In Circus Maximus, the 75-minute documentary/brain poem that accompanies Travis Scott’s new album UTOPIA, our hero Travis gets into a scuffle with a tentacle creature and headbangs in an open field. He then climbs a mountain to seek an audience with Rick Rubin to confess a deep-seated fear that has been gnawing at his very soul: Do I still have the ability to rage?
This is Travis’ idea of getting vulnerable. Since he released his inescapable album Astroworld five years ago, Travis has fully embraced his persona as the ultimate hooligan, even after tragedy put that character under fire. In 2021, while he performed one of his raucous sets at his hometown Astroworld Festival in Houston, 10 people were killed and thousands more were injured during a sudden crowd crush. While Travis remains a defendant in several civil lawsuits, he was not held criminally responsible for the incident and has seemingly moved on, or pretended it never happened. Spoiler alert: He does still have the ability to rage. And to get that across, here is UTOPIA, a big, empty rap blockbuster that lives in the shadow of other bigger, less-empty rap blockbusters.
Specifically, those by Kanye West. That probably won’t be a surprise to anyone who has ever heard any song by Travis Scott, who’s been a Ye disciple since the days of getting some production credits on Yeezus a decade ago. But UTOPIA veers from heavy inspiration into Travis pretty much trying to Single White Female him. Well, that’s impossible, because even with the moody AutoTune warbling of 808s & Heartbreaks, the grand maestro vibes of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, the icy electro synths of Yeezus, and the famous-friend-apalooza of The Life of Pablo, Travis is missing arguably the most important aspect of Kanye. Even at his most wild, most narcissistic, and most famous, Kanye still felt shit. Raw no matter how much he tinkered, layered, or absorbed. Unafraid to look like a fool, or at least convinced that he was so cool that it didn’t matter if he did. In the Circus Maximus film, the visuals are at times so pristine and polished that Travis looks like a cyborg; UTOPIA sounds a lot like that, too.
Sometimes, the marquee features and shiny production are good at masking the fact that Travis is an emotional blackhole on the mic. The digitized lilts over Blonde-inspired fogginess on “My Eyes” sound nice enough, especially when sprinkled with dreamy riffing from Sampha and Justin Vernon. The rage beat on “Fe!n” is played-out, but Playboi Carti’s new vocal trick (sounding like he has bronchitis) soaks up the attention and just lets Travis do a bunch of ad-libbing. Future is strong over the orchestral beat of “Telekinesis,” and I like when he raps, “Countin’ so much money till my skin peel.” SZA is here, too, sounding good and sounding like she’s collecting a check. But again, at his peak, Kanye was able to draw showstopping features out of collaborators—these are nothing more than fleeting thrills.
