Travis Scott — ASTROWORLD ANALYSIS & REVIEW
Published 08/10/2018
For a work that seemingly attempted to put personality, uniqueness, and a sonic divergence from the norm in the forefront, it was very disappointing to hear incredibly lackluster decisions in vital elements of the music such as rhythm, form, and textural development. Priorities were backwards throughout the work; what was obviously built to be the selling point, which was the chosen atmospheric synths and general sonic space, came to mean very little due to the more exposed and influential parts of the barebones structure being very tedious, malnourished, unoriginal, and rudimentary. An analogy: a poorly written book with an uninteresting plot and boring character development is printed in a new, decorative font. Some readers, namely adolescents who don’t have much experience, might enjoy that, but many others will see right through it. Musically, what came to be the only speck of creativity and personality here had little to no affect from song to song, as the weightier substances that the music was created from were well too dull to be overcome.
I’ve said this many times before, but rap music has a rather make or break style due to the minimal textures it often uses and the sheer amount of exposure the solo voice receives. In other words, there’s not a lot of room for error for either the voice to lose interest in pitch and (more importantly) rhythm, or for the backing percussive structure to lose interest in its repetitive figures. Essentially, that’s the entire musical structure. This album lost interest in both sides almost right away and never recovered. It wasn’t so terrible in providing at least a basic level of background engagement; the chosen synthetic instruments delivering semblances of harmonic movement weren’t necessarily ear sores, although they certainly didn’t provide enough of a distraction from the ridiculous backing vocal additions saying the same few words every time.
As stated earlier, development on all fronts was largely missing and created a huge void. Only the bookends of the album were songs worth listening to from start to finish, as they were the only ones to employ some sort of important dynamic and textural growth in original idea, whereas the rest of the songs gave the listener everything they’d get in the first 45 seconds, and it wasn’t pretty. Development isn’t a necessity when the original idea is a home run, but these had a hard time even getting on base. Subjects were well too plain and overstated, and moved nowhere interesting for the duration of the track. These songs all had rather slow tempos, which in itself was a sameness that was difficult to enjoy, and on top of that there was nothing pulling them through, be it a highlighted instrumental addition or change in range or dynamic variety. There were absolutely no rewarding arrival points found in this music. The sound was at a basic level of being amicable for the most part, only dipping into real empty, flat boredom in songs like “Wake Up” and “Can’t Say” with terribly bleak guitar usage. Vocal auto-tune hindered more than it helped. I don’t care if that’s “just the style”; it created an overly poignant and sharp emphasis on lifeless melodic lines not worth showcasing and in turn became very annoying and trite. Add on the fact that it literally makes the delivery lose its authenticity, and you have a very lackluster timbral decision.
Then, we get to the most dominant part of this music, the melodic layer, which was quite pathetic. The second half especially felt like a complete crawl due to the inane amount of boring repetitive material in the voice — the rhythms were repeated measure by measure and were annoyingly oversimplified, pitch involvement was nothing but arbitrary and created lines were very shallow with no harmonic involvement or emotional height. This was a terrible showing by Travis Scott in trying to match his sonic ideas with a forefront that could potentially bring us into this world and give that necessary dosage of captivation right away. It’s obvious that his lines were either not prioritized at all, or he simply has no compelling talent. Newsflash: doing the same stupid rhythms over and over again that everyone else is doing will never creatively fit with any unique background idea, and in this case, it really took away from the personal expression and deviations it tried to convey. In truth, this came to be not much different from any other failed, bloated rap album. There’s a clear talent divide in the rap world today, and Scott finds himself on the wrong side of it with this bore of a work. Despite what he tries to keep reminding us of in the background of these songs, it’s not “lit”. It never was.
