8 Wednesday November 10 2021 | the timesarts
‘I
am just a kid from Texas,”
said Travis Scott last
month in an interview
to promote a unique
collaboration with the
French fashion label
Dior for which he
had just co-designed a
line of clothes.
It was the latest in a string of
commercial affiliations for the
award-winning 30-year-old
rapper, born Jacques Bermon
Webster II, including deals with
the fast-food giant McDonald’s
and the sporting colossus Nike. A
master of marketing, when the
live music world closed down
during lockdown he teamed up
with the phenomenally popular
online game Fortnite — more
than 27 million players watched an
animated version of Scott perform.
Scott is a protégé of Kanye West and
his partner is Kylie Jenner, half-sister
of Kim Kardashian and sister of the
model Kendall Jenner. Kylie is the
most followed woman on Instagram
(with 280 million followers) and the
founder of a cosmetics company that
made her, briefly, a billionaire at just- She is now worth an estimated
$700 million, while Scott has a fortune
of about $60 million. Last year GQ
described him as “one of the most
influential people on the planet”.
Today, though, the American rapper
is facing a slew of lawsuits after eight
people died and hundreds were
injured in the crush during the
annual Astroworld Festival he
organised for about 50,000
people in his home city of
Houston last week.
He and Drake, the
Canadian rapper, are accused
of inciting the crowd to cause
mayhem. The city’s police
chief has said that he went on
stage and “conveyed concerns
about the energy of the crowd’’.
There were a couple of stoppages
when Scott spotted ambulances but
the show carried on as people were
squeezed unconscious. In videos on
TikTok taken by fans the concert
continues as terrified concertgoers are
heard screaming and chant at Scott to
“stop the show”.
Where responsibility lies for the
tragedy remains to be determined — a
criminal investigation is under way —
The $60 million rapper,
his $700 million partner
and the mega concert
that ended in tragedy
Travis Scott was celebrated as ‘the pied piper of the mosh pit’ until, on
Friday, eight people died in the crowd at his show. By Damian Whitworth
but an impending sense that
something in Scott’s life might career
out of control seemed apparent from
the first moments of the documentary
Netflix filmed about him in 2019: Look
Mom I Can Fly.
As he sits calmly in a rollercoaster
as it thunders through the night sky,
all around him people scream. Scott
tells the interviewer: “I feel like at
some points in life you have to just be
extreme and sometimes you have to
take all matters to the extreme.”
The film then cuts to scenes of a
concert where he was urgently telling
a crowd of his fans to “back up” as
they surged in a frightening mass
in front of the stage and
paramedics hurried in bearing
stretchers. In footage a few
moments later he is heard
introducing himself to the
audience: “To those who
don’t know my name it’s
Travis f***ing Scott.”
He needed no introduction
in that arena. But despite his
popularity, many over the age
of 25 were probably only dimly
aware of him here until he hit the
headlines at the weekend. Perhaps
they had heard his name on the
Reading Festival line-up from 2018.
Anyone whose post-GCSEs child
came back from seeing him headline
the festival that year raving about the
rite-of-passage of plunging into the
mosh pit, may have broken into a
cold sweat as the grim news came in
of last Friday’s tragedy.Scott has been called “the pied
piper of the mosh pit” and his
concerts are famous for fans — and
the star himself — wildly throwing
themselves about, or “raging” as he
calls it, and body surfing across
heaving seas of people.
He said he was unaware of the
gravity of the situation as it unfolded
in Houston on Friday and was
“absolutely devastated” by what
happened. He has offered to pay for
the funerals of those who died and
to refund all ticket holders, gestures
that he certainly has the financial
means to fulfil.
Scott and Kylie Jenner were first
spotted together at the Coachella
festival in 2017 and have a daughter,
Stormi, now three, whom Scott calls
“our little rager” and who was with
her mother on Friday watching her
father perform. Scott and Jenner’s
relationship has reportedly been
tempestuous but they are back
together after a break-up and
expecting a second child.
The couple bought a Beverly Hills
mansion for a reported $13 million
and last year he spent $23.5 million
on a house that looks like a beached
superyacht on a hillside in Brentwood,
Los Angeles.
He rarely talks about his private life
and is not keen on all the attention on
their relationship. “I don’t think he’s
really cool with it, but he deals with it,
because we love each other and we
have a family,” Jenner once said. “I
know he doesn’t like the attention.
That’s why we just go the extra mile
to keep our relationship super
private... I don’t want it to be Kylie
and Trav. If people don’t ever see us
together, that’s OK with me, because
we just do our thing.”
However, they have engaged in
carefully curated appearances. Almost
48 million people watched her
question Scott on such matters as
her eye colour and the names of her
dogs for a GQ video. She appeared in
the video for one of his songs.
At one stage he denied rumours of
cheating and told Rolling Stone about
the start of their relationship. “We was
just two kids, f***ing around. Maybe,
like, the first week, you don’t know if
it’s real or a fling.
“Then the second week you’re like,
‘Whoa, I’m still talking to her, she’s
responding, I’m responding. We ain’trun out of a thing to say.’ And it got to
a point where I was, like, ‘I need her
with me to operate. She’s that one.’ ”
He said in that 2018 interview: “We’ll
get married soon. I just gotta sturdy up
— I gotta propose in a fire way.”
The next year he interviewed her for
Playboy and she said that “we think
the same, and we have the same goals
and passions in life. Besides the fact
that we have good chemistry, we have
a lot of fun together. You’re my best
friend. Through all the ups and downs
that every relationship has, we evolve
together through them and keep
getting stronger.”
Stormi’s birth was, the rapper said,
the first time he cried. “Fatherhood
influences my job. It has a huge
impact. It’s a major inspiration.” He
told the magazine I-D: “I realised my
job is way more important than what
I thought because of her. More
responsibility, you know? You’ve got
to use that properly.”
Previously he has sought to describe
the crazy behaviour of fans that he
stokes up at concerts as creating a
community. “You can fall and
everyone will pick you up. It’s weird
how one person’s music can turn
everyone into a family.”
Scott was born in a tough Houston
neighbourhood where he lived for the
first few years of his childhood with
his grandmother and saw “randomp
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Reading FeTravis Scott at the
Astroworld Festival
in Houston last week.
Right: with his
partner, Kylie Jenner,
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some points
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be extreme