SZA has unveiled a new song from her forthcoming album ctrl, titled Love Galore featuring Travis Scott. She first previewed the track back in January, but the full song – and an accompanying video, typical of the beauty and pristine production TDE visuals are known for – us now upon us. The video has been directed by Nabil, who also directed Kendrick’s DNA. video.
https://youtu.be/3OteKsbBeas
Top Dawg Entertainment appear to be living up to their promise of finally releasing SZA’s new album now that Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. is out. What’s interesting, though, is that the song has been released alongside the announcement of a new signing. That is, SZA’s album will be co-released by TDE and RCA Records, under the banners of Universal and Sony Music respectively. RCA is home to pop singers like Sia, Justin Timberlake and Zayn, as well as the likes of D’Angelo, A$AP Rocky.
Solana Rowe, aka SZA, the first and only female signee to the label that called Kendrick Lamar, ScHoolboy Q, Jay Rock and Ab-Soul home, has been teetering on the edge of her new release since last EP Z came out back in 2014.
Following on from S and Z, many assumed her new release would be A, but we found out last year it’ll be titled ctrl instead. SZA dropped new track Drew Barrymore and performed on late night TV back in January, less than three months after announcing on Twitter, “I actually quit“, and blamed her label for holding up her release.
That said, TDE promised SZA’s album would be out back in February. It was also supposed to come out last year – but let’s focus on the future for now.
As an aside – what’s up with Travis Scott and TDE lately? He came out on stage at Coachella to perform Goosebumps with Kendrick Lamar. He’s been announced as the main support act for Kendrick on the DAMN. tour. And now this? Very, very interesting.
Travis Scott’s latest album Birds In The Trap Sing McKnight was pretty decent. While it wasn’t the best rap album to surface this year, it was nonetheless solid enough. The bars were pretty good, and my only real criticism was with the lack of diversity in the sounds production-wise.
One of the tracks that wasn’t that great, however, was Beibs In The Trap. It was just kind of… eh. Nav’s voice was fairly average, and Scott’s opening to his verse is just abysmal. So it’s with no great excitement that I write this piece about an upcoming video for the track. Scott posted a picture of a pretty sweet car on his Instagram, stating “BEIBS IN THE TRAP SOON.”
Of course, Travis Scott has shown to have a pretty loose grasp on the meaning of “soon,” so I wouldn’t hold your breath. Still, music videos are usually fun, and might even make the song sound a little better. Scott’s Lambo seems to be dressed up as a 1940’s car, so here’s hoping that the video breaks away from the generic aesthetic, unlike the song it portrays. But hey, at least it isn’t a video for First Take, because that song actually sucks.
Image: Instagram
Other than being a protégé of Kanye West, rapper/producer Travis Scott can also ignite a crowd, and then some. The Houston-native is currently in Australia for Listen Out festival and decided to swing by Sydney to perform to a very rowdy sold-out crowd. Sweet, sweaty hysteria ensued.
If you’re devastated that you missed out on this, stooge around no longer. Listen Out is heading to Sydney and Brisbane this weekend, featuring an all-time lineup, including Anderson .Paak, RÜFÜS, Ngaiire, A$AP Ferg, Cosmo’s Midnight, Yung Lean and many more.
Photos: Dani Hansen/Howl & Echoes
Last week, Travis Scott released his latest full length studio album, Birds In The Trap Sing McKnight. Now I have to say that before it dropped my hype levels weren’t huge. Rodeo was a pretty lukewarm effort, and while a sophomore album generally indicates an improvement or refinement of skills, hopes weren’t high for Birds. So when my phone politely bleeped with a notification around the time of release, I plugged in my headphones somewhat reservedly. The first beats of the ends trickled through. Scott’s heavily auto-tuned voice belted from the ambient synths, announcing “2 AM howlin’ outside/Lookin’ but I cannot find.” My hopes were beginning to rise. André 3000 dropped in for a verse (not as stunning as his verse on Frank Ocean’s latest, but still solid), and the opening track painted a pretty great picture for the rest of the album.
However by the time that the closer rolled around, some 54 minutes later, Birds was wearing thin. The rapping was still as strong as ever, with subtle lyricism and flow that is hard to improve on. It showed that Travis Scott was a competent story teller, and a class-A rapper. The incredibly heavy use of auto-tune was bold (or safe, depending on who you’re talking to), and it mostly paid off (there were a few moments when it could have been scaled back, or even ditched). Production-wise, that’s another story.
The entire album is full of the most stereotypical trap/hip-hop beats you could imagine. The old kick-reverb-distorted-bass combo is there, along with that (increasingly insufferable) tick-tick-tick noise (AKA Rolling Hi-Hats) that seems to be in every amateur rap song released in the last year. There’s no variation. Only the intros and outros of each track offer any sense of musical deviation from the bog standard, and even there it’s only one or two bars of a different synth before the drums kick in. It’s frustrating to listen to, even more so on repeated spins. No matter how amazing the rapping is, it’s ruined by such generic and, ultimately, boring production. And the sting is made worse by the fact that there’s so much good production out there. Like, a lot.
One need only look as far as Kanye West to see how production is done right. Sure, he was a producer before he was known as a rapper, but that’s besides the point. Production is one of the most important aspects of hip-hop, and Kanye, among many others, gets it so right. Every one of his albums has had its own distinctive style, with the production lending a sense of cohesion to the album as a whole. Yeezus was so well produced that many people consider the rapping secondary to the beats (but we’ll save that debate for another day). It was harsh, daring and above all, exciting. It’s this quality that Travis Scott lacks on this album. Cut and paste beats aren’t good enough to support his rapping. Good production is what elevates a great rapper to legendary status. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy may have been one of Kanye’s more “traditional” rap albums; it’s the production that’s contributed so heavily to its place among the greatest hip-hop records of all time. His use of auto-tune was smart, with Runaway using it more as a vocoder than a vocal enhancement or a veil. The beats were layered and complex, often utilising creative samples and new sounds, rather than wheeling out the same, vapid trends that we’ve all heard before.
Other great examples include both Run The Jewels albums (El-P is without doubt one of hip-hop’s greatest producers), and Kendrick Lamar‘s To Pimp A Butterfly. Not only a stunning hip-hop album thematically and lyrically, but the musical backing, as unorthodox as it is, similarly contributed to it immediately becoming a timeless masterpiece. It’s the experimentation with new sounds, cross-genre blends and unusual, challenging rhythms that make these records sound so good. El-P toys with heavy, almost industrial beats and post-apocalyptic instrumental layers which add feverish power to he and Killer Mike’s already dextrous verses. K.dot’s ability to conceptualise an album so dense, over beats which blend jazz, soul, electronic (not just any electronic either, but Flying Lotus, who originally gave those beats to Kendrick) and so much more, is quite simply astounding. The jazz-inspired musical style was revolutionary in the world of mainstream hip-hop, and propelled Lamar from a place of quiet success to one of the biggest names in the industry. Even Action Bronson continues to collaborate with the likes of Mark Ronson to produce some of the smoothest beats this side of Queens, and ScHoolboy Q can deliver an extremely heavy gangsta rap album with soul, melodies, and dynamic hooks. In a world where Vince Staples can release an album bookended by James Blake productions, and where De La Soul can release something so surprisingly funky as And The Anonymous Nobody so late into their career, how can we justify the hype surrounding hip-hop where the beats fail to match the lyrics?
Image: Hypebeast
While Kanye West has obviously been dominating headlines with his own WAVES news, another artist has released a track of the same name. R&B crooner Miguel has dropped a gorgeous remix of his 2015 song, similarly titled Waves, featuring bars from none other than Travis Scott.
Waves was originally released on Miguel’s beautiful 2015 album Wildheart, and the Scott-featuring remix has breathed new life into the seductive bedroom track. Blending Miguel’s signature neo-soul sensuality with Scott’s upbeat hip-hop, the track has been given a massive makeover.
The original track opens softly, with that seductive, syncopated blend of neo-soul and rock elements that made Miguel’s album so unique, and so cool. It then opens into a more disco-friendly, dance-floor ready beat, with a bright chorus and suggestive lyrics about riding that wave, surfin’ that wave, and so on. The remix, on the other hand, opens with a heavier beat and an atmosphere that’s immediately bigger, headier, and very Travis Scott, complete with a verse of his own, auto-tune, and Scott-savvy synth flickers.
Miguel was supposed to visit Australia late last year to perform at Soulfest, but unfortunately the event was cancelled just days before it was supposed to kick off. His album, Wildheart, was one of our favourites of 2015, so our fingers are crossed that he’ll be touching down soon!
Travis Scott has pleaded guilty to charges of reckless conduct, after he literally incited a riot during his set at Lollapalooza last August.
During the set, Scott encouraged fans to jump the security barricades, while telling security- who he referred to as “everyone in a green shirt”- to get out of the way. His set lasted all of five minutes before being shut down, despite his admissions to the crowd that “we can start over, everybody just get down”. Scott attended court last Tuesday (Dec 22nd), where a judge ruled that he be placed under court supervision for a year.
It’s a small blemish on what has been a huge year for the rapper, having released his debut LP Rodeo last September to considerable acclaim.
While there were no major injuries, one 15 year old girl was said to have been trampled- and he was arrested by Chicago police moments after the set’s short finish. At that time, the Office of Emergency Management released a statement stating that, “The performer played one song and then began telling fans to come over the barricades. Due to the security’s quick response, the situation was remedied immediately and no fans were injured. The performer fled the scene and was taken into custody a short while later.”
It’s unknown at this point how this ruling will effect Scott’s upcoming support slot on Rihanna’s ANTI tour- but as is stands it seems that he got off lightly.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnZ8h3MRuYg&w=560&h=315]
There was a lot of anticipation around Travis Scott’s debut album Rodeo, which in advance of its release was compared to Kanye West and Kid Cudi, both artists Travis admires. Big shoes to fill – even my size 15 foot might flounder in such an undertaking and unfortunately, so does Travis.
Travis’ name has been in the media a lot leading up to Rodeo, with his non-shit-giving personality and the way he’s been acting out: fighting security, fighting a fan, threatening concertgoers, humiliating a photographer, ‘inciting a riot’ at Lollapalooza, and, recently, making homophobic slurs. He might be trying to come across as a badass, but these antics land him closer to the juvenile behaviours of other rappers of his age group like Odd Future (whose dark and twisted raps are at least well written).
Taking inspiration from Kanye, in Rodeo Travis gives us the gothic sound that he helped Kanye craft on Yeezus with songs I Am God, Guilt Trip and New Slaves and later expanded on with his stellar sophomore mixtape, Days Before Rodeo. But here, some of the auto-tune audio-synth is murky and at times hard to understand.
The key to pulling off the futuristic, experimental synth-rap sound that works so well for ‘Ye and Cudi is having tight raps to back it up, which Travis unfortunately doesn’t. In the song Apple Pie, Travis even says, “I am everything, except a rapper”, which is a confusing statement to make on a rap album.
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Travis is far from a show-stopping rapper, which I feel like we might have known from his two mixtapes (where he actually comes a lot harder on the raps than he does in Rodeo). So why else would you listen to the latest rap album if not for well-crafted raps? You might pick up the album because of his ear for putting together producers, engineers, and guests to create killer fresh-sounding tracks. With exposure and endorsement from Kanye, along with the inspiration of Kid Cudi’s Man on the Moon, Rodeo had all the makings of an album worth waiting for. Needless to say, the hype behind his debut album was enormous.
But it seems that the hype was too much for Travis to live up to. He is simply overshadowed as a rapper by the illustrious guests he raps alongside: Kanye West, Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, Chief Keef, Future, ScHoolboy Q, Quavo, Young Thug.
The only time I found myself turning up the volume when driving the truck around Melbourne streets was during the guest verses from 2 Chainz and, weirdly enough, Justin Bieber. Whatever your opinion of Justin Bieber, he delivers a surprisingly good verse on Maria I’m Drunk, one of the more thrilling numbers on the album which pairs Bieber with Young Thug. The track is a rework of the Travis Scott and Young Thug collab Drunk, with Bieber subbing in for Travis for the second verse. It is such an unlikely combo of pop star and rapper that the track reads as skippable – but it actually makes for a better song than the original.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFQI7_3un2s&w=560&h=315]
There’s a lack of narrative or identity on Rodeo, and I found Travis repeatedly falling back on overused ideas like too many blunts and too much liquor. In fact, OK Alright and Never Catch Me, billed as bonus tracks, actually deliver more of the personal and entertaining approach that has been missing from the main tracks on the album.
I’m not saying Rodeo is a bad album: it fits together as a whole, but individually the songs aren’t great. It might be a good debut for someone else, just not for Travis. He has proven himself a solid producer and music video director, but his rap game is just not up to the standard you’d expect in an album. He might have been better off taking the Statik Selektah approach, gathering the who’s who of the rap game to spit 16 over his tracks.
There are definitely a few bangers on the album with some surprisingly good moments – “30 30 3,500 for the coat/only real n***** keep you float/only trill n***** I know,” is catchy as fuck and I’ve rapped it at my dog for the past two days (with “puppy” in place of the n-words). But it shouldn’t be a case of a few songs being only ‘surprisingly’ good, and in a year that has given us To Pimp a Butterfly; I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside; Songs in the Key of Price, Sean Price’s posthumous tribute; and two Ghostface albums, I can’t help but look at this and wonder if it was really ready.
Whatever you do, don’t let the dollar signs fool you.
Travi$ Scott was about to play a listening session of his debut album Rodeo at the Up & Down club in New York, when a comment by a fan hit home.
The footage was captured by those guardians of culture – TMZ. In the clip, Scott is heading towards the club, flanked by flashing cameras and fans. One fan has the poor sense to yell out “A$AP Rocky!” Not a good call. Even if the artist had been A$AP Rocky, having his own name yelled out at him was hardly going to end with the two becoming best friends. Not wanting to let that slide, Travis does a 180, comes back from the club and snaps “Not motherfuckin’ A$AP Bitch.” La Flame’s quick reaction seems to suggest this isn’t the first time he has been mistaken for Lord Flacko.
Do you file this as a racist Miley Cyrus-esque “all you people look alike” gaffe? Or is it a more forgiveable comparison because both artists have braided hair and dollar signs on their names?
Either way, nothing can ever be as appalling as this:
More: A$AP Rocky’s At. Long. Last. A$AP album review