Travis Scott HHV Records 8 Items

Explosive synthesizers and autotune inserts

The youth of Texas-native Jacques Bermon Webster II was shaped by his love for rapping and producing – as well as by the violence of the problematic neighborhood in the southern part of Houston: “I was always like, ‘I gotta get the fuck out this shit.’ It gave me my edge,” Webster himself says. With a musician father, he left university behind shortly to pursue his Plan A: Los Angeles offered the perfect breeding ground for this in the early 2010s. A certain T.I. caught wind of Webster’s musical talent and connected the young beatmaker with Kanye West. Under the name Travis Scott, he soon found himself in the studio for West’s label GOOD Music, and he was involved with the 2012 released compilation Cruel Summer: this album featured not only West and Jay-Z but also heavyweights like Big Sean, 2 Chainz, and Pusha T, propelling Travis to a new level of public attention. After numerous delays, his first solo mixtape Owl Pharaoh was released a year later, which combined dark soundscapes and explosive synthesizers with ventures into autotune inserts. Travis’s foundation was laid.

Collaborator and Guarantee of Success

Due to an undeniable resemblance to Kanye’s Yeezus era, Travis’s musical influence was quite clear, while he drew inspiration from various pop and rock bands alongside Kid Cudi. From the very beginning, Travis’s music wasn’t purely hip-hop: “It’s not always about rap to me. It was mostly about melody.” His debut album Rodeo arrived in record stores in 2015 and became a widely celebrated hit – he embarked on tours with fellow Trap newcomers Metro Boomin and Young Thug. Between crystal-clear beats and distorted, half-sung rap parts, Travis Scott made international waves and became one of the most sought-after newcomers in the genre – and also a featured guest who was frequently encountered alongside colleagues like Rihanna, Wiz Khalifa, and SZA. Suddenly, Travis was everywhere, and his second album Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight didn’t take long to arrive – effortlessly, it reached the top of the charts in 2017. As a joyful collaborator and a guarantee of success, he proved himself once again on Drake’s Portland, where Quavo was also heard – from the collaboration with the latter, the joint LP Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho, was born in the same year, unsurprisingly lingering once again in the upper echelons of the Billboard 200.

Ambitious Pop and Psychedelic Trap

By 2018, thanks to his number-one hit Sicko Mode, Travis Scott had become known even to those unfamiliar with hip-hop, and on his album Astroworld, named after a childhood amusement park in Houston, he blended ambitious pop with psychedelic trap elements. In the same year, the Astroworld Festival came into existence, where, in 2021, during a catastrophic crowd surge at the festival, ten people lost their lives while Scott was on stage. He therefore paused his live performances for a while, and a lawsuit from the affected families occupied his attention for a period – however, he was ultimately acquitted. Prior to this, he had been involved in the soundtrack of the blockbuster film TENET: with his theatrical track The Plan, Travis contributed a song to a film for the first time. “The way that he connects with art is not in a singular form,” producer Ludwig Göransson commented about the rapper. Scott made his directorial debut in 2023 with the work Circus Maximus, a visual accompaniment to his concurrently released album Utopia. The grand-sounding record was published on his own label, Cactus Jack Records, solidifying Travis Scott as a musical figurehead of his generation.