Review Summary: No bull, but Travis Scott's Rodeo is terrible
Producer/rapper Travi$ Scott is a weird guy who makes really weird music.
His long-awaited debut album Rodeo capstones that point. Unlike his mixtapes Days Before Rodeo and Owl Pharaoh, the album isn’t a highlight in his discography.
As stand-alone tracks, Rodeo has few gems on it, with a great feature from Quavo of Migos on “Oh My/Dis Side” as well as a noticeable instrumental on “Night Crawl”, assisted by Chief Keef and Swae Lee of Rae Sremmurd.
In its entirety, however, the album lacks change of pace and cohesion.
Much of the first half is a typical mainstream trap album. Drugs, partying, alcohol, codeine, sex… you get the whole nine yards. Unfortunately, those nine yards are ran forward and backward, and Scott refuses to give his lyrics life. On the Weeknd-assisted “Pray 4 Love”, Scott’s raps go from talking about his anger with white power to the love interest of a female (with some horrible cringeworthy lyrics in between). This is also a rare occurrence of a disappointing Weeknd feature.
The track “3500” with Atlanta goofballs 2 Chainz and Future could have been a nice single… if the song wasn’t unbearably long. The almost 8-minute run time could have been chopped in half, cutting out the obnoxiously long and repetitive hook as well as a dull instrumental towards the back half of the song.
However, one song that is thankfully short is “Piss on Your Grave” with Kanye West. The last few Kanye verses have been questionable, including “Jukebox Joints” from A$AP Rocky’s At.Long.Last.A$AP as well as Kanye’s own “All Day”. “POYG” outdoes all of those with, easily, the worst guest verses of the year. West repeats the titular phrase 14 times, including 11 in the first 30 seconds of the track.
WHY IS HE YELLING?! These verses sound as if Kanye brought the microphone into the bathroom, recorded the tracks while excreting, got constipated, and kept going. His presidential campaign sounded more thought out than this track.
It keeps spiraling downward, with another boring single in “Antidote” and “Maria, I’m Drunk”, which brings in Canadian tough guy Justin Bieber and Young Thug. Bieber provides a sing-rappy tale that I’m sure he was recording shirtless, posing like Chris Farley at the end of the “Chip ‘n’ Dales” SNL skit.
Some of the production is nice, but it’s all overshadowed by Scott’s repetitive subject matter, atrocious rapping, and lyrics that make me shake my head.
If you bought the Rodeo ticket, you might want to ask for a refund.
