‘This Ain’t a Festival, It’s a Sacrifice’: Travis Scott, Janelle Monáe, and the Desire for Utopia

After the Astroworld tragedy in 2021, conspiratorial-minded commentators declared that Travis Scott was possessed by the demonic. Cited by the Guardian, one example read: “This ain’t a festival, it’s a sacrifice.” Another: “The music industry is demonic and collects souls.”

The conspiracy is punctuated with horrible details that imply that Scott was indifferent to the deaths before him. One article described him watching the concert-goers being trampled in the front row and launched into another song. To a TikTok semiotician, it could make sense that a demonic presence has possessed Scott.

Reality is much more banal; the “conspiracy” was a corporation ignoring concert regulations and allowing excess attendees.

This is one of the occasions that keeps coming up in late-stage capitalism: structural collapse from corporations appears as an orgiastic, ritualistic blood sacrifice. Who’s to blame? Is it Scott? Satan? But if not Satan, then to what or whom? Underneath the mask, there is always an enemy… Capital. Like the ongoing and ever-present environmental crises, under the facade, no one person is to blame, and no collective can take responsibility.

In the face of death and destruction, there is a retreat into utopian visions of a better world. Scott and his contemporary Janelle Monáe released albums in 2023 — UTOPIA and The Age of Pleasure — that unsuccessfully address these contradictions. I want to examine how visions of the future work and what we can learn from their failures.

They think I’m satanic, I keep me a reverend

Between the Astroworld tragedy and UTOPIA, there’s a jarring juxtaposition. If the stampede was a signal that death culture had become art-pop during the COVID-19 pandemic, Scott’s new album provoked an almost universal disappointment among fans and critics.

The main criticism of UTOPIA is that it’s shallow; it has nothing new to say. It hinges on too many cliches from an artist known for pushing boundaries and straining the limits of hip-hop and rap. It doesn’t add anything new to the palette of Scott’s repertoire, and this lack is felt deeply, even if the album is, in fact, enjoyable.

In theory, it is precisely the type of music one would expect to hit the core of the cultural American Zeitgeist — mixing what Mark Fisher termed “party hauntology” — lo-fi, depressive hip-hop manufactured with auto-tune malaise with arresting renderings of experiential failure and aching, and aimless heartache. Despite this cultural spinal tap, Scott’s mourning is not perceived as sincere —he mourns the parties passed; he laments the memory of pursuing pleasure.

Scott seems resigned to melancholic woe that is out of sync with his experience. Weber’s Protestant work ethic condition holds onto death as a responsibility-driven dialogue. The Big Other’s desire for punishment and reflection on the Astroworld tragedy remains — to take responsibility and perform mourning and grief that humanizes him in the face of criticism. Sadly, Scott delivers neither. Reading the album reviews, American culture has not forgiven Scott for his cold and egoic non-reaction to death, and his unwillingness to respond haunts UTOPIA.

You can find this avoidance and deflection all over the album. On “MELTOWN,” there are intertextual references with frequent invocations of numerology (Drake repeats 6–6–6 in the first verse, and Scott responds with 7–7–7 in the second, the antidotal “angel number”). Fight spiritual fire with spiritual fire. Paired alongside a diss track about RICO cases, the calculation changes slightly: fight spiritual fire alongside reality’s fire. Other references to the horror strike a similar tone. On “SIRENS” he raps, “It’s a festival right in my room.” The mixture of pain and pleasure is interspersed with tragedy. Festival becomes a constant reference that dualistically replicates the effects of the pros of capitalist expansion (the expansion and vigor of “stage” and the tragedy that comes with the expansion. On “MY EYES” he raps an almost mournful apology:

I replay them nights, and right by my side all I see is a sea of people that ride wit’ me
If they just knew what Scotty would do to jump off the stage and save him a child
The things I created became the most weighted, I gotta find balance and keep me inspired (Hah)

Reflexively, Scott remarks that the stage is why those people were there in the first place, and it appears he was rocking so hard that they had to die. He could have saved them, but he was transfixed. “MY EYES” also has an uncanny echo with Philip K. Dick and Bladerunner, with all its dystopian machinations: “If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes,” etc.

I stand on the stage, I give ’em the rage
No turnin’ it down, can’t tame it, can’t follow it
We do in the streets, we do it for keeps
We do it for rights, got fifty-two weeks
This shit ain’t for pleasure, I’m comin’ to tweak
This shit is forever and infinity

Disavowal of responsibility goes hand in hand with witnessing horror. It is precisely the experience of seeing the horrors that force a deflected ironic distance and traumatic deflection, a veil of falsity to fall over subjective experience, and a failure of the Utopian to be realized. For Scott, death and responsibility linked to those deaths must go unaddressed. Death is an untraceable origin, and responsibility is an impossible exchange that remains indefinitely self-referential like an inescapable cloud. A festival, a stage, a sea of people, all pointing to his impossible task of taking responsibility. Scott transforms mourning into an angry desire for transcendence. However, his resistance to self-reflection, responsibility, and critical thought is fatal to the larger goals of the album.

I hear the zeitgeist, now I’m in the zone

UTOPIA attempts to sublimatize cynical irony and sincere hope, but it adds too much and too little. A common criticism made by mainstream reviews is that the album relies heavily on name-checking artists and is short on ideas. This criticism points to a fundamental superficiality and empty vacuum where substance and belief in a utopia — and all the ideas that that complex word implies — would entail a broader scope regarding ambition and statement worthy of its title.

As outlined in Archeologies of the Future, The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005), philosopher Fredric Jameson points out the difference between the utopian form and utopian vision. What makes a Utopia utopian is what someone adds to reality. Scott adds to reality is what is already there: anger, resentment, rage. Object-less in all fantasies, the ideology of UTOPIA is already in a state of retrograded self-denial. What is desired is right in front of him; what drives him is what always drives him. What is added to his music is a re-enchantment of the banal, but without the fantasy to go along with it. Instead, it’s an absence of denial…

At the end of “SIRENS,” Drake brings a woman to his hotel room. She asks him where Utopia is, and he answers that the hotel room is good enough for him. Meaning and modernity fall to the wayside of a pure jouissance, a desire for the same to be invoked, for the natural and banal to enchant in a way that pops music and hip hop have always entranced listeners, entertaining and projecting reflexive sexuality and hyperreality.

We are young / So let’s set the world on fire

A similar type of failed Utopia was envisioned with Janelle Monáe’s The Age of Pleasure, which follows her trio of messianic albums: The ArchAndroid, The Electric Lady, and Dirty Computer. These three previous albums are set in a cybernetic future of good and evil, man vs. machine, and questions like what it means to be human and how to overcome adversity. They manage to reach the greatness of Afrofuturist art, grappling with a history of oppression while at the same time looking forward to a world of fantastical opportunity and techno-ambivalence. Like Parliament or Sun Ra before her, detailed world-building springs from creative depths.

Monáe has always been a source of intense joy and pleasure for me. I saw her perform in 2009 as a new and upcoming artist, and it was an intensely gratifying and explosive concert of pure frenetic power. She had an easel on stage, and throughout the performance, she would paint as though her creative impulse could not be contained to one medium at a time. Monáe took on a mimesis of Ian Curtis, with whom she seemed kin — gyrating, revolving, and always on the brink of losing control. The Age of Pleasure is the Hegelian antithesis to Unknown Pleasures; where Joy Division found Schopenhaurean anti-joy out of despair and objectless angst, Monáe finds numinous transcendence in the form of objectless pleasure.

Pleasure boasts of her first emancipation from narrative science-fiction and, like Scott, without an enemy to organize around. Unlike Scott, she revels in the excesses of pleasure. Pan- and polysexuality are the centerpiece of the utopian dreams that make an epochal enjoyment following the defeat of the robots that haunt the first three albums. The problem is that with Utopia comes an absence of inspiration. Monáe’s first three albums have always revolved around Afro-Futurist feminism that combines the transactional dystopian realm of Philip K. Dick (Monáe acted as “Alice” in the show Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams) with a holy, humanist war against technological corruption and anti-freedom.

Her vision of liberal conflict has always been an America captured by the simulacrum of white supremacy like the 2020 film Antebellum, where Monáe plays an enslaved woman stuck in a Truman Show or The Village-esque simulacrum where the Confederacy and plantation life persists in the 21st century as a theme park. In her musical career, white supremacy and a lack of agency are found in the robots that control society and the cyborgs that exist in a perpetual state of ontological indeterminacy, a rogue figure stuck between the role of human and robot.

The robots offer the Freudian primitive father figure, whose territorialization of the human by the artificial threatens to control humans and their pleasures. However, absent that conflict with an Other, the world envisioned is unsurprisingly objectless. Pleasures are captured, but the music feels more artificial than ever. Gone are the sex drives of “Make Me Feel,” the future-soul of “I Like That,” or even the funky “Tightrope.” Instead, it’s been replaced in The Age of Pleasure by a sexless anti-jouissance, an abundance of imagistic pleasure.

Vous avez une visage comme une femme, que zut alors, oui

The Francophonic site of pleasure appears as utopian desire — a Badiouian event of transcendence to conflict. “Haute,” “Champagne Shit,” “Oooh La La (Ft. Grace Jones),” and “The French 75 (Ft. Sister Nancy)” all reference the West Indies Franco-Colonial experience. The Haitian revolution makes sense given the liberation of the experience from colonial forces, formerly enslaved people who are now accessible but speaking the language of their former colonizers as a symbol of their freedom from the past.

In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy looked at how being European and Black formed a double consciousness about the transatlantic slave trade and capitalism — these formed into various socialist and feminist movements that provided dreams for a better world that could be imagined. In Postcolonial Melancholia, Gilroy looks at how these dreams of a better world replaced these dreams with a “trans-local human rights movement (26).”

The Age of Pleasure cherry-picks and utilizes elements of The Black Atlantic and Postcolonial sounds to argue for an epochal shift in creativity and access to pleasure. However, under all that hedonism and revelatory freedom of expression, there’s little to unearth from whatever is said or the music played. Monáe’s sexuality and cultural absorption beg the question — is a world in the age of pleasure going to be this boring?

Even at its most immediately pleasurable, say “Float” or “Lipstick Lover,” the sterility of the reggae backbeat speaks to more significant structural choices that repress larger conflicts. Voyeuristically enjoyed pleasuredomes are consciously inaccessible for the watcher, and in the music video for “Lipstick Lover,” for instance, there is a spectacular quality to even accessing pleasure in abundance. The island, the semi-nudity, the explicit sex acts that are then censored through a prohibitive matrix, which itself acts as an obscenity, an obscenity of inaccessibility in abundance.

I like lipstick on my neck
Hands around my waist, so you know what’s comin’ next
I wanna feel your lips on mine
I just wanna feel a little tongue
We don’t have a long time

Seduction has political and societal values, which play out for Monáe as a part of the utopian vision. On the one hand, there is anticipation (“so you know what’s comin’ next”) and the way that time acts on anticipation (“we don’t have a long time”). Abundance and pleasure have to be delegated quickly as part of the seduction process. Accessibility and taboo perform as seductive elements, which act out on the body (lips, tongue) as connected to the impermanent nature of pleasure — “lipstick on my neck.” Pleasures place body and time out of joint with the cause of their value; it is only valued because of their prohibition and enjoyable because of their taboo nature. And yet, this very pointed and direct way that these pleasures are narrated makes the experience of listening to it so bland.

There is then the political element to seduction: the delegation of pleasures by those who live in abundance: the political and capitalist class that has to reinforce austerity despite reaping the benefits of bourgeois society and its authoritarian structures. The polyamorous anthem, “I Only Have Eyes 42,” was picked by former President Obama in his 2023 summer playlist. Obama, the neoliberal father figure, offers his detached endorsement of utopianism, even while watching his post-presidential years subsumed in failure. Soft authoritarianism allows for abundant pleasure to provide a basis for blowback. That is, when the pleasures are consequential and self-destructive, there is a paternalistic austerity to give you the “I Told You So” and to bring you back into the fold of liberal idealism.

In Monáe’s Utopian vision, gender fluidity and access to pleasure exist in abundance. But that represents a shortage of delegated pleasure in reality. We do not live in a world of unlimited pleasures, so this Utopianism is a specific type of inverted pessimism. This pessimism implies an absence of pleasure where interpassivity fails to hit the mark. It also highlights the dystopian capitalist realism that gender fluidity and unlimited access to pleasure can co-exist with deep impoverishment and oppression. These escapisms are similar to the much-hated vacation photographs on social media. Yes, people should be experiencing pleasures in the world; pleasure is integral to primary motivations and organization. Lacan’s psychoanalysis has all but shown this is a primordial inclination. But that doesn’t mean others should be expected to enjoy them, and many don’t.

Disavowal of responsibility is instrumental to both Scott and Monáe’s utopias. It can’t be the structure that is the cause of a decrease in freedom and autonomy; it must be access to pleasure and pleasurable activities that constitute a better world. Individual choice leads to pleasure, and if we engineer a fungible world of accessible pleasures, then that world will manifest. The marketing adage: “selling a better version of the customer back at themselves” is represented in typical late capitalist fashion — we must first buy a new world to achieve a better world.

This belief system gets to a trend with science fiction and Afrofuturism, which has, in popular culture at least, all but absorbed capitalist ideology and sold it as historic progress for the politically marginalized. Gone are the more radical approaches of the '60s, '70s, and '80s, and in their place is the conservation of marketable pleasures under the presentation of radicalism. Musings of a world outside of capitalism have been replaced with a pessimistic retreat of Black Panther into a royalist reaction.

This shift from Afrofuturism to what Orlando Patterson and Frank B. Wilderson III call Afropessimism is a reaction to the conditions of the Black Atlantic and post-colonial melancholia. The cultural desire for Utopia backfires and transposes into its opposite, and expressions of utopianism pessimistically declare moral battles and democratic liberalism as the end state of futurism — the future that has already arrived.

These political limitations are baked into what is possible in culture. Imagination plays on the prohibition of what is impossible. Freedom is only defined by what can be imagined as free. For Scott and Drake, freedom looks like a hotel room and a clear conscience. For Monáe, freedom looks like an orgy at the end of a war against robots. They’re not wrong; these are the pleasures and spoils of upward-class mobility and new opportunities for the select — but that necessitates the exclusion of the majority who don’t can’t access these pleasurable passwords. What does freedom look like then?