DontgetTired777
FINE$$E THE WORLD BREH'S
Jesus Christ, the music industry won't stop trying to make this dude happen. Not only do they let him leech off actually successful and talented acts, they even deny the obvious order of things (Young Thug >>>>>>> Travis Scott, under any criteria imaginable) in promoting a new co-headlining tour as "Travis Scott and Young Thug: The Rodeo Tour." Uh, excuse me if this is stating the obvious, but doesn't everyone know that he's a shameless biter?
It's depressing that there aren't that many germane results when you Google "Travis Scott biter." The first result, thankfully, is critic Andrew Nosnitsky's straightforward tweet: "travis scott is a biter." Then come a handful of message-board arguments about his two full-length projects, 2013's Owl Pharaoh and last year's Days Before Rodeo, where his detractors level the charge at him and his fans shout them down. Yet there isn't anything definitive on the subject of Scott's blatant, unrepentant biting from any publication or website of note. So let's try to fix that, shall we?
Despite the push among music-biz trendsetters, Scott still flies under most fans' radars, so some background information is appropriate. He's a 22-year-old rapper/producer from Missouri City, Texas, a suburb of Houston. As he lays out in this interview, his family is very well-educated. But while he says he graduated high school early at 17, he went on to surreptitiously drop out of the University of Texas sophomore year to pursue his rap dreams. Instead of leveling with his parents, he asked them for money to buy books and other supplies, and used the money to buy a ticket to New York City, where he planned to grind his way to the top, armed with only with his ideas and some couches to surf and cars to sleep in.
Now, the story of how he hit it big from there is purposely vague; it requires a little projection to make sense of. According to that same interview, one of Scott's couch-having friends was Mike Waxx, a Connecticut-born, Brooklyn-dwelling fellow dropout who founded Illroots, a rap blog that followed the mid-to-late-'00s ethos of loose track aggregation.
This is Scott's first mention on Illroots, a January 2012 post about his song/video "Lights (Love Sick)"; the next comes two months later in March, posting "16 Chapels." That one mentions that Scott had migrated out to L.A. to work on his Owl Pharaoh EP; a month later, Illroots again catches up with Scott, this time putting up "Animal," which features a guest verse from none other than T.I. It goes on to mention that Scott was now "down in Atlanta making major moves," even recording a song with Future.
Now, how, in the span of mere months, does an otherwise anonymous kid from Missouri City head up to NYC to make it big, wind up basically homeless, and then all of a sudden get flown all over the country to record with some of the biggest mainstream rappers around? For further insight into Scott's curiously charmed life, we have this interview with Hot 97's Peter Rosenberg, wherein the rapper got pretty detailed about his come-up:
For as many answers Scott gives about his meteoric rise, there are still so many questions. He mentions that while in NYC, he often recorded music at Stadiumred, one of the biggest studios in the city, famously the stomping grounds of one Just Blaze. How did some no-name kid finagle his way in there? And the fortuitous industry connections didn't stop there. After his short stay in New York, Travis talks about how he decided to go stay with a friend out in L.A.; as soon as his plane lands, his phone blows up with texts from T.I., and in no time at all they're on a track together.
Another helpful acquaintance: Anthony Kilhoffe, a producer/engineer with decades of experience and a direct line to Kanye West, who in short order invites Scott to contribute to what turns out to be G.O.O.D. Music's 2012 Cruel Summer album. From there, he gets face time with label boss L.A. Reid, heads out to Hawaii to work with Kanye again on Yeezus ... even the look on Rosenberg's face as this tale unfolds tells you how unbelievable all this good luck is.
Are we seriously to believe that Scott went from zero industry connections to meeting virtually every rap bigwig in a matter of months, all on the strength of a couple songs that otherwise no one knew about? How many artists are introduced to listeners through high-profile collaborations with A-Listers without building any kind of local audience to speak of? Did anyone like Scott before the industry told us to?
At times during their talk, Rosenberg makes a couple weak gestures at pressing Scott on his serendipity—again, you can tell he doesn't really buy the official story—but he just as quickly backs off and accepts Scott's vague answers:
PR: Here's what I don't understand. No matter how you cut it—and I'm not taking away from the fact that it was scary, like, when you were out there on your own—but you had a very quick ascent. Like, there are people who grind for years and years and years. Like, how did you get—like what hap—like, you really did seem to catch some breaks, right? I guess that video really resonated with people.
TS: I've been really trying to put people onto, like, my sound since I was like 17, 16. So it was like, I graduated when I was like 18 or 17 and a half, and I was just out there immediately. But you know, it was kind of like a good [unintelligible] man. You know, God willing, man. I thank God about that every day, you know. But, I mean, I don't know, man—I guess it's like, talent."
Riiight. Talent. (My theory: Houston veteran Mike Dean, who Scott mentions working with when he was in school and has been something of a right-hand man to Kanye from Late Registration on, is Scott's mysterious benefactor.) The fact that the industry—so desperate to unearth the Hot New Thing yet simultaneously so clueless as to how to develop hot new talent, and thus almost totally reliant on the ephemeral, illusory internet hype cycle—decided to cling to and thrust up, Simba-style, some kid with good connections itself isn't necessarily the worst thing. This has long been a reality in the blog-dominant rap world, where savvy labels and managers cynically do their best to play that hype cycle against itself. Through ad-buying or outright bribery, get your artist in good with one blog, which leads to another blog thinking that artist is important and scrambling to keep up, and on and on until the echo chamber has turned a faint PR-driven hum into a full-on, quasi-organic buzz. No matter that none of it was built on any genuine fan interest; all that matters is that the right people say this artists matters, and voila, it becomes so.
FULL ARTICLE HERE: http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/travis-scott-is-worse-than-iggy-azalea-1682870003
Comments section on fire too
I never got it with this cat, it's funny how people talk about industry plants all the time but never talk about him because he shows all the signs of being one.... 
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for Iggy by directing the attention away from her to a black guy.
