Travis Scott prowls around the top of the huge, rambling faux-stone construction that will, in a few days, begin serving as the stage for his Circus Maximus tour. Sometimes he sings, sometimes he stops. As he does so, he visits different parts of the structure, which seems part battlement, part ancient ruin, part lonely asteroid, part coral island risen out of the sea, strewn with a miscellany of roundish faux-stone heads of varying sizes and facial expressions. It’s surprisingly jarring to see Scott perform his songs without the full-on total commitment that is his trademark style, but right now is clearly about something else. It feels like he’s trying to figure things out that only he can figure out, working out the rules in a world he created.
After a while he steps down from the stage, walks outside, and gets into a car where he requests that a Radiohead album be put on (it’s In Rainbows), and then be turned down. I compliment him on the stage. “Yeah, you fucking with it?” he nods. “I got to dial it in some, but it’s getting there. It’s something new.”
I inquire what he wants people to be thinking as they look at it.
“I just want people to be in just a good zone,” he says. “Really not so much thinking, more just doing. It’s like: You don’t come here to think, you come here to let loose.”
And the heads?
“I mean, those are just, like, Disney World type of ideas,” he replies.
I think he’s saying that too much shouldn’t be read into them, but I tell him I can’t work out whether they’re friendly or terrifying.
“No, it’s all good vibes,” he says. Then he reconsiders, a little. “I don’t know—terrifying is all subjective. I didn’t want it just like corny, just like all like googly-goggly. Because life isn’t just, like, all bright. It has its ups and downs, you know.”
To which anyone reading this who knows anything about Travis Scott’s last two years will probably be thinking: yes, and some. And will probably assume that Travis Scott had to have been thinking of all that when he just said what he said, and that he’s also well aware that what he just said will appear to be an obvious reference to all that. Though, strangely, whether because of compartmentalization or masterful disguise, or because the complex ways we find to deal and not deal with painful history are beyond such scrutiny, Travis Scott betrays no sign that this is so.
It’s a short journey, our car ride. We are in Lititz, Pennsylvania, where an extensive studio complex and supporting technical ecosystem has been built for artists rehearsing tours, but there isn’t too much else here, so all journeys in town are short ones. Five minutes after we set off, we pull up outside a restaurant. Scott tells his manager he wants to sit in the car a little longer, have a smoke, so we keep talking for a few more minutes. Until Scott’s smoking preparations are complete, that is, and the driver realizes what is happening.
“You can’t smoke,” she says. “You can’t smoke in here!”
One of Scott’s camp unsuccessfully tries to negotiate—“Can we just roll the windows down? We’ll pay the cleaning fee”—but Scott himself seems to accept the verdict equitably: “Oh, okay. I’m sorry. We’ll step outside.”
We decamp to a table in front of the restaurant, where Scott talks for a moment about success, and how when you get close to where you thought you were heading, what you wanted can still feel so far away. “It’s like what you’re trying to achieve still feels like it’s across the world and on another axis,” he says. Then he stands, asks if I’d like to get something to eat, and disappears with a small group into a private room.
Later, after we return to the studio complex and Scott settles into a dressing room sofa, a woman on the crew comes and asks whether he or I need anything. “She’s the best in business. Best in the biz,” Scott observes once she has left. “She’s probably the only person back here that can make me happy.”
I ask him what everyone else does.
“Everybody else wants a lot from me,” he says. “She puts me at calm and peace. Everyone has a lot of questions.”
I indicate the sheets of paper, and the scribbled notes, on my lap.
“Right,” he concedes. “No, it’s all good.”
Since the cataclysm of November 2021, when 10 people who attended Scott’s Astroworld festival in Houston died, Travis Scott has been edging back into the world. He has played some shows, but this will be his first tour. And though his long-anticipated Utopia album finally arrived at the end of July, topping the charts with immense streaming numbers, Scott himself has said very little before now.
I’m not sure what to expect. I think it’s fair to say that Travis Scott’s reputation has long been as someone from whom words come sparingly; reserved, fairly closed off. But that’s not really what I find. Yes, there are moments when words emerge reluctantly, but minutes later, other words will gush out in torrents; all of sudden he’s a man with plenty to say and the voice with which to say it. It goes back and forth. What he seems keenest, or at least most comfortable, talking about is Utopia—both the album itself but also some kind of broader constellation of ideas. It’s been a preoccupation for some time now— “People think of the world as a great place, but then also in a crazy, wild place right now,” he explains. “In all different parts of the world, nothing is at, like, a Utopia spot on a three-sixty aspect. People go through things. You know, you can be in the hood, you can be wherever, and it can be the roughest time ever. There’s 24 hours in a day, and it might be like one minute, one second, whatever, that might make somebody smile. It might take them away from where they’re at. The little distraction. No matter how long it is or how little it is, to me, that’s like a form of Utopia. And so I thought, like, creating an experience that can get people to kind of zone into that aspect of their life and maybe find some balance.”
By mid-2020 the album itself was already well underway. He offers a snapshot of the initial inspiration: “I was actually riding with Stormi…”—his daughter, the oldest of his two children with his ex, Kylie Jenner—“we were getting fireworks in Houston.” Stormi repeatedly requested something from her father’s back catalog. “Her favorite song is ‘Mamacita’—it’s like, her favorite song of all time. She plays it all the time in the car, over and over and over, and that’s from this mixtape Days Before Rodeo. Just hearing that song over and over just reminded me of that time.” That night, after Stormi went to sleep, he stayed up listening to his earliest solo recordings: Owl Pharaoh, Days Before Rodeo, and a thought solidified. “I wanted to get back to the essence of who Travis Scott was as, like, a creator of music and sound,” he says. “To just go back to the core, what got me here, which is producing and creating and the raw format of how I’ve started making music. And I got so excited about that.”
So he started making beats. “Making beats, making beats,” he emphasizes. The first new beat he made, he called “Cats and Tigers” (presumably a nod to its source material, Chronicle Grime’s “Career Cats Get Tiger Suits”), which would later evolve into Utopia’s opening song, “Hyaena.” After he’d put it together on his laptop, he was so excited that he got in the car and went straight to a studio in Los Angeles. He wanted to really hear it. And he liked what he heard: “Oh, shit. Because the drums are like crazy fat. Like, this shit is like dumb, fat. It’s just so punching. Like, it sound like some rock shit but it’s still hood as fuck. Just like, driving. And I was like, Man, this is some hard shit.” He felt he was on to something.
Weirdly, there’s a parallel story about Utopia’s genesis that I will chance on, by accident, later tonight, an even more unexpected one. It comes up when I ask Scott about a prospect he’s previously floated that he’d like to write a musical. Only then does he mention, as though a curious thought has just struck him, “the album was supposed to be a musical.” This is an assertion so seemingly random and improbable that at first I assume that he is referring to some momentary firefly of a thought. But it turns out to have been rather more than that.
“I wanted the album to be a play,” he continues. “I was trying to take Broadway—because the thing about Broadway theaters, they’re kind of small—I was trying to bring the idea of Broadway to bigger venues. Like, either, like, plays in stadiums or plays in arenas, but still make it feel like a Broadway bill.” To this end, he met with the playwright Jeremy O. Harris. “I love Jeremy O. Harris. He’s amazing. We were exploring all these different ideas. I met with him. I met with a couple of different people. We just talked about the idea of it happening. I was still trying to figure it out.”
When I ask him whether he had a sense of the kind of story it might be, he offers this description: “A story on some Sin City shit. Like Frank Miller style. Like comic, but try to bring it to 3D, incorporate some high-level Fantasia-type shit. You ever seen that Disney? Like this weird combo of the two.” And he animatedly explains with his hands an ambitious idea where there would be a “speed roll of sets” where the stage set would continuously change every two or three minutes.
He says he would still like to do a musical
Will the music still sound like your music?
“For sure! That’s the idea. Like orchestra, heavy drum programming. Live instrument, orchestra-based.”
I ask whether he would appear in it. This is the one moment in our time together that he looks at me as though I must be completely insane.
“Of course!” he exclaims. “For sure! For sure, man. I got to be in it!”
That is for the future. In the meantime, Scott has been doing a bit of film acting. After appearing in the little seen teen-rampage movie Gully as a beleaguered video store owner, he recently had a larger role as an assassin’s sidekick in Harmony Korine’s AGGRO DR1FT. Scott says that he was sold on the idea when Korine showed him some footage from the thermal camera he intended to use. “I was, Oh, this is fucking fire. So I just pulled up. I fuck with Harmony. That’s my guy.”
Was it easy?
“It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t hard.”
Are you a good actor?
“I never act. I dive deep. You know what I’m saying? But sometimes I tap in. When you tap in, you’re not even acting no more. Your shit just get real.”
Well, isn’t that acting? I think that’s what they all talk about.
He laughs in a way that makes me think he’s wondering whether at least one of us is talking nonsense.
“I guess it’s part of it,” he says.
Here is a strange story, or circumstance, or fact, about Travis Scott’s youth. It has been occasionally alluded to before in interviews with Travis Scott, but only ever as a stray anecdotal detail, a presumably meaningless and momentary whim that required no further explaining. It is not a dark secret, nor one that speaks of youthful torment, nor of a magically telltale Rosebud moment of creative inspiration. But it is engagingly dissonant when matched with the Travis Scott we might believe we know, which perhaps means that if we understood it a little better, perhaps we might edge an inch closer to understanding him.
The fact is this: When Travis Scott was young (or to be precise, when Jacques Webster II, Scott’s real name, was young), his ambition was to become a nephrologist. A doctor specializing in the kidneys. And this was not a momentary impulse. It was serious.
It started, Scott explains, with a sleepover at his friend Adebayo’s house when they were in elementary school in the suburbs of Houston. (Scott tries to pin down how old he was: “Had to have been in third grade? Fourth grade? When did NFL Blitz come out?”) It was a birthday party. “We went to his crib,” Scott remembers. “His crib was crazy. I’ve never seen a crib like this. It was OD. His dad was an ob-gyn. And I remember his uncle was at the house, and I asked his uncle, I was like, what do you do? And he’s like, I’m a nephrologist. He told me what it was, and I was like, Yo, it’s crazy. I was like, Yeah, I want to be that. I don’t know why being a kidney doctor was just such… I think it was his swag. Like, his whole swag was just like he was fresh. I don’t know. It was the idea of just, like, saving people at the time was dope.”
Once embedded, this idea became far more than just a passing fancy.
“Middle school, high school, that’s all I wanted to do—wanted to be a nephrologist,” says Scott. “I used to go and shadow at the hospitals. So I fell in love with it more there, just the whole process of it all.”
Though music was increasingly the passion that was taking over, this other plan was still in his mind when he went to college—he attended the University of Texas at San Antonio before dropping out of college in his sophomore year. “I wanted to own my own practice, know the business side of it, do the medicine side of it,” he says. When I ask him whether he thinks he really might have ended up doing it—really becoming a nephrologist—if things had fallen differently, he says, “Yeah—for sure.”
In weird symmetry and counterpoint, here is a similarly strange flash forward into one version of Travis Scott’s future. Scott insists that he wants to go back to college, and soon. This, of course, is the kind of thing celebrities sometimes say—maybe I’ll go back to college and study so-and-so—something that nine times out of 10 it feels like an airy aspiration. As though by making this wishful declaration, while they nonetheless barrel forward unstoppably into their next album or tour or film or TV series, they are waving fondly at another version of themselves disappearing into the hazy distance of a parallel dimension, someone who they know they will never really become. But Scott insists that he is absolutely serious.
“I’m going to Harvard for architecture school,” he says. He tells me that he’s already taken a couple of visits there. He says he’s properly looked into the admissions process. “I got to work hard to get in. They’re not letting me take any shortcuts.”
And how soon, realistically, could you imagine doing it?
“Well, I told myself after this album I was going to go in. So after the tour.”
Seriously?
“Yeah, seriously.”
Full time?
“Yeah. Go in.”
Move to Boston and live there?
He nods.
How long for?
“It’d probably be like four years. I’m still going to make music, of course.”
Scott explains to me more about this proclivity. “I’ve always been into structural design and structural engineering and, you know, trying to just build all different type of things, right?” he says. “When you start seeing how odd things can be shaped and then see how they can structurally work, it’s interesting. And I’m always trying to be like an ultimate problem solver. A lot of things intrigue me. Like, I’m doing rehearsals now and I’m always asking questions about even just structural and staging and how it can be built.”
It feels like he’d be happy to talk about architecture all evening. But there are other subjects, ones that can’t be avoided forever.
Travis Scott started working on Utopia in 2019. By November 2021, a version of the album was, he says, maybe 50 or 60 percent completed, and plans for its release were beginning to be cemented. The rollout began with the November 5 release of two songs: “Escape Plan” and “Mafia,” announced only the day before, its sleeve image a spoof of a Weekly World News cover declaring “The True Dystopia Is Here!” Scott says that other releases were anticipated ahead of the Utopia album itself. But then what happened happened, and everything stopped.
The release of those initial songs was timed to coincide with the first night of Scott’s Astroworld festival in Houston, the festival’s third installment since 2018. That evening, while Scott was onstage, crushes formed within the crowd that some people were unable to escape. Interviewed by the police two days later, Scott explained that he only began to get a sense that something gravely serious had happened when a friend came into his trailer afterward and said that someone was getting CPR, and that only over the next few hours did the full horror become clear. Ten members of the audience ultimately died. (In June of this year, the local district attorney announced a grand jury’s determination that “no crime did occur, that no single individual was criminally responsible.”)
This, of course, is the subject that has been hovering around the edges of our conversation. I ask Scott whether, when he started putting together the version of Utopia that was finally released at the end of July 2023, he thought a lot about whether the album should or should not in any way reflect what had happened that night. Eventually, after several long pauses, and asking me to repeat and clarify the question, he begins to answer.
“Making music, you think about things that go on in life and things that happen in your life, and you dial in on things,” he says. He audibly exhales. “That moment for families, for the city, you know, it was devastating. And when it came to making, like even finishing the album…I got back into it probably like, I don’t know, months and months and months after. And the idea of just even getting back into music, working on music and just even getting into that, was therapeutic of being able to channel some of the energy into production and sounds and finishing it.”
Presumably, you were not in a good state?
“Nah, not at all. I mean I was just overly devastated, you know. Yeah.”
Is it something you find yourself constantly thinking about now?
“Yeah, I always think about it. Those fans were like my family. You know, I love my fans to the utmost.”
Has how you’ve been dealing with it changed over time?
“It has its moments where it gets rough and…yeah. You just feel for those people. And their families.”
There is just one song on Utopia that clearly refers to what happened. Overall, says Scott, “My Eyes” is a song about “the things I deal with on a day-to-day basis and the fact of how it could be misunderstood and the struggles of life and all aspects of life. The constant weight that’s put on. That you carry, you know. And just a vision through my eyes.”
Like many of Scott’s songs, it is a work in multiple movements. Its core was one of the album’s first songs to be written, but other parts evidently came later, after the tragedy, because there is a moment toward the end where a faster tempo kicks in and, amidst a cascade of words, Scott says, “I replay them nights, and right by my side, all I see is a sea of people that ride wit’ me. /If they just knew what Scotty would do to jump off the stage and save him a child.”
“It just came out when I was writing,” he says. “Like I said, it was a real moment. The song is emotional to me. It’s one of my favorite songs on the album. And that verse means a lot to me.”
And what did you want people to think when they listen to that song?
“To know I have pain too. I have concerns, things that I think about, and the things I see on a day-to-day basis I think about them. And every day I want to find change in the things, to make things better, make myself better. It’s just like: I go
through things like everyone else. And even recently through something like I never could imagine. So.”
Just over a month after the Astroworld tragedy, Scott offered his one sustained public reflection on the events of that night in an interview with Charlamagne tha God. In a way it may be that there was nothing Scott could have said that would have been considered sufficient—maybe that’s still the case, and maybe it always will be—but as much as he did face up to a series of tough and pointed questions, he was criticized for not being all of the different Travis Scotts that people wanted him to be in that moment. In a way, he was and is frozen in a limbo where anything he says about how these events impacted him can be taken to imply a kind of broader insensitivity, but there was one sentence toward the end of that interview that, whatever its shortcomings, seemed to offer a revealing window into how he was processing his own turmoil: “My heart wasn’t there to be the villain—I was there to be a hometown hero.” I ask him about that.
“I mean, yeah, everything I’ve been doing is always to highlight where I was from,” he says. “I set out a goal coming into this to really take Houston and really show the world how global Houston is. You know, we’re just as strong as LA or New York or London or Tokyo. Everything I was doing from literally my first couple of albums, touring, everything I was doing was just to maximize and really show how ill we are. And even going into creating the festival, it wasn’t about me, it was about different worlds of music that I enjoy, and I know that people from Houston enjoy. Like, I was always a fan of concerts growing up, and I couldn’t see a lot of my favorite artists because they never really came to Houston that much. And so being able to bring that joyful moment to the city and really open up that creative brain and, you know, all that. All that is going to inspire the next kid to be like, ‘Wow…I can do this’. You know what I’m saying? Yeah.”
So all of that and then it suddenly isn’t that?
“Yeah.”
And that kind of ruins it? Ruins the attempt at it?
“Yeah. The attempt of it.”
Charlotte, a week later. Tonight, the Circus Maximus tour opens. Scott was up until seven o’clock this morning rehearsing on the stage. Now, just after lunchtime, he is in his dressing room. “I’m Gucci!” he declares. “I’m Gucci. I’m fucking excited today, baby. It’s been a long fucking time.”
I take a seat, expecting him to do the same, but he never does. He talks, but he does so in constant motion, walking irregular loops back and forth around the room. Sometimes he even arcs into the bathroom, so that I can barely hear him, but his conversational flow carries on just the same.
Much of what he’ll say this afternoon seems to reflect his anticipation at being reunited with a certain kind of fan. “I think one of the most different things about me is I feel like a core fan base understand me,” he says, “but then you have people that will be like, What’s up with this kid, or something? I think to understand me, you kind of got to follow the music from the beginning and follow my journey from the beginning.”
What are the things that the core fans get that maybe other people don’t get?
“They understand what I’m out to do, you know what I mean? Like, what Travis is here to do: here to push things forward. I’m always here to like just literally push things forward—every aspect of this shit: music, creativity, all this. Without having to be redundant with saying it. I just want to show, you know.”
Why do you think you make music?
“Man, because I have a lot of emotion I want to output, you know. And I can feel for other people in a sense of things that’s relatable. And sometimes you become that representative of a flock of people. It’s like, through the lyrics, it’s like, Ah, yeah, we feel the same way.” Famously, the person Scott always felt this way himself about is Kid Cudi. “The shit he was saying, man, it’s crazy,” Scott reflects. “You would have thought this dude was, like, your brother, and then he would say in the next lyric, like, ‘I’m your big brother.’ You’d be like, What the fuck! It’s only a handful of artists that get you that feeling, right? That real shit that you feel: like, Damn, this dude went to my high school. Am I related to this guy?”
A few moments later, I’m asking Scott where he lives now, a question he first answers by saying “I live on the road,” then modifies by adding “out west…my babies” before breaking into song. “My babies!” he croons. “Where my babies is!” This seems to remind him of something. “She wants me to call her,” he says to himself, and dials his phone. His daughter Stormi’s face soon fills the screen.
“Oh, you getting your hair braided?” he asks.
“Yeah!” says Stormi.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” says Scott, who in seconds has morphed into achingly sweet father mode. “You getting your hair braided, huh? You get way more braids than Dada! You want to see the stage real quick?”
“Yeah!” exclaims Stormi. I follow the real Scott and the virtual Stormi down the corridor, and out into the arena. (“She got to approve the set,” he tells me.)
“So I’m gonna show you this, it looks so crazy, girl,” Scott says to Stormi. “So crazy! It’s so big.” He points the phone’s camera at the stage. “It’s so crazy, right?
“Wow!” says Stormi with evident glee.
“It’s nuts,” Scott agrees, and takes her closer. “Isn’t this head cool?” As he says this, flames shoot out of the stage and an explosion goes off—some kind of tech test.
“Whoa!” says Stormi.
“It’s a cannon,” says Scott, and shows her more of the heads. “See this one, boogie? Storm Storm!”
“Yeah!” she says.
“You see this one? That’s crazy, right? It’s a big face.”
She squeals with delight.
After they say their farewells—“I love you”; “Bye-bye, Daddy!”—we return to the dressing room where Scott starts doing loops again, and I ask him what he’s expecting it to feel like out there tonight.
“I don’t know. Like, turnt. Let’s fucking get it, man. I’m so anxious, man. Like, I’m ready.”
In a few hours, Scott will burst out from under the center of the stage, the arena will erupt, and the tour will have begun. From that moment, it’s strange how everything that had seemed so central—the elaborate stone-world stage set, the moving heads with their laser eyes, the artfully processed live images of Scott projected on a 360-degree screen around the top of the stage—recedes in importance. All of that adds, but it’s not the show. The show is Scott. He creates his own vortex, and at its center is his energy, his pent-up self-confidence, his evident determination to be exactly who Travis Scott feels he should be.
The week before we first met, there was a photo published of Scott that was taken at a sports-memorabilia store event near Atlantic City alongside Tom Brady and Kevin Hart. It catches my attention for two reasons. Firstly, because both Brady and Hart have appeared in Scott’s songs—Hart is mentioned on Astroworld’s “5% Tint,” and Brady appears twice on Utopia (in “Meltdown” and “Thank God”). Scott, however, appears to find this circumstance barely worth mentioning. “Yeah, yeah, they know,” he tells me. “They’ve been to shows a bunch.”
The second reason the photo stays with me is because of the way Scott appears in it, as he often does in photos like this. Both Brady and Hart present their faces and their smiles to the camera in the familiar, obligatory way. Not Scott. His back is curved, his knees are slightly bent, his arms are crossed, and his gaze appears to be directed at the floor, as though he’s managing to participate in the least participatory way, while still being in the frame—both there and not there. As if, in the last resort, when there’s nothing to hide behind but himself, that’s what he’ll use. I find myself musing about the man in this photo as I watch Scott onstage in Charlotte, in a situation where everything is on his own terms and he is the nexus of everything, his face everywhere, by the end shirtless and exploding with an intensity that seems both manic and entirely under his control. The point isn’t to wonder how these two Travis Scotts can be the same man. The point is to know full well that they are, and ponder quite what that means.
When I ask Scott about that photo, and other photos like it, what he says to me is this:
“Yeah, my head’s down. I’m not a picture guy. I just put my head down because people are just snapping away.”
I suggest to him that maybe he’s still posing, just with a particular attitude of his own, but he refutes this.
“I think people think I’m posing,” he acknowledges. “I’m not. I’m just really just looking down.”
Like wishing it was over?
“No, just looking down,” he says. “And then when it’s over, we can laugh and do whatever again.”
Chris Heath is a GQ correspondent.
A version of this story originally appeared in the 2023 Men Of The Year issue of GQ with the title “Travis Maximus”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Jack Bridgland
Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu
Hair by Yazmin Adam
Barber by Ian Owens
Skin by Hee Soo Kwon using Dior Backstage Face and Body Foundation
SFX Makeup and painting by Malina Stearns
Set design by James Rene/Jones MGMT
Produced by Patrick Mapel at CAMP Productions