I love hanging out with my cousin, so when she said she was coming to Toronto from Ottawa to see Travis Scott, I jumped at the chance to tag along. After all, SZA’s “Love Galore” is one of my favourite songs. Most of my favourite artists had collaborated with Travis at some point, and I’d liked what I’d heard. Yes, I hadn’t listened to Utopia, his latest album, but how bad could it be?

Travis Scott is a great collaborator because he’s friends with great artists. But he doesn’t have the vocal skills or the mind for lyrics to carry an album so sprawling. His production is over-grandiose to the point where it feels muddy. I looped that album all December and I didn’t like a single song on it. Then I looped ASTROWORLD and I didn’t like a single song on that, either. Also, if you’ve forgotten like I had: it was Scott who caused the deaths at the Astroworld Festival back in 2019. He’s indirectly responsible for 10 people literally suffocating to death standing up, because he was encouraging all the people around them to rush the stage. I was up in the nosebleeds, so I wasn’t afraid for my life. I was afraid for the security guards, though, who are not paid nearly enough to fight a rich kid high on party drugs for the sake of a man telling that rich kid to act as crazy as he can.

Teezo Touchdown was supposed to perform, and for whatever reason didn’t show up. Instead, Scott’s DJ played a half-hour set made exclusively of Drake songs, like they were trying to hint Travis would bring him on. Travis himself started a respectable 90 minutes late, coming on stage as different parts of the labyrinthine platform they’d built for him erupted into flame. Everyone lost their shit. The people on the floor pressed as close to the bars as they could. And Scott’s energy was good – rapping himself instead of lip-synching, leaping into the air with every line. For a moment, I thought, This might actually be really fun.

Five minutes later, he stopped. He told us we needed to scream so loud the top of Scotiabank Arena would come off. So we did: “Travis, Travis, Travis!” at the top of our lungs. He stood there and took it all in. I realized he didn’t have any backup dancers. He intended to entertain 50,000 people for two hours on the force of his own charisma. Then the lights got crazy, and fire shot up from the stage, and he started rapping again… then five minutes later he stopped to catch his breath and watch us all hang on to his every word.

This pattern kept repeating, but he did other things, too. His favourite thing to do was to pick someone out of the crowd – he’d make everyone scream for his attention for minutes first – so they could climb onto a skull-shaped platform suspended from the ceiling and lose their shit. He didn’t bring on any other artists; just Travis. Well, and his dozens of stagehands, there to set off more fire, hook people onto the skull for liability purposes, and protect him from the crowd when he left the stage for his costume change. At one point, he put three of them in Bigfoot costumes and had them roam the stage without spotlights on them. This was the most he was willing to share the attention.  

Most of his set list featured other rappers, so I had been expecting him to cover their lyrics as well. Instead, he just ended the songs before their verses. My cousin was most excited for him to play “FE!N,” and he did. And then he played it again. By the second time screaming along, I had a moment of mortification, realizing the chorus is literally just the word “fiend” 20 times in a row. By the fifth time (because he played it five times), when people around me were taking off their shirts and throwing them into the audience and the security guards had formed a human wall to stop a crowd crush with their own bodies… I was wondering how someone so self-obsessed, reckless, and mediocre could sell out Scotiabank Arena.