Travis Scott Helped Build the Sound of the 2010s. His Next Era Is Already in Motion

A
nd just like that, I’m back in high school, parked out front of some kid’s parents’ house, hotboxing in the back seat of an SUV. Except this is Travis Scott’s custom Rolls-Royce Cullinan, featuring a bespoke two-tone exterior complete with a candy-green “Spirit of Ecstasy” hood ornament and a custom monogrammed interior. We’re parked in front of a sprawling, 18,000-square-foot brutalist mansion, which belongs to the founder of Oakley Sunglasses and is currently for sale. Scott, an architecture buff, is here to tour the place and, as he slyly suggests, to see if it might become his own. Right now, though, he’s seated next to me in the Rolls, casually making a few well-packed spliffs disappear into plumes of smoke. 

Scott is dressed in a vintage T-shirt with the logo of the influential German art school Bauhaus, paired with a Chrome Hearts belt and Balenciaga jeans. As we chat in the car, he explains how — on the heels of a rec­ord-setting world tour during which crowds registered as earthquakes on geological surveys, as well as a Grammy-nominated, chart-topping album in 2023’s Utopia — he’s looking to push things even further. “Putting my whole body and soul into the next [project], for more people to understand,” he says. Who exactly might those people be? “The person that still don’t understand Trav no matter how long I’ve been in this shit.”

He has, in fact, been in this shit quite some time. Since his debut album in 2015, Scott has brought swarms of young fans into a universe that, through various commercial collaborations, includes shoes, apparel, sunglasses, McDonald’s meals, Fortnite skins, in-game concerts, and cereal. With more than a decade at the center of the rap zeitgeist, Scott is an avatar for 2010s hip-hop. The way we might categorize the “shiny suits” era of the late Nineties with Mase and Puff Daddy’s “Mo Money Mo Problems” video — replete with its Jerry Bruckheimer-style extravagance — Scott’s sonic and commercial maximalism, his cathartic blast of sounds turned up to max volume, his commitment to the rage, is the defining trait of the past decade of rap.

Now, the current generation appears geared for a revival of the 2010s aesthetic that Scott helped define. The year 2016 has become a TikTok fascination, as younger members of Gen Z look back 10 years, to when the current era’s superstars, Scott included, released much of their most influential work. The oozing hedonism and syrupy psychedelia of “Maria I’m Drunk,” from Scott’s debut album, Rodeo, quite clearly presaged Justin Bieber’s latest Swag-era turn. The chorus from “Antidote” — “Don’t you open up that window” — might very well soundtrack some future documentary about the 2010s. “Sicko Mode” featured one of the most significant beat switches in rap history, a structural gambit that reshaped how mainstream hits could move and fracture. In 2024, after Scott officially released his 2014 mixtape Days Before Rodeo on streaming, the project, already a decade old, nearly blocked Sabrina Carpenter from Number One on the charts. “That mixtape did a lot for me, and people really dialed into what I was as an artist,” he says. “[It’s gratifying] to see people still fucking with the album years later.”

Watch the video interview below

Scott’s generation of rap stars emerged during a particularly optimistic moment in music, when digital distribution platforms, along with the democratizing force of social media, broke down some longstanding barriers in mainstream culture. It became more common for rap, rock, and everything in between to comingle. “I think now it’s limitless. There’s no box,” Scott says. “For a chorus, you might be feeling like this, for a verse you feeling like this. There’s nothing wrong with them both being together. It’s like a DJ playing fucking ‘I kissed a girl, and I liked it’ to fucking some Gucci Mane.” 

Some of that era’s optimism has since waned, as the prevailing conversation in hip-hop these days is a sense that the genre has strayed too far from its roots. Scott is familiar with these types of critiques, too, as they’re similar to what rap purists said about the wave of acts that came in the 2010s. “Even when I was coming in, it was like that,” he says. “People wanted to keep [rap] a certain way. I didn’t. And now you got so many other artists that’s on the same type of timing.” Artists in their thirties, like Scott, are keeping a close eye on younger audiences, where they might once have looked up to older gatekeepers. “As the [new] generations come, those [older] people don’t get pushed out. You see they start bending towards it and shit. Usually it was like the other way around: Generations had to conform up. Generations now conforming down.” 

In conversation, you get the sense that Scott sees the current landscape as decidedly different from when he was coming up — and at 34, on top of the world, he has the perspective that lets him appreciate how far he’s come. “Everything is now catching up to everything. The art, the fashion — all of that shit is becoming just as important, if not more important, than the actual music,” he says. “I’m not saying it’s bad or nothing; it’s just a new outlook, I guess. But you got to start ­pulling the layers back to the basics at the end of the day. Your core is still going to be music. When I came in, it was about rearranging all this shit.”

AS WE TOUR THE MANSION, Scott comments on the clean minimalism of the space. He tells me he’s been looking at architecture programs he might enroll in, casually listing Harvard as a potential option. When Scott suggests he’s possibly considering purchasing the $65 million property, it doesn’t register as a ha-ha kind of joke, but more like something you say to gauge your friends’ reactions before you actually do it. He’d toured the home once before, though at the time it still had all of the owner’s custom furniture. Today, with the plush sofas and cozy decorations installed by the real estate folks tasked with selling the place, the house feels very much like a home. Scott says it reminds him of the house where his children’s mother lives (he shares two kids, ages three and seven, with Kylie Jenner). “I think this is cool because it’s like an open flow,” he says, taking in the indoor theater complete with a world-class projector. He remembers his first visit here differently. “When I actually came, I know [the owner] had these chairs. It was black leather chairs. The arms were more like a still structure that was built in his world.” He pauses, recalibrating the room in real time. “But this feels mad comfortable, which I fuck with.”

The owner, Jim Jannard, bought the mansion, located in Trousdale Estates in Beverly Hills, in 2009, not long after selling Oakley, the wildly popular sunglasses and apparel company he grew out of a motocross accessory brand, for approximately $2.1 billion in 2007. Like Scott, the Oakley founder understood how a subcultural aesthetic could scale without losing its edge. Oakley, with whom Scott has a brand partnership, was built on a kind of aggressive anti-fashion, gear designed for punks and ravers rather than runway models, a sensibility that later translated into global ubiquity. Scott’s trajectory followed a similar arc. As his sound and image expanded into stadiums, brand partnerships, and global campaigns, he became an unavoidable symbol of the millennial rapper as brand ambassador and, in turn, an easy target for skepticism. As his presence became more and more dominant, his work was treated less like music and more like a logo or a brand activation. Call it hip-hop’s version of the “rockism” discourse that plagued the aughts: the persistent belief that once something resonates too commercially, its artistic ambition must have been compromised.

“People wanted to keep [rap] a certain way,” he says of his early days. “I didn’t.”

“As far as musically, they won’t acknowledge a lot of the musical barriers and shit that I try to push with the music,” Scott says of his critics. “The genre-bending that I try to do with the music, the people I try to bring together, the true understanding of what I’m here to do.” He points to this very publication’s review, which called Utopia an “empty paradise.” “I don’t even overhype the things I’m doing onstage, but this is all in the same time that I went out and did a show that had 65,000 people. So, for me, I never gave a fuck about what critics or what people [who] criticize the music think.”

That disconnect, between fan adoration and critical praise, poses a challenge that Scott does seem interested in conquering. Despite his reluctance toward interviews (“I don’t want to continually explain myself,” he says), he’s decidedly friendly and open as we talk. “I can only put my best foot forward and go achieve and knock down barriers, right? But I think since the beginning of my career, that’s always been what it is,” he says. “I think these writers or whoever these people are, they feel like they got to have this tone towards what I’m doing.”

Scott is blunt about his frustrations with critics, and about his annoyance at the Grammys. So far, Scott has been nominated for 10, including a Best Rap Album nod for Utopia in 2024, though he’s yet to win one. He’s not shy that he feels he deserves the award. “There’s always the person that has one that will tell you it don’t matter,” he says. “They’ll tell you it don’t matter, but when you go in the crib, it’s on the mantel.”

Utopia and its subsequent tour wrap up a distinct period in Scott’s career. The tour — branded Utopia: Circus Maximus World Tour —  was also wildly successful, a sprawling global spectacle that spanned more than 80 concerts across six continents and more than 20 countries. By the time the tour ended late last year, it had sold more than 2 million tickets and grossed more than $250 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing solo rap tour in history. 

Like Kanye West before him, Scott had already built a reputation for ambitious live experiences. Early in his career, he was known for raucous, punk-like gigs, full of moshing fans. In 2020, he delivered a performance inside the video game Fortnite, which garnered more than 12.3 million unique players and set off a new wave of in-game concerts from the likes of Ariana Grande, Lil Nas X, and Eminem. “Even me doing in-game performances, we went back and forth. I love being in the physical [world], seeing the people. But for some reason, actually, [the in-game performance] was just so turnt.” He notes that the global pandemic may have helped his cause. “It was a different time, right? Everybody was home. It was one of those moments.”

It was against the backdrop of Covid restrictions lifting that the Astroworld tragedy unfolded in 2021, fundamentally changing how Scott’s performances, and the culture around them, would be understood. In the car, he becomes solemn when the subject comes up. He says he still thinks about the event, in which a crowd crush resulted in the death of 10 concertgoers at Scott’s festival in Houston. One of the hardest parts for him on a personal level is the fact that it happened in his hometown. “When I did that festival, I was trying to bring something to where I’m from, and when you look back, it’s like a time that was supposed to be so enjoyable just went wrong,” he says. “I would love to heal that in the city. But I would also want people to be receptive [to it]. I don’t want to force a reception.”

“I would love to heal that [pain] in [Houston]. But I would also want people to be receptive to it.”

More than four years later, Scott still faces scrutiny for the tragedy. “Through that experience, I think, there’s a distorted view of who I am and what I care about,” he says. I ask him what he’d say to the commentators who hold him individually responsible. (In 2023, a Houston grand jury declined to bring criminal charges against Scott or other organizers; civil litigation has continued, and many claims have been settled.) “I wouldn’t tell them anything. I would ask them,” he says. “Sometimes when I read or even hear about some of the shit that people write, I don’t even know if they believe it. I think there’s always been this distorted view of what I am. And it’s my responsibility just to keep showing what it really is.”

SCOTT PREPARED FOR A LIFE in music almost from birth. He was born Jacques Webster II and raised between the Houston neighborhoods of Sunnyside and Missouri City. His dad bought him a drum set when he was three years old, and from there he was obsessed. Eventually, he’d teach himself production, developing the eclectic sonic style that would define his career. Chase B, Scott’s longtime DJ, grew up in the same area, and has known Scott since they were kids — even if Scott got a head start on music. “It’s like our culture where we grew up,” Chase says. “Obviously, he was super involved in the music, [but] I wasn’t at the time. We were just cool. He was just playing me all the shit he was making, and the shit just sounded crazy.”

Later, when Chase would DJ in college at Howard University, Scott would send him his songs to play at parties — proceeding to blow people’s minds. “He would send me his music and I would go out to the house parties and I would just be playing it for people, and everybody was fucking with it. It was a whole thing, like, ‘Who is this?’” Eventually, Scott would come and visit Chase on campus. “We just ran around to different stores and shit, giving mixtapes out,” Chase recalls. “We were really doing everything guerrilla-style way before any album deal or artist deal got done or anything like that. We were just stuck in it, just me and him.”

In 2012, Scott, then known as Travi$ Scott, signed with Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music after a single of Scott’s, “Lights (Love Sick),” caught Ye’s ear. The next year, Scott started gaining wider attention with his mixtape Owl Pharaoh, a project that immediately stood out as a new sound in West’s Yeezus-era orbit. The project drew as much from IDM (so-called intelligent dance music) and electronic styles as it did from Southern rap. Its blown-out synths, fragmented hooks, and dark, immersive atmosphere are a vivid precursor to the sonic distortion of the current era’s underground-rap heavyweights. Listening to the mega-viral young artist esdeeKid, for instance, you can hear hints of mixtape-era Travis Scott.

Owl Pharaoh set the stage for Scott’s world-building, a term he’s keen on using. Its songs felt engineered for a highly distinct mood, and his voice, a husky brooding tone that was grizzled by Auto-Tune, functioned more as another instrument in the mix than typical vocals.

By the time his Astroworld album arrived in 2018, Scott had fully fused his influences — Houston rap, electronic and EDM, Kanye-era maximalism, and aughts-vintage trap — into a blockbuster vision. Named after a now-­defunct Houston theme park, Astroworld was both intimate and engineered for scale, marking the culmination of Scott’s early ascent and establishing him as one of the defining rap ­artists of his era. Around this time, Scott launched the Cactus Jack label. Since then, it’s grown into a creative umbrella for his own releases and for artists he’s signed. In 2019, the label released its first Jackboys compilation, featuring artists on the label. “Everybody just got their own thing,” Scott says of his signees, who include Don Toliver, Sheck Wes, and SoFaygo. “Don and Sheck with this raw energy. And Faygo, just melodically. Everybody just got their own energy.”

Toliver remembers buying the Rodeo CD from Target: “Travis really stood out. I really was just like, ‘Wait a minute, this guy is from the H and he going crazy like this?’” It wouldn’t be long before their paths crossed, as Toliver started gaining his own buzz around Houston. “And then one day, he just randomly hit me up and was like, ‘Yo, pull up to Hawaii,’” he recalls. “I literally just threw everything I had in a bag, in a suitcase, and jumped on a plane.”

Last year, Cactus Jack released its second compilation album, Jackboys 2, which debuted at Number One on the charts. Fans’ reaction to the project online, however, was mixed. “I’m hearing that maybe they wanted it to feel like a solo [album],” Scott says. “This is just an album where you were in a group of different people. And I love that. I think the album is dope as shit.”

Jackboys 2 arrived at a particularly contentious time last summer. Weeks before it was set to drop, Clipse released the single “So Be It,” which takes direct aim at Scott. “Calabasas took your bitch and your pride in front of me,” Pusha T raps on the track, referring to Scott’s ex. “Her utopia had moved right up the street.” The jab came because Scott had been pulled into Pusha’s long-running feud with Drake: On Utopia’s “Meltdown,” Drake’s verse throws shots at Pharrell Williams, Pusha’s close collaborator. In interviews, Pusha suggested Scott once crashed his recording session with Williams to play them the album, but intentionally omitted Drake’s verse.

Scott disputes Pusha’s version of events. “When you go back and look at it … it’s crazy. Niggas said I had a film crew [with me]. I’m like, ‘What?’ I remember when I pulled up, it was them niggas that had a film crew,” he says. “I’m talking about the little microphone on the stick and all of that. I was like, ‘Oh, shit. Am I in a documentary?’”

As for not playing Drake’s “Meltdown” verse for them during a listening session, Scott says the verse hadn’t come in at that point. “A lot of shit [Pusha] was saying just didn’t make sense to me. It was like he was saying I was interrupting shit and I was playing them shit. First of all, I can’t interrupt something that somebody asked me to come pull up on,” he says, noting that Pharrell specifically invited him to the session. “So when I hear that type of shit, it’s just like, I don’t know, man. If you got to drop Trav name for the rollout, so be it.”

“Man, my kids are just like me
when it comes to trying to get off ideas.”

In the past couple of years of industry drama in hip-hop, Scott has at least tried to stay more or less neutral, which is partly why Pusha’s comments were surprising. “I’ve always been a person who tried to put the best worlds all together. And I just think when worlds come together, the music just sounds so ill,” he says. “You got to think, man, rap is only what, 51 years old? That’s just young as hell. It’s a genre that’s still growing, so people are really trying to see the growth of it.”

Chase B, who’s releasing his own solo album this year, has taken inspiration from Scott’s ethos. “There’s really no boundaries to this shit. When it comes to putting these songs together and these collaborations [with Scott], people really do be excited to kind of step out of their boxes too,” he says. “People want to be like, ‘Oh, shit, I never really took this angle from here before.’” Scott credits his upbringing in Missouri City, on Houston’s southwest side, as key to his worldview. “MO City, I tell people all the time, if you want to ever grow somewhere, that shit right there is the best place because you get a mix of everything,” he says. “All different types of people, all walks of life, all nationalities, all types of psyches.”

One figure who comes to mind when thinking of Scott’s rise is the late designer and creative Virgil Abloh, whose collaborative spirit stamped a generation of young hip-hop acts, Scott included. “We come from that school. When I first started, Virgil was starting [art collective and DJ crew] Been Trill,” he says. “He always had that tone of just bringing people together for the right thing.” For Scott, that spirit of collaboration is a hallmark of the era he came up in. “The artists that came up with my generation, we got such an important task to just hold this down to another level. Because we ain’t had nobody ever show us how to do this shit,” he says. “We had to go through this shit and really break the molds. We got to really put our heads together to really keep this going and really pass that shit along. And it’s not even about being all ultra sharing and fucking kumbaya. It’s about remembering to leave a trail for people to have an understanding [of what you do].”

By now, Scott has left his own trail of products and collaborations that all speak to a broader universe. There are his long-standing collaborations with Nike, his Cactus Jack brand and label, his partnership with Oakley, and Cacti hard seltzer, to name only a few. “I’m trying to have something here that’s like an experience that’s passed on to generations,” he says. “And the things that I do and create can be placed in households. On the mantels, and in the collections, and the stories that’s told behind it.”

He recalls having a voracious creative taste as a kid, from film to art and design and fashion. “These are just different aspects that I was intrigued and I was into, to be honest,” he says. “I’m just into all things creative. I might not be the best in everything. That’s how I can respect working with other people in certain fields that I’m not so good in.” In person, Scott is most effusive when he’s talking about ideas or concepts. There is a sort of childlike wonder to the way he describes how products — yes, products — inspire him. Following the acclaim of his first two mixtapes, Scott recalls wanting to release his debut album as an action figure that included a USB stick. While the plan didn’t pan out, Scott’s multidisciplinary instincts were present from the start. “I like things to be based on my ideas and things that I create and things I design,” he says. “This is for someone that might not even like me as an artist, might not even like me.”

Yet, even with his focus on innovation, Scott has his reservations about AI. “In specific ways, if used right, it could be helpful. I think it’s all about how it’s used,” he says. “You got to challenge the designers and the creatives of the world. Instead of running from something, you got to become a leader in setting a platform and design landscape for it before it just gets too out of control.”

When it comes to his children using AI, he’s matter-of-fact. “My kids don’t have AI,” he notes. “Having AI right now will compress their ability for their brain to maximize. So they got to learn the physical and the actual way of learning so then they know how to actually use AI to their best ability, because if it’s doing everything for you, how do you even know what’s right or wrong?”

Scott seems to take particular pride in his parenting. While he keeps his kids’ private life private, he lights up when he talks about fatherhood. The hardest part about being on the road for so long, he says, is being away from his children. Fatherhood has given him a new perspective on life. “You can’t crash out. You can’t do a lot of crazy shit like you would,” he says. “Man, my kids are just like me when it comes to trying to get off ideas. My son’s three now, about to be four. I took him to the Disney Imagineering spot, and his mind was just going off when he seen the robots and all the new tech and how it’s built.”

THE MANSION SITS ATOP a high point in Beverly Hills and features sweeping, unimpeded views of the entire region, stretching from downtown L.A. all the way to the ocean. A legal protection attached to the property prevents future development from blocking the mansion’s sight lines. Evening sets in as the mansion’s floor-to-ceiling, retractable glass window drapes a panoramic vista of the greater Los Angeles area into the wide-open living space. Scott drifts from room to room in his shades, thanking staff and talking through the bones of the place.

As we make our way out of the house, Scott says he can see himself touring well into old age. He cites the likes of Iggy Pop and Ozzy Osbourne as examples of the kind of performance longevity he’d like to have. He famously collaborated with Ozzy on “Take What You Want,” from Post Malone’s 2019 album Hollywood’s Bleeding. “[Ozzy] was cool as fuck. We could see him sitting in his chair, and he was like, ‘Travis!’” Scott recalls, offering up his best Ozzy impression. “I turned around, I was like, ‘Oh, man, it’s Ozzy Osbourne. Shit.’”

For now, Scott says, he’s focused on his next album, which he’s envisioning being played in stadiums. “When I make the music, I have this full vision. I see it going down,” he says. “I’m thinking stadium status. How could people so far away feel so close? How can the music be so big but grounded? Taking raw elements and making it feel, like, euphoric. Man, finding new rhythms, but nothing too hard to take in. You know what I’m saying? A level of what could Rodeo be like on the ultra-scale stadium life.” 

He’s cagey about any concrete timelines, but says fans can expect new music in the near future. “Got to feed the kids, man. The kids must eat.”