Rap concerts sure have come a long way from the days when the most exciting thing to look at was Snoop Dogg's uncle twirling a towel in the back corner of the stage. Saturday's sold-out Travis Scott concert was one of the genre's farthest-reaching visual productions yet.
Following on the pyro-singed heels of Drake, J. Cole and Jay-Z — all reaching for a bar set by his fellow Kardashian-in-law Kanye West's hi-fi tours — Scott literally brought an amusement park's array of bells, whistles, stunts and tricks to Minneapolis. (He also brought his wife Kylie Jenner and their infant daughter, setting off a minor tsunami on social media.)
The staging was based on his third album, "Astroworld," nominated for three Grammys a day earlier and named after the now-defunct, Texas-sized, Six Flags theme park in his hometown of Houston.
Scott, 26, strapped into a Super Loop-type ride and rolled upside down at the beginning of the show. He rode a roller-coaster over the heads of the 15,000 fans during a couple of songs near the end. In between, he blew up a giant inflatable astronaut and danced under an arcade's worth of lasers and lights. Oh, and he rapped, too.
The 80-minute set started with a sleight of hand. Scott first appeared on the smaller B-stage at the back end of the arena. This set off a rampage of young concertgoers running across the general-admission arena floor, after they had stood for a couple of hours pressed up tightly against the main stage and waited out a long gap left by the absence of one of three scheduled openers, Trippie Redd.
That patient lull quickly gave way to a hyperactive pace once Scott came out. He tore through six songs in about 15 minutes on the small stage, starting with "Stargazing" and "Carousel" — also the two opening tracks on "Astroworld" — and culminating with one of his 2014 breakout cuts, "Mamacita."
The one production gadget that really matched and complemented his performance was the bank of vents that blew sudden blasts of smoke up from both stages. Scott's rapping style through much of the show similarly came off like a fast-rolling steam-train, all grrr and very little purr.
His frenzied delivery felt a little too blunt-forceful and overblown by the time he thundered through "Don't Play" and "3500" deeper into the set, but the crowd never seemed to tire of giving back its own unhinged response. Once fans on the floor finally settled/crushed back into place in front of the main stage, they still found room (and energy) to excitedly jump up and down to the unusually loud and hard-booming beats, mimicking what seemed to be Scott's only dance move.
