At the Travis Scott soft relaunch

`+A recap from the first fundraiser for my new magazine, Rag

On July 4, as the crowd for the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest dispersed, I headed to the Coney Island Art Walls to watch a Meek Mill concert, co-billed with Travis Scott’s label Cactus Jack. The occasion was quietly spun as an opportunity for the two rappers to bury a beef that most people don’t even remember: Mill and Scott reportedly shut down billionaire Michael Rubin’s annual all-white Fourth of July party in the Hamptons by getting into an argument exactly a year ago. 

This year, at that same party, Travis Scott stepped onto a stage to and grabbed a microphone to perform a couple of songs to a celebrity-filled crowd of rappers, Kardashian-Jenners, and others. But that was only the first step of what has been a quiet relaunch of the Travis Scott live concert experience.

The next day, Scott came to Brooklyn to perform in public for the first time since a crowd crush disaster resulted in the deaths of 10 people at his Astroworld Festival in Houston in November of 2021. The backdrop of Coney Island rides recalled that festival and the rest of Scott’s amusement park aesthetic–I found it hard to decide whether that was eerie or apt. It was an open secret that Scott was coming, and DJs and performers spent the afternoon promising concertgoers wearing merch from previous Astroworlds and from Scott’s collaborative clothing line with McDonald’s that Travis Scott was in the building.

But no one knew what exactly Scott was coming to do, and that’s because the expectations of Scott in this moment are unclear.

The narrative that coalesced around Astroworld, which held Travis Scott personally responsible for the tragedy, has remained a conundrum to me. Across social media, Scott’s rowdy, unsafe concert demeanor was blamed for a crowd crush caused by an overbooked event, with some commenters insisting Scott had made a deal to sacrifice the dead to the devil himself. It was a moment of profound rupture for sure: a mega-celebrity in the Kardashian universe, a Black rapper with mostly white fans, implicated in shocking, sudden deaths. Such an incident invites apocalyptic levels of panic that quickly become more gratifying to take part in than reality. While the outcomes of the various lawsuits are to be determined, the court of public opinion sentenced Scott, the performer, to the months-long hiatus he is only now returning from, and permitted Live Nation, a company that’s bathed itself in safety violations and deaths in its short history, to proceed its business mostly uninterrupted.

How exactly does someone at the center of such panic proceed? How does a celebrity in this age, where narrative control is so core to the function of celebrity, proceed? The Astroworld tragedy can’t be made into a segment on the Kardashians, resolved and moved on from by the end of the episode…can it? But if it can’t be, how can Travis Scott have a future?

At last, at about 9:30, as fireworks began to go off at Coney Island, Travis Scott took the stage during Chase B’s DJ set. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” whimpered a fan near me. Travis hopped immediately into the crowd — flanked by security — and drank in the night air with a diamond-white smile, relishing the feeling of being back in front of a crowd.

Within moments, though, it was also clear that Scott was interested in projecting a sense of reform. The intermittent screams emanating from Coney Island’s, with names like like the Sling Shot and the Astro Tower, provided an uncanny backdrop; Scott seemed to hold himself back from fully becoming the fiery djinn that once hoisted microphone stands over his head in memes. When he got on stage an FDNY officer loomed visibly, and Scott began by checking in with the crowd: “if everybody okay let me get a ‘hell yeah’,” and, as captured by a clip that later went up on TMZ, stopped his performance of “Antidote” to insist that a fan in a Spider-Man costume climb down from some scaffolding. Was that posturing, the building of the new narrative?

It’s hard to say, particularly because Travis Scott has always struck me as more earnestly invested in his artistic practice than would otherwise be required of him. Rap shows these days are mostly mid, and that’s a little bit Travis Scott’s fault–his appropriation of hardcore sensibilities to hip hop gets a lot of shit for its recklessness, but it should get more for its encouragement of his slapdash imitators who bring nothing to the stage but a DJ and some unearned exhortations to open up the mosh pit. Scott himself, though, is clearly dedicated to his live show. Before his debut album “Rodeo” came out in 2015, he went viral for ordering a cameraman off stage. When later asked about that incident on a radio show, he complained about the control he wants to have over his performances  “I don’t understand why radio shows don’t allow artists to have any creative direction on stage,” and that the headline from that performance should have been “500 kids rushing the barricades.” 

At Coney Island on Monday, kids did rush the barricades, at the side of the audience floor, to climb into the VIP section where Scott was performing. In the days since, social media commenters have insisted that Scott shouldn’t have the gall to continue performing; Coney Island rapper Nems’ backstage video with Scott was flooded with gratuitous jokes about the Astroworld deaths. Scott referred to “kids rushing the barricades” like they’re a currency, a talisman of his stardom. It’s only the symptom of a live music culture, much larger than him, that sees audiences primarily as numbers. Those other people don’t get held to quite the same standard.

How the Rag fundraiser went

Oh, man… so much fun. Thank you to everyone who came, who danced, who hung out. I feel kind of bad that I didn’t do much hosting, being really stressed out about “manning the table,” and the music and stuff.

Speaking of music, a heartfelt shoutout to my friend Syl Dubenion, an amazing performer whose music you should check out–in case you missed it, he also performed at my All Good Things concert last year. Syl is a great saxophone player who also plays with a band called Standing on the Corner. Syl helped me out by doing something I’ve always wanted to do, the old sax-and-DJ combo, something I saw in Colombia one time and haven’t been able to forget. Shout out to him for learning the cheesy Italian pop-disco songs I wanted to play.

Shout out to friend and Rag editor Graham for manning the merch and the bar. If you still want to donate, please do! We raised about a thousand bucks–holy shit–but I’d love if we could get closer to $1500 so that we can safely cover all production costs for the first issue of the magazine.

See you at the next one,

Adlan