80,000 people came to I-Days in Milan to pay their respects to their idol, but something didn’t work out. And let’s not talk about the pouring rain
Rain. It rains a lot, without interruption. A continuous descent of water, which, however, can do nothing against the 80,000 people present at I-Days for Travis Scott’s long-awaited first Italian date. It’s the last day of a very hot June, but the temperature has dropped below 20 degrees, turning the La Maura Racecourse into a muddy and wet Glastonbury. And as if we are in Glasto, very young daredevils defy a long storm even with bare chest: they already know that it will not extinguish their fire.
The Travis Scott concert was a mystical vision for them. The messiah, who walks the waters of Milan Albion, distributes to needy students (just a few passages later, he invites a boy from the audience onto the stage to give him shoes from his new collaboration) and brings fire as a tribute – in fact, flashes are the only trick Travis to fill in a non-existent set design, not minimal, with support DJs on the side but, oddly enough, in plain sight (an impromptu machine gun that violates the potential cleanliness envisaged on the stage). ) and three giant screens with a Houston trapper modified with simple but effective stage effects, it’s really cool.
Everyone is here to see Travis: his first date in Italy is the highlight of the season. Tedua, Rondodasosa, Bresh, Capo Plaza (who played at the opening, took the opportunity to announce his new album) perform in the guest zone. Tiktoker and influencer. Your little brother, your slightly older sister, your dad who controls them, and your uncle who works as a graphic designer in Milan, and the whole art scene. Despite what one might think this concert isn’t just for Gen Z kids, Travis’ imagination has brought this storm into a cross-cutting audience that tends to naturally split up when different areas kick off a concert. wall of death or wild pogos, or all the stuff that trap stole from metal and punk to overcome rap’s aesthetic crisis and reach out to a generation stripped of boundaries and labels. Under the stage, in the barrier, the younger brother of a dear friend. When he appears destroyed by the battle (because it was for them), I ask him how everything went in the moshe. He replies, “What is pogo?”
Photo: Fabio Izzo
And what happened on stage, you ask. Well, actually very little (because even the time on stage was short, only an hour): there are more shows in the hall (“It was one of the best concerts in my life,” the trapper says into the microphone) and on stage. Of course, Travis has a hypnotic appearance – and his whole range of movements – for the younger ones, but his address to the microphone is very rude, even annoyed in a sense. Desperate. If Travis’ auto-tune rap frap is thought to lead us to an orgasmic transcendence – to paraphrase Keith Mackintosh – the trapper here fails to abide by the premise of approaching a voice constantly held in a screaming tone, thus minimizing the interpretive leaps that bring his productions to life in the studio and which, when privately listened to, take the listener to another place. For this reason, the choice – now common in the genre – to constantly cut songs after the first chorus is counterproductive. So you never get into the mood, you never get into the atmosphere. Sometimes yes vibe – as they say here – but continuous breaks are a series of interrupted sexual acts.
Travis’ aura is definitely stronger than Performer Travis’s. And the reason we’re here is also because Travis’ image is so much bigger than his own music. fashion, drop, collab, festival, Fortnite, Astroworld. We’re talking about an artist who allows himself to tour 80,000 people even before the release of the fourth album (the concert actually seems like a way to shirk while waiting for the album to be released). Utopia, scheduled for later this month), exactly double – to give you a proportion – of how much Kendrick Lamar brought in last year. To remind us that today an artist’s weight is increasingly measured by the breadth and brilliance of the created universe, rather than by the records themselves. And on this Travis tallest in the roomseriously.
For those who have come to Milan to idolize Travis, this will be – potentially – a concert of a lifetime. Travis was there, and every appearance of a messiah is worth a lifetime in itself. For others, let’s say non-specialists or sympathizers, this show was rather semi-disappointing, especially when compared with certain expectations: on stage, Travis is not at the level of Kendrick and not at the level of Tyler, the Creator. At this stage, this is not tallest in the room. A comment found on Instagram describes this short circuit perfectly: “Quiet volume, sung for 1 hour. Flood. The rest is nice.”