La Flame was hot during the 2024 Grammys, and we’re not talking about the pyrotechnics during his performance.
Travis Scott used his appearance at the 66th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday, February 4, to blow off steam after another year of returning home empty-handed. His 2023 album, Utopia, was up for Best Rap Album, an award that went to Killer Mike’s Michael during the untelevised portion of the ceremony. So, when Scott, 32, hit the stage at the Crypto.com Arena for his scheduled performance, he let the Grammys know he was mad.
After performing “My Eyes” and “I Know?”, he went into “FE!N.” At the end of the song’s first verse, Scott changed the lyrics to include how he’s been up for 10 Grammys but has taken home none. “They slept on me 10 times!” he shouted furiously as flames went up all around him.
Scott was first nominated at the 2014 Grammys for Best Rap Song (“New Slaves”). Three years later, he scored an Album of the Year nomination for his role in Justin Bieber’s Purpose. In 2018, his collaboration with SZA (“Love Galore”) was up for Best Rap/Sung Performance. The following year, his Astroworld scored three nominations: Best Rap Album, Best Rap Song (“Sicko Mode”) and Best Rap Performance (“Sicko Mode.”)
He picked up another nomination at the 62nd Grammys in 2020, this time for Best Rap/Sung Performance for his part in Young Thug’s “The London.” In 2021, “Highest in the Room” was up for the newly minted Best Melodic Rap Performance, and the following year, his role in Kanye West‘s Donda earned him another nomination. Scott’s winless streak increased to 0-10 with this most recent shutout.
Ahead of the performance, Scott reflected on Utopia. “If you could have a feeling of utopia for one second, or one moment, or one minute, one hour, things can be calm even though everything else around you is moving at 1,000 miles per minute,” he said. “And the album is just my trip trying to find that.”
Critics mostly panned Scott’s performance because it stuck out on a night of soft but emotional showings from artists like Billie Eilish, Joni Mitchel, Olivia Rodrigo and Luke Combs with Tracy Chapman.
Critics also blasted the Recording Academy for including Scott in the broadcast due to the November 2021 Astroworld festival tragedy that resulted in 10 people being crushed to death. During the show, Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. spoke in a segment paying tribute to fans killed during terrorist attacks on music events, from Paris’s Bataclan concert massacre in 2015 to 2017’s Route 91 Harvest Music Festival mass shooting to the recent Hamas attack at the Supernova Music Festival in October.
Since the tragedy at Astroworld was an accident and not a terrorist attack, Mason didn’t mention it during the segment. However, fans online railed against the exclusion and called Scott’s involvement in a show with such a memorial “tone-deaf.”
