Pay attention: Travis Scott has come unstuck in time. Travis has gone to sleep a washed-up pariah and woke up on the day that his McDonald’s meal got here out. He has walked by way of a door in 2023 and are available out one other one in 2019. He has gone again by way of that door to seek out himself in 1971.

In 2023, the yr of the good hip-hop-turns-50 media circus, a typical concern-trolling thinkpiece topic has been the ostensible business decline of rap music. We’re about to hit August, and we haven’t had a rap tune attain #1 on the Sizzling 100 all yr. We didn’t have a #1 rap album, both, till Lil Uzi Vert’s huge schizophrenic data-dump Pink Tape got here out just a few weeks again. So what’s occurring right here? How is it that no rappers have seized the zeitgeist like Taylor Swift and Morgan Wallen and all these regional Mexican guys? Has rap reached the inevitable second the place its centrality dissipates, following jazz and rock on the lengthy street towards basic cultural irrelevance?

There are many causes that we’re gentle on rap blockbusters proper now, and considered one of them is the sluggish however actual drain of potential monocultural rap superstars. A few of rap’s largest names — Drake, Future — are nearing center age and between album cycles. Kanye West is off-planet. Younger Thug is locked up. Pop Smoke, Juice WRLD, XXXTentacion, and too many others are lifeless. We’ve obtained loads of rappers on the arena-headliner degree — Lil Durk, Playboi Carti, Lil Child, Moneybagg Yo, Tyler, $UICIDEBOY$ — however your mother in all probability doesn’t know who they’re. After which there’s Travis Scott, who was on that A-list degree earlier than the backlash hit.

The backlash was in all probability inevitable. Even earlier than the Astroworld pageant, Travis Scott was Icarus, flying too shut to finish overexposure. For a yr or two, Scott cruised in imperial mode, releasing forgettable and forgotten singles that also debuted at #1 on the pop charts. He staked out a place because the approachable company face of bleary, drug-dipped entice music — the man who may gargle Auto-Tuned hooks about Xanax and nonetheless grow to be a toy in a McDonald’s business or pop up on the Tremendous Bowl halftime present that everybody else was boycotting. You possibly can’t be that perpetually.

However the fall got here faster than anybody imagined. Two years in the past, at Travis Scott’s hometown pageant in Houston, a crowd crush killed 10 individuals, together with a nine-year-old child, and injured a whole bunch extra throughout his set. Travis had constructed up a fame for electrical, chaotic stay reveals, and people reveals had left just a few individuals significantly injured, however there’d by no means been something on that degree earlier than. I preserve that the Reside Nation promoters are the individuals in charge for the Astroworld atrocity — that the individuals concerned within the nuts and bolts of grand-scale occasions bear far more duty for the lack of life than the one that was onstage on the time, solely unaware of the dimensions of the chaos erupting within the crowd earlier than him. However Travis Scott was the face of the Astroworld pageant, and he grew to become the face of all that loss of life earlier than all of the insanely silly on-line rumblings about how Astroworld was actually some sort of satanic occult ritual.

After Astroworld, individuals needed Travis Scott to go away. I’m not citing any statistics right here as a result of it wasn’t a statistics factor. The vibes had been merely fucked. Travis Scott appeared to don’t know that he’d worn out his welcome, that most people felt no sense of heat or gratitude for him. He saved trying comebacks — awards present performances, visitor verses, pageant performances. The rollout for Utopia, the primary Travis Scott album within the 5 years since Astroworld, has been a multitude, from the canceled pyramid-show boondoggle to the laughably weak lead single “Okay-POP.” By some means, Travis obtained two of the most important streaming stars on the earth on the identical tune and got here up with a tune so low-impact that it’s prone to lose subsequent week’s chart battle to Jason Aldean’s culture-war vigilante tune. (The “Okay-POP” title refers to a ketamine-laced lollipop, to not something BTS-related, and the observe attracts extra on afrobeats and baile funk, however that title nonetheless looks like a grand swagger-jack.)

I used to be uninterested in Utopia earlier than the album got here out, and I hit play this morning with a way of grim resignation. Think about how stunned I used to be to find that this shit goes. Travis Scott has accomplished one thing I wouldn’t have thought attainable. He’s made an album that primarily units the clock again to 2018, that merely ignores the anxieties of circa-2023 rap stars generally and of Travis Scott particularly. Utopia sidesteps all of the prevailing developments of at this time’s rap music. It by no means tries to play catchup with New York drill or Jersey membership or any of the tiny regional micro-scenes which have grow to be the actual hotbeds of rap creativity in latest months. As a substitute, Travis Scott has merely given us a large, messy slab of all-star psychedelic event-rap. He’s chosen to behave just like the previous few years by no means occurred, and it’s working higher than anybody may’ve imagined.

Utopia isn’t precisely the identical as Travis Scott’s final album, 2018’s Astroworld. (It should be awkward when your most profitable and most up-to-date report has the identical title as your deadly-stampede pageant.) A few of the company on Utopia — Teezo Landing, Rob49 — didn’t have careers when Astroworld got here out. The place Astroworld discovered Scott exploring his affection for Houston screw music, Utopia is extra besotted with ’70s prog-rock. (Travis Scott isn’t trying to make prog-rock, the best way Lil Yachty is doing today. However if you open an album with a Light Large pattern, you’re making an announcement.) Finally, although, Astroworld and Utopia have many of the identical strengths and weaknesses. Astroworld occurs to be a reasonably good event-rap album, and so is Utopia.

This factor has scope. After the aforementioned Light Large vocal second, opening observe “Hyaena” smashes straight into a large, bloodthirsty breakbeat laced with hacked-up harpsichords. “Looove” rides a sinuous home bassline right into a desert-planet horizon. “Telekinesis” has Travis Scott, Future, and SZA crusing on an impressive organ-drone. The beat-drop on “Fein” hits like a nuclear torpedo. “My Eyes” goes for absolute magnificence, with Justin Vernon and Sampha wailing over Boards Of Canada-style pitter-pat drums and decaying synth-glimmers. “Meltdown” goals to be “Sicko Mode 2.0,” with Drake and Travis Scott settling scores over not less than three seismic beat-switches, and it truly largely will get there. Multi-part tracks soften into each other, and the entire thing has been mastered to sound like suns exploding in IMAX. After a few years of low-ambition streaming-bait rap information, it’s weirdly heartening to listen to somebody going for it, making a report that sounds big and costly.

On Utopia, Travis Scott ropes in lots of his outdated collaborators, and people collaborators get most of the finest moments. Drake is tense and offended on “Meltdown,” and he takes pictures at Pharrell, a man who’s additionally on the report. Teezo Landing’s operatic glam-rock vocals on “Fashionable Jam” appear to return out of nowhere. 21 Savage is reliably cold-blooded in his couple of guest-verses. Westside Gunn feels like he was born to rap over echo-drenched drums and haunted organs like those on “Misplaced Perpetually.” Beyoncé’s grand, commanding showcase “Delresto (Echoes)” may’ve simply been a Renaissance outtake, which works simply wonderful for me. Loads of the tracks right here may’ve appeared on massive albums in previous years, and if the net rumor mill is to be believed, a few of them virtually did seem on information like Kanye West’s Donda and Metro Boomin’s Heroes & Villains. That’s wonderful, too, when you think about that each Travis Scott album works finest as a lovingly curated compilation.

If Travis Scott isn’t attempting to recapture his personal previous glories on Utopia, then he’s chasing his most blatant affect. Travis so clearly needs to create the sort of moment-defining statement-album that Kanye West used to make. Particularly, the Travis of Utopia appears to be chasing the Kanye of Yeezus. (Travis was one of many producers who labored on Yeezus, and Kanye has a few manufacturing credit on Utopia.) The sounds on Yeezus and Utopia aren’t all the identical, although the towering shuffle-beat of “Circus Maximus” is an apparent and intentional echo of “Black Skinhead.” However Travis Scott isn’t fairly as much as that, and that’s the place the issues are available. Even at his most aggravating and indefensible, Kanye West was all the time attention-grabbing. Travis Scott is just not.

In the event you can ignore the precise substance of the lyrics, Utopia has among the finest rapping that Travis Scott has ever accomplished. On opening observe “Hyaena,” for example, Scott actually locks in with that breakbeat, hitting the pocket and displaying an informal command that I’ve hardly ever heard in him. However what he’s saying is stuff like this: “Write a present on my own like I’m Chelsea Handler/ Or write a collection ’bout my bitches like I’m Kelsey Grammer.” There are such a lot of lyrical clunkers on this report. Contemplate: “I like a bi woman on a bicycle/ Then I purchased a automobile, now she really feel entitled/ My dick so laborious, pokin’ just like the Eiffеl.” Or: “Take a sip, I been goin’ off the rip/ I been bumpin’ extra Coldplay, the world chilly as shit.” In the event you don’t course of the phrases that Scott is saying, he often sounds fairly cool on Utopia. In the event you give these lyrics any thought in any respect, the phantasm glitches out.

I’m positive there’s movie star gossip to be mined from Utopia; TMZ is already speculating on one like the place Travis Scott apparently goes after Timothée Chalamet. So far as I can inform, Scott solely addresses the Astroworld tragedy with one line on the entire report: “If they only knew what Scotty would do to leap off the stage and save him a toddler.” Scott appears extra involved concerning the occult conspiracy-theory shit, making fixed non secular references: “They suppose I’m satanic, I hold me a reverend.” (That ought to fulfill everybody.) The Travis line I hold seeing quoted is that this one: “I’m loyal, bitch, I obtained Ye over Biden.” That’s not nice! Travis follows it instantly with this: “I let the shit go off the highest, yeah, no typin’.” Possibly he ought to strive typing his lyrics out. It couldn’t damage.

The issues that I are likely to worth essentially the most in rap music — linguistic fireworks, granular specificity, persona — aren’t inside Travis Scott’s skillset. They by no means have been. At this level, I don’t actually anticipate something like that from Travis. Travis Scott’s abilities lie elsewhere. He’s good at making the kind of music that superior alien races may attain for once they’re testing the speakerboxes within the trunks of their spacecraft. On that degree, Utopia is an unqualified success. The Travis Scott components of the Travis Scott album are a little bit of a multitude, however it’s been some time since we’ve gotten a rap album that works as a widescreen sonic expertise, and I’m comfortable to have it, no matter yr it’d occur to be proper now.

Utopia is out now on Cactus Jack/Epic.