There are moments when tonight’s stop on Travis Scott’s Circus Maximus tour feels more metal gig than rap-show. It’s not just the numerous circle-pits (with the passion if not the ferocity of a Slayer crowd) or the boulder-strewn, prehistoric stage-set straight out of Masters of the Universe. It’s the blunt assault of the music – the buildup of tension and the cathartic relief, the puncturing, kinetic power of those drum-machine pulses – and how the tireless Scott commands this gargantuan stadium with sheer force of will, and a massive box of fireworks.
Sporting quarterback shoulder-pads, he bounds and pogos across the stage, the rich-guy ennui that sometimes fugs his records entirely absent. His energy is matched by his fans, whom he’s named “ragers”, and who jump when he says “jump!” and thrust their middle-fingers in the air when he asks them to do that. Little of the Dolby Atmos-ready, cathedral-of-sound aesthetic that made albums such as Astroworld and Utopia such psychedelic experiences survives the transition to this vast space. Instead, Scott leans on the pugilistic likes of Meltdown and No Bystanders, whose bold, bellowed hooks make Onyx sound like Clannad, and whose blitzing, acid-trap beats sound like early Schoolly D on steroids, coldly mechanical and raw.
It’s not all brawny bangers. Scott sings Bon Iver collab My Eyes bathed in green lasers upon a raised platform, his Auto-Tune-enhanced croon sounding like holy music – the sweetest dancehall balladry, a canary singing from a coalmine of chopped and screwed noise. In such intimate moments he holds his ragers rapt, turning them loose in the next breath and demanding they raise their middle fingers again. Scott’s a crowd-pleasing ham in the lineage of Freddie Mercury, stopping and starting a ground-shaking Fein so often it goes past Rickroll into genius, and bringing on Ice Spice to rap her Think U The Shit (Fart) to a fan waving an Ice Spice flag.
You need a big personality to rule such a grand space with just a DJ in tow, although – unlike his influence Kanye – Scott never succumbs to empty egotism; when Shepherd’s Bush MC Central Cee and Atlanta’s own Lil Baby jump onstage to rap their underground hit BAND4BAND, Scott deferentially carries their jackets and watched on like a proud dad.
