Drive through any neighborhood in south Houston on a summer evening and you’re likely to feel the thrum of woozy bass lines vibrating from car stereos.
Out of an open window, you’ll hear the sluggish moan of a pitched-down voice rapping in slow motion, a hallmark of “chopped and screwed” hip-hop, a mainstay on the city’s unofficial soundtrack.
As with any transcendent art form, this sound is no longer Houston’s alone.
The novelty sub-genre pioneered by DJ Screw while messing with turntables in his apartment, has, over 20 years, been borrowed, bent, broken and even shamelessly stolen by artists across the globe.
Cultural appropriation, homage, or both? It’s a classic question in art, one Travis Scott should be feeling keenly right now.
The Houston rapper’s music, at times, borrows from the native sonic dialect, mimicking the chopped and screwed style as a wink to his local roots growing up in Missouri City.
He liberally references Houston iconography on his albums, mixtapes and merchandise, from Astroworld to Frenchy’s Chicken to the Toyota Center. In return, he’s given back to the city through charitable contributions and toy drives. His Cactus Jack Foundation helped build a new basketball court at Sunnyside Park, a community garden at an elementary school, and an art and design center for middle and high school students on the East End.
His status as a cultural ambassador was cemented by Mayor Sylvester Turner, who presented Scott with a key to the city in 2019 for “keeping Houston on the map.”
Then, two years ago, Scott’s most significant cultural contribution to Houston–the Astroworld music festival– ended in tragedy.
What was meant to be a tribute to the iconic amusement park Scott frequented as a child descended into a horror show: 10 concertgoers, including a 9-year-old boy, died when a massive crowd surge caused them to black out and suffocate while the star rocked the stage.
What is Scott’s stature among the rich lineage of Houston artists now? Astroworld has yet to return.
Civil suits brought by thousands of festival attendees against Scott and concert organizer Live Nation are still pending, and Scott has barely shown his face in Houston since.
While he escaped criminal charges for his role in the Astroworld deaths after a grand jury declined to indict him in June, he has yet to achieve public absolution —no matter what his lawyer says.
A 1,200-page Houston Police Department report released on July 28 revealed that Scott may have, in fact, been aware of how unsafe the crowd was while performing, yet did little to stop it, and apparently stood to lose millions of dollars if he did.
HPD investigators interviewed witnesses who directly contradict Scott’s claim in his own police interview that he didn’t know about any of the crowd deaths until after the show.
Steve Hupkowizc, a monitor engineer at the festival, told investigators that Scott was informed the concert had taken a deadly turn well before the show’s climax, in which the rapper Drake was brought on stage. Hupkowizc said one of the vocal technicians told Scott: “We need to hurry up and get to the Drake part of the show … three people have died,” a stunning failure to recognize that inviting one of the biggest stars in the world would further amp up an already perilous crowd environment.
There was also the financial incentive at play: HPD investigators detailed a contract between Scott and Apple that would have paid him $4.5 million so long as he finished his set.
Whether that incentive factored into Scott’s thinking might never be known, but a statement from his attorney Kent Schaffer did little to assuage the perception that Scott is more concerned with his bottom line than being accountable for his actions.
Schaffer accused HPD of attempting to discredit Scott and hurt his record sales by timing the release of the report to coincide with the release of “Utopia.” Schaffer noted that Scott “actively stopped the show” at different points during his set, but stayed on stage throughout.
In fact, Scott’s version of a welfare check was asking the crowd if they were good by instructing them to put their middle fingers to the sky. Afterwards, Scott told police he was “dialed in” to his performance, and that the crowd seemed mellow.
These disparate accounts are further muddied by Scott’s music. Those looking for signs of personal or artistic growth on his new album, “Utopia,” will be disappointed.
He’s always been more vibe curator than wordsmith, orchestrating baroque, bouncy productions laced with debaucherous and, at times, banal lyrics.
His primary artistic function is churning out hits with ear-wormy hooks, and getting people to “rage”–shorthand for some concertgoers’ primal desire to cause destruction while thrashing about in a crowd of thousands.
“Utopia,” his first album in five years, is a messy, brooding body of work projecting an indulgent, robotic emptiness that feels out of touch with reality.
Here his superficial lyrics, with hollow boasts about his wealth, fame and sexual exploits, seem to foil any attempt at introspection.
The closest thing to a sign of genuine remorse about the Astroworld devastation on the 73-minute long project is on the second verse of the fourth track, “My Eyes.”
Amid droning synths and pattering drums, he raps: “I replay them nights, and right by my side, all I see is a sea of people that ride wit’ me / If they just knew what Scotty would do to jump off the stage and save him a child / The things I created became the most weighted, I gotta find balance and keep me inspired.”
That flicker of vulnerability might be compelling if seconds later he didn’t revert to his materialistic comfort zone: big houses, fast cars and shiny watches.
There is certainly plenty of blame to go around for the Astroworld failures. Neither city nor Harris County officials have passed new standards or regulations to prevent any of the myriad factors that contributed to the 10 deaths from happening again.
A task force organized by Gov. Greg Abbott let Live Nation off the hook and basically admonished concert attendees themselves for lacking “collective accountability” for keeping each other safe.
Nobody was expecting a new album or single from Scott to heal the grief of 10 families who lost loved ones at Astroworld. And the time for heroism was long gone.
But we thought he’d spend a few verses remembering victims, reflecting, maybe wrestling with the responsibility of his enormous platform, perhaps pushing for change.
When a similar crowd stampede during the band Pearl Jam’s set at a 2000 Danish music festival left nine people dead, the band members didn’t run from their own culpability.
They became vocal about making festivals safer and met personally with the victims’ surviving family members.
On the 20th anniversary of the disaster, the band issued a heartfelt statement honoring the victims.
That admirable response is probably an outlier, and it’s true that people are still buying Scott’s music regardless.
By some projections, he will score another No. 1 album, with the equivalent of 400,000 album sales when factoring in streaming numbers.
Fellow Houston icons such as Beyonce are still collaborating with him. He still benefits from his connection to Houston. But does Houston?
Some of us once viewed Scott’s appropriation of city symbols as a point of pride.
Now, one of them, Astroworld, has been forever redefined–memories of carefree thrill-seeking tinged with horror, and dread, and for some families, grief.
We don’t begrudge Scott his success. He’s moving on. That’s what profiteers do. It’s just that, at one point, we thought he was more than that.
