male artist (set final yr with “As It Was”).