In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
It took a village to make “Sicko Mode.” Officially, “Sicko Mode” is a solo track from Travis Scott, but that’s not what it really is. It’s a superstar team-up from Travis Scott and Drake, though you wouldn’t know that from the song’s Billboard listing. “Sicko Mode” comes from Astroworld — the album, not the deadly music-festival disaster. (A future Travis Scott column will have to dig into the story of that Astroworld, but it won’t be the focus today.) The Astroworld album is jammed with famous guests, from Frank Ocean to 21 Savage to Stevie Wonder, but none of them get the “featuring” credit. The idea was that their voices would pop up as surprises when you listened to the album. A whole lot of other big-name rappers have adapted that move, though most of them usually add the featured credits after the album has been out for a day or two. Scott still hasn’t done that with Astroworld.
That means that the headline at the top of this column is a lie. Drake technically isn’t featured on “Sicko Mode.” Neither is Swae Lee, whose unearthly mutter-crooned two-word phrase “someone said” gets all chopped up and works as a weirdly sticky little hook moment on “Sicko Mode.” Officially, the song is just Travis Scott by himself, which is misleading in all sorts of ways because “Sicko Mode” is not a solo song. It’s not even really a song — or not just one song, anyway. It’s a stitched-together Frankenstein’s monster of a track — at least three different pieces, all melted into one another as if you’re hearing a tripped-out DJ set. Nothing particularly unites all those different parts, but “Sicko Mode” still has its own strange internal logic. Every sudden change feels like a shift in the atmosphere, a raising of the stakes. The structure makes no sense, but it sweeps you along anyway.
Everything I just told you about “Sicko Mode” — the famous-friend cameos, the chaotic vibe-centric assembly, the transitions that keep you constantly off-balance — are hallmarks of the Travis Scott approach. It’s not unfair to say that Travis Scott’s entire rap style is a sloppy assemblage of traits and tics from other big-name rappers, and a great many younger rap figures are currently trying to imitate his specific synthesis. Even with that in mind, though, there’s never been another rap star quite like Travis Scott. Scott barely has any distinctive personality in his delivery or his production. He doesn’t seem like a cool guy who takes control of every room, which is the classic rap archetype. Instead, he’s a cipher, a void. Travis Scott songs barely ever work as songs. At worst, they’re branding exercises. At best, Scott curates feelings and moments. Sometimes, those moments resonate.
It’s hard to even fathom the expense and the paperwork that goes into the creation of a song like “Sicko Mode.” How does it work? What are the negotiations like? Lots of people have pieces of the “Sicko Mode” pie. Thanks to its glued-together progression and the way it samples songs that sample other songs, “Sicko Mode” has a long, long list of credits. The song has six credited producers and 30 credited songwriters — a number so extreme that this column is probably going to look like a parody to some of you. DJ Premier, Q-Tip, KC & The Sunshine Band — they all get publishing checks from “Sicko Mode,” even though none of them are actively or even really passively involved with the track. It’s just how business gets done.
On “Sicko Mode,” Travis Scott explains his role in this circus better than I could, and he does it in one line: “Who put this shit together? I’m the glue.” There it is: the rare Travis Scott line worth quoting. Scott has never been a great rapper in the way the term is usually understood, but he’s the one who got the business done. He glued all these disparate pieces together, organizing and branding them as if they were just one song — his song.
Travis Scott now has a bunch of #1 hits, and most of them are tracks that you might never encounter in your entire life. Over the years, Scott has proven himself a master of pop-chart numbers-fuckery. Billboard keeps changing the rules on how its charts are collated, and Travis Scott keeps finding new loopholes that’ll sometimes push a nothing song to #1 for a single week before it disappears from the charts forever. Scott does have big hits. I’ve seen the way kids at middle-school dances react to some of his tracks; it’s mayhem. But the songs that have that effect typically aren’t the ones that reach #1. “Sicko Mode” is the exception. That song really did go crazy. For about a year, I could walk into any nightclub-type establishment — the kinds that don’t have live music, anyway — and be assured that I would hear “Sicko Mode” within half an hour. It’s funny: “Sicko Mode” might not even be a real song, but for a minute, it was the song.
So let’s talk about the glue that put this shit together. Lots and lots of names will have to appear in this column, but “Sicko Mode” is ultimately Travis Scott’s big moment. “Travis Scott” doesn’t look like a stage name, but that’s what it is. Jacques Bermon Webster II comes from a middle-class Houston family, at least from what I can tell. (When Scott was born, the #1 song in America was Amy Grant’s “Baby Baby.”) He’s not the kind of rapper who builds his life story into mythology, and he doesn’t actually talk about his upbringing very much. But he’s said that he spent a lot of his childhood with his grandmother in Sunnyside, a neighborhood on Houston’s south side, before his parents moved out to a suburb called Missouri City. As for what his parents did for a living, Scott once told Complex, “My mom worked for Apple, and my dad owned his own business.” That’s so vague! Both of those statements could mean so many things!
Travis Scott started making music when he was in high school. His rap name is way more boring than the government name Jacques Webster; he took the “Travis” from his uncle and the “Scott” from his favorite artist Scott Mescudi, better known as Kid Cudi. (Cudi will eventually appear alongside Travis Scott in this column.) At first, Scott mostly focused on production rather than rapping, and you could argue that he’s never really stopped. In high school, Scott had two different rap groups, both of which had perfectly doofy blog-rap names: the Graduates and the Classmates. For a little while, there was a pretty successful blog-rap duo called Kidz In The Hall, and I can only imagine both of those Travis Scott groups as his attempts to be that. I haven’t hunted down any music from the Graduates or the Classmates because there’s no way that it would be as funny as the letterman-jacket situation that I’m imagining.
After high school, Scott went to UT San Antonio for a year before dropping out to try to make it in music. He moved to New York and then Los Angeles, sleeping on couches and trying to get people to listen to what he was making. For a while, he lied to his parents, telling them that he was still in school, and they stopped giving him money when they found out what was really happening. Eventually, Scott scrounged up the email address of one of Kanye West’s engineers, and he persuaded that guy to meet up with him. He kept sending that guy music for a while before finally hearing that West, someone who’s been in this column a few times and who will eventually return, liked what he was making. Scott got the invitation to work on Cruel Summer, the compilation album that West’s G.O.O.D. Music released in 2012. Scott co-produced three tracks on Cruel Summer, and he also appeared on one of them, a posse cut called “Sin City.” All those tracks have a ton of credited producers, so Scott’s contributions didn’t stand out, but he had his foot in the door.
Travis Scott became part of the production squad at G.O.O.D. Music, and he worked on some of the tracks from West’s noisily ambitious 2013 album Yeezus, including the single “New Slaves.” (That one peaked at #56.) At the same time, Scott worked to get any kind of recognition as a rapper, and the ability to drop Kanye West’s name probably helped him out with that. Scott was chosen for the 2013 XXL Freshman Class, and he scored a deal with Grand Hustle, the imprint run by T.I., another rapper who’s been in this column a bunch of times. That means pre-fame Travis Scott got himself into two different label deals with two different now-canceled rap titans, which isn’t that surprising when you think about it. Around the same time that Yeezus came out, Scott released his own expansive, guest-heavy Owl Pharaoh mixtape. I remember being impressed with its sense of apocalyptic atmosphere even if I couldn’t really connect to Scott as a rapper.
Scott clearly reveres his Houston hometown’s psychedelically slowed-down screw music, but he’s never really tried to rap like a Houston rapper. He doesn’t have the booming, choppy, in-the-pocket authority that I tend to associate with the city, and he rarely presents himself alongside regional legends the way that Megan Thee Stallion, another Houston rapper who will eventually appear in this column, sometimes does. Instead, Scott raps in the bleary, melodic gurgle that he must’ve learned from Atlanta titans like Future and Young Thug. Scott sounds a lot like those guys might if their weirder edges were sanded off, and I was a bit surprised when he was welcomed into the A-list rap-star community. Early on, even Scott’s self-appointed nicknames and ad-libs seemed like rip-offs of things that he heard from more-established rappers — “LaFlame” from Gucci Mane LaFlare, a trademark “straight-up” moan that sounded just like something Future used to say.
The real Houston rap influence in Travis Scott’s music is in the lurching, suspended feeling of DJ Screw’s music. Screw, who died when Scott was a little kid, played records at half-speed, turning them into amniotic haze-creeps that would sound especially good when you were high on codeine cough syrup. Scott uses those textures the same ways that he uses samples from prog-rock records — as a way to get you lifted, to sweep you up until your feet can’t touch the ground. If you wanted, you could absolutely play a Travis Scott record while laying on a rug and staring at the ceiling, but that’s not how he presents his music. Instead, Scott is a famously kinetic live performer. He barely raps onstage. Instead, he plays hypeman to his own tracks, jumping around so that crowds will jump around with him. The last time I went to SXSW was 2014, and Scott was a constant presence there. I remember being surprised at just how unhinged and uncontrolled his sets were and at the way audiences enthusiastically responded. When you’re on your first mixtape and you can crowd-surf in an inflatable raft, you’re onto something.
Scott came into the game at the peak of the fashion-plate rapper moment. He picked up a lot of tricks from Kanye West, who always strove to present an aesthete sensibility, from samples to movie references to fashion. He also followed in the footsteps of A$AP Rocky, who had his own carefully curated set of references — many of them also from Houston — and combined them with a GQ mood-board approach. But where Rocky’s sound mostly reflected retro-cool underground styles, Scott built much of his style from the Atlanta trap of his contemporaries. When you detach trap music from its social context — when you never actually sold drugs in an abandoned house — you wind up with someone like Travis Scott, whose version of criminal-underground rap comes through the prism of the cool-kid internet. Maybe it took someone that far-removed from the original trap context to imagine the music as free-form stadium rock.
Travis Scott seems to get in a lot of fights at famous-people parties, but I never get the sense that he’s in the game, that he’s someone to be feared. If Scott has any gang affiliations, for instance, he doesn’t flaunt them. Instead, he presents a different kind of danger, the Warped Tour kind. Scott quickly became famous for whipping up wild moshpits. Scott wasn’t the first rapper to encourage moshing — Onyx were doing that in the early ’90s — but his version of danger felt approachably suburban. He wore fancy streetwear and included indie rock types like Toro Y Moi and Tame Impala among all the rappers who guested on his records, and that probably made him more marketable, too. As soon as he got famous, he started designing limited-edition sneakers, and I’ve got friends who have made a decent chunk of change buying and selling those shoes online. The entire wave of mosh-happy gen-Z rap festivals is essentially built in Travis Scott’s image.
But it’s hard to maintain a facade of corporate-friendly danger, and Scott’s live shows started to become an issue early on, especially as he moved into bigger rooms. At Lollapalooza 2015, he was arrested for disorderly conduct after he told the crowd to rush the stage. During a 2017 show at New York’s Terminal 5, a guy fell from a balcony, got paralyzed, and unsuccessfully sued Scott for inciting the crowd. Eventually, Scott became the face of dangerously chaotic concert planning, and a significant chunk of the internet started talking about his live shows as Satanic rituals, but that’s a matter for a future column.
Long before all festivals and Satanic-ritual allegations, you could tell that Travis Scott was getting a label push. New rappers usually don’t have big guest-stars and professional mastering jobs on their debut mixtapes. It was once tempting to dismiss Scott as an industry creation, but he had a clear sense of vision, too. After Owl Pharaoh, every new Travis Scott release felt a little noisier. He followed it with the 2014 mixtape Days Before Rodeo and then the official 2015 debut album Rodeo. Scott first cracked the Hot 100 when “3500,” a 2 Chainz/Future collab from Rodeo, reached #82. Another album track got way bigger than that. The haunted-circus singalong “Antidote” went all the way to #16 and eventually went platinum seven times. That song got stuck in my head a lot when it was new. Around the same time, Scott produced for Rihanna and opened her stadium tour, and he and Rihanna made out in public at least once.
Scott started touring arenas soon after he released his 2016 album Birds In The Trap Sing McKnight, and his shows turned into elaborate productions. On one tour, he would ride on a robotic eagle. At another, he had a working roller coaster onstage, and people got pulled out of the audience ride it — real Spinal Tap shit. On Birds In The Trap, Scott was able to wrangle guest appearances from just about anyone he could’ve wanted — the Weeknd, André 3000, his old hero Kid Cudi. The album’s big single was the Kendrick Lamar collab “Goosebumps,” which only reached #32 but which eventually went diamond. At live shows, Scott would perform “Goosebumps” over and over, sometimes a dozen times in a row.
By the time he released Birds In The Trap, Travis Scott was everywhere. He seemed to make multiple guest appearances on every big rap record. He teamed up with former Number Ones artist Quavo, another omnipresent figure, on the 2017 collaborative album Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho. He guested on tracks from Drake and SZA and Miguel, and some of those tracks did pretty well. Scott was also famous just for being famous. He started dating Kylie Jenner in 2017, and their daughter Stormi was born early in 2018. He was on a crazy upward trajectory, and it came to a head when he released the Astroworld.
I never heard much substance on Astroworld, but the album has a crazy sense of scope. It’s one of the most expensive-sounding rap records I’ve ever heard, and it’s impressive as pure laser-Floyd spectacle. Astroworld is the kind of record that your most talented friend might make if granted access to an unlimited budget after going on an ayahuasca retreat where Young Thug and Tame Impala played on a constant loop. It’s not my idea of a classic record, but sometimes you just want to hear music that sounds like an alien spacecraft taking off. Scott released the early track “Butterfly Effect” in May 2018, and it peaked at #50, but Astroworld wasn’t really an advance-singles situation. Instead, the album demanded to be heard altogether, as a single pure-moods experience. That’s how people heard it at first.
Astroworld debuted at #1 and stayed there for a little while. Future Number Ones artist Nicki Minaj was furious when the second week of Astroworld prevented her album Queen from debuting at #1. Nicki accused Scott of using duplicitous means, bundling albums with concert tickets and merch, to keep its chart numbers up. She was right, but she was using the same tactics to juice her own stats. When everyone is playing the same dirty game by the same dirty rules, then the winner is the winner. In any case, Astroworld really did capture a lot of imaginations, and a couple of tracks stood out right away. The hazy opening track “Stargazing” reached #8 despite, or maybe because of, its own total lack of structure. (It’s a 7.) But naturally, nobody was surprised when the big Astroworld song turned out to be the one with Drake on it.
Travis Scott had already made a couple of songs with Drake before “Sicko Mode,” but they were on Drake records, not on his own. In 2015, Scott appeared on “Company,” a track from the Drake mixtape If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. Two years later, Scott and Quavo both showed up on Drake’s “Portland,” which came out on the More Life project and peaked at #9. (It’s a 6.) That song is funny because it’s the one where the artists all caution you not to let somebody else “ride your wave,” even though wave-riding is what both Drake and Travis Scott do. The practice has made both of them tremendously successful. They keep an ear out for trends and sounds and styles, and they incorporate that stuff into what they were already doing, like the Borg. That’s an important skill for a rap star to have, and it’s kept both of them relevant for longer than most of their sui generis peers. But maybe the burden of being good wave-riders is the feeling that you have somehow generated your own wave and that other people are riding it. And I don’t know, maybe they’re right. I don’t really understand aquatic physics.
“Company” and “Portland” are grand and ominous and portentous, but they’re both fairly normal rap songs with fairly normal rap structures. That’s not the case with “Sicko Mode.” Instead, “Sicko Mode” is a multi-part suite with its own distinct movements. That’s not an entirely new pop-music concept. Brian Wilson tried something a bit like that on “Good Vibrations.” Paul McCartney tried something a bit like that on “Band On The Run.” In a rap context, Travis Scott absolutely didn’t invent the beat-switch convention. Since rap grew out of DJ’ing, the beat switch is almost built into its DNA. There are plenty of ’80s rap tracks that break themselves up into multiple pieces.
The first time I can remember really being like “whoa, it’s like a whole different song now” was halfway through Missy Elliott’s 1999 Eminem collab “Busa Rhyme.” Maybe that’s because Timbaland his beat-switch into a cinematic highlight, or maybe it just shows that I wasn’t paying enough attention when a producer like Pete Rock did something similar years earlier. But rap songs with beat switches were never presented as crossover attempts. On “Sicko Mode,” part of the juice is sheer starpower. 2018 was the year that Drake moonwalked all over the zeitgeist. In the context of Astroworld, Drake’s voice cut through all the expensively designed digital haze, and he brought more casual mastery to his “Sicko Mode” appearance than he did to basically any of the eight billion 2018 songs where he was the lead artist. But “Sicko Mode” also succeeds on a pop level because the beat switches are masterfully executed. When you hear the track enough times, they start to feel inevitable.
In a great 2019 New York Times Magazine package, Jonah Weiner, the guy who used to edit my little one-paragraph album reviews at Blender, broke down the structure and credits of “Sicko Mode,” demonstrating how one track can end up with 30 credited writers. I got into the mechanics of sampling songs that sample other songs in my column on Drake’s “Nice For What.” The same thing happens, to an even crazier degree, on “Sicko Mode.” If not for Weiner’s helpful chart, I can’t even imagine how I’d figure out who did what on this song.
“Sicko Mode” starts with a smeared, distended organ sound. It comes from Rogét Chahayed, a classically trained pianist who became a hitmaking producer when he co-produced DRAM and Lil Yachty’s euphorically loopy 2016 jam “Broccoli.” (“Broccoli” peaked at #5. It’s a 9. Chahayed’s work will appear in this column again.) Chahayed co-produced that first “Sicko Mode” bit with another Southern California native, Chauncey “Hit-Boy” Hollis, who added the drums and bassline. Hit-Boy came up under mega-producer Polow Da Don and ascended during the blog-rap days. True to his name, Hit-Boy worked on a lot of huge songs, the biggest of which was Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “N***as In Paris,” which peaked at #5 in 2011. (It’s a 10.) But even Hit-Boy’s “Sicko Mode” contributions seem pretty minimal for the first 30 seconds or so. Instead, that gluey bass-heavy organ hangs over everything, killing time until things can start happening.
The first thing that really happens on “Sicko Mode” is that Drake shows up, doing his airy singsong tenor thing to describe the frozen nocturnal landscape where his friend might murder you for a designer belt. Stuttering drums arrive, and Drake downshifts into rapper mode, but we only hear him that way for a quick second. As soon as he mentions young LaFlame in sicko mode — Travis Scott putting in work — Drake’s voice disappears into murky echo. Swampy 808 bass notes hit repeatedly, sounding like an engine that’s trying to turn over, before the next beat arrives. At one point, that minute-long intro was an entire song that Drake and Scott recorded together. But Scott scrapped most of the finished song and used that bit as a willful-misdirect opening, a snippet that could dramatically offset the next thing.
The next thing is Travis Scott rapping. The beat on the song’s second part is a guttural trap groove, with eerie high-pitched keyboard chords and deep, distorted bass. When the second part arrives, it works a bit like a Skrillex bass drop. Perhaps inevitably, Skrillex, a producer who’s been in this column, soon came out with a “Sicko Mode” remix where he tried to negotiate the song’s disparate pieces. But Skrillex bass-drops come after long ramp-ups; it’s the tension-and-release dynamic. “Sicko Mode” doesn’t have that. Instead, the changes are sudden. They’re supposed to jar you.
The music on the second part has the best story. The beat comes from the Swiss producer Ozan “Oz” Yildirim. In his Times Magazine piece, Jonah Weiner writes that Oz came into possession of an email address that supposedly belonged to Travis Scott, so he started sending his beats to that address. For a while, he got no response. Eventually, Scott replied, telling Oz that his music was good and that he should keep sending it. The second part of “Sicko Mode” is one of the beats that Oz emailed Scott. That story might be a little too neat, since Oz was landing beats with American artists like DJ Khaled and even Travis Scott himself a few years before “Sicko Mode” came out. Still, I like the story. Print the legend.
Working on his part of the beat, Oz got some help from another Swiss producer, his friend Mirsad “M-Dee” Dervic. M-Dee worked as a washing machine salesman, and he made music in his off-time. For all I know, that’s still what he’s doing. He’s the only one of the 30 credited “Sicko Mode” songwriters who doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. Oz also used a sound that he took from a sample pack created by Cubeatz, the production duo of two twin brothers from Germany. Those guys started out making beats for German rappers in the ’00s, and they broke into American rap when they made connections with American producer Vinylz and co-produced Meek Mill’s “RICO,” a Drake collab from the time before Meek and Drake stopped getting along. (“RICO” peaked at #40 in 2015.) Cubeatz became regular Drake collaborators, and we’ll see their work in this column again, though who knows if it’ll just be for a sound in a sample pack that someone else used.
When Travis Scott finally arrives on “Sicko Mode,” he’s doing a deep-baritone singsong over Oz’s beat. He announces that he’s got his jewelry on in the studio while he’s recording, which is nice to know. Some engineer probably had to take out all the clanking sounds, but that’s a small price to pay for the unearthly confidence that rappers can get when they’re wearing all their most expensive stuff. It looks like I’m being snarky here, but I’m not. Rap confidence is a mysterious and intangible thing, and it can sometimes come directly from those precious glittery artifacts. Scott sounds confident on “Sicko Mode,” even if he doesn’t say much of anything.
When Scott gets the solo spotlight on “Sicko Mode,” he mostly just talks about being fly. He’s got his DJ mixing up lean like he works at Jamba Juice. (Jamba Juice comes up multiple times on “Sicko Mode,” somehow.) His chain has different-colored diamonds, and crackers wish it was a noose. He has enough famous-singer exes that he “might put ’em all in a group.” He’s about to turn this function into Bonnaroo. He says hi to New York mixtape rapper Papoose, and it’s almost certainly the first time anyone has said hi to Papoose on a #1 hit. (See, he says he’s drunk on Remy Martin, and Pap used to be married to former Number Ones artist Remy Ma. You get it.)
See the problem here? As a rapper, Travis Scott is a total nonentity. His voice is heavy and commanding, and he knows how to find a pocket, but he almost never says anything worth remembering. (Scott co-wrote his “Sicko Mode” lyrics with Cyhi The Prince, a rapper from Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music camp who had a bunch of verses on Kanye tracks but who never emerged as much of a star himself.) Scott can’t hold the center of attention for an entire album, or maybe even an entire song, and he rarely tries. Instead, he turns himself into a sort of sound effect. Sometimes, that’s enough, but it’s striking how the most exciting bits of the second “Sicko Mode” part all belong to other people’s voices. Those shards make the “Sicko Mode” credits much, much more complicated.
For instance, there’s the late Biggie Smalls, someone who has been in this column a couple of times. Scott sing-raps, “When we pull up, gimme the loot,” and then Biggie’s voice suddenly rings out: “Gimme the loot!” That’s the hook from “Gimme The Loot,” a 1994 Biggie classic that samples a bunch of other tracks. Because of that extremely brief sample, Biggie and producer Easy Mo Bee get songwriter credit on “Sicko Mode.” All the members of Gang Starr, Onyx, a Tribe Called Quest, and Leaders Of The New School also get writer credits on “Sicko Mode” because “Gimme The Loot” has samples of “Just To Get A Rep,” “Throw Ya Gunz” and “Scenario.” (“Throw Ya Gunz” peaked at #81, “Scenario” at #57. “Just To Get A Rep” didn’t make it onto the Hot 100.) You can’t hear any of “Just To Get A Rep,” “Throw Ya Gunz,” or “Scenario” on “Sicko Mode.” You can barely hear any of Biggie. But because of that three-word cut-in, “Sicko Mode” gets an extra 14 credited songwriters.
And then it happens again! Travis Scott says that he arrives in Miami and women treat him like he’s 2 Live Crew figurehead Uncle Luke. Suddenly, Luke’s voice cuts in: “Don’t stop, pop that pussy!” That’s from Luke’s 1992 track “I Wanna Rock.” (“I Wanna Rock” peaked at #73. Luke’s highest-charting single, 1990’s “Banned In The USA,” peaked at #20.) That Luke line was especially familiar because it was sampled on the hook of the 2012 French Montana/Rick Ross/Drake/Lil Wayne posse cut “Pop That,” which peaked at #36. And because “I Wanna Rock” sampled KC & The Sunshine Band’s “That’s The Way (I Like It),” Sicko Mode picked up a few more writers. Travis Scott could’ve probably saved himself some money and his lawyers some paperwork if he didn’t use the vocal bits from Biggie and Luke, but they truly do make “Sicko Mode” just a tiny bit more exciting.
A couple of patched-in vocal bits sound much more ghostly. One of them is Swae Lee, who’s already been in this column as half of Rae Sremmurd and who will soon be in here by himself. Swae utters, “Someone said,” and he sounds so sad and lonely. He doesn’t say anything else. He seems to also sing the word “motherfucker,” but that gets bleeped for some inexplicable reason. That bit of Swae Lee is an orphan, and we don’t know where it came from, though he eventually spun it off into “Someone Said,” a not-bad 2020 single that didn’t really go anywhere.
The closest thing that “Sicko Mode” has to a chorus doesn’t come from Travis Scott or Drake. Instead, it’s taken from the slowed-down version of “Victory Flow,” a 2005 track from the late underground Houston rapper Big Hawk. Hawk had been a member of DJ Screw’s Screwed Up Click, and he was shot dead in 2006 at the age of 36. Hawk’s older brother Fat Pat, another Screwed Up Click member, was killed eight days earlier. Neither murder was ever solved. On “Sicko Mode,” Hawk’s already-deep voice, made positively inhuman when it’s slowed to a crawl, murmurs a bit of hard-earned wisdom: “To win the retreat, we all in too deep.” The sample is a cool salute to the Houston underground of Travis Scott’s youth, and it illustrates how much that gluey funk informed Scott’s stadium art-crunk style.
Just as suddenly as “Sicko Mode” switches into its second part, that second part dissolves into a blur of digital noise, which actually comes from another veteran of the Houston rap underground. Producer Mike Dean has already been in this column for his work on Kanye West’s “Stronger,” and he’ll be back many more times. (Like Hit-Boy, Dean was one of the producers who worked on West and Jay-Z’s “N***as In Paris.”) Dean, a middle-aged white stoner, is the go-to producer for any A-list rapper who wants an epic Hans Zimmer-sounding sheen. Before he joined Kanye West’s circle, Dean put in work for the Rap-A-Lot Records roster, making beats for rappers like Scarface and Devin The Dude in the ’90s. Travis Scott looked up to Dean when he was a kid in Houston, so it’s cool that they made music together after both of them became hugely successful.
“Sicko Mode” snaps into focus much more cleanly when Mike Dean’s noise-cloud gives way to some eerie, tingly bells and some hard-hitting drums. That’s the work of Brytavious “Tay Keith” Chambers, a self-taught Memphis producer whose music sits comfortably alongside all the other Three 6 Mafia descendants in his city’s peerless legacy of creepy-sounding bass-heavy horror-movie bangers. Tay Keith is a fixture now, and when you hear his producer tag — “Tay Keith, fuck these n***as up!” — you know that something hard is about to follow. In 2018, though, Tay Keith was new on the scene. He was making tracks for the underground Memphis dance-rapper BlocBoy JB, and Drake was impressed enough to reach out and appear on BlocBoy’s one big hit, 2018’s “Look Alive.” Immediately after that, Tay Keith produced Drake’s “Nonstop,” and he’s been a big-name beatmaker ever since. (“Look Alive” peaked at #5. It’s a 10. “Nonstop” reached #2. It’s an 8.)
The best part of “Sicko Mode” is the Drake/Tay Keith part. Drake has family roots in Memphis — his father is from there — and he pays tribute to the old Memphis underground nearly as often as Travis Scott pays tribute to the old Houston underground. More importantly, Drake just sounds so smooth and comfortable on Memphis beats. That sound brings out his imperial swagger, and its bass balances out the treble in his voice. Whenever Drake is on a Memphis beat, almost everything that he says becomes cool. Even when what he’s saying is definitively not cool — even if he’s just talking about taking half a Xanax to sleep through a 16-hour flight — he sounds cool.
On the third part of “Sicko Mode,” Drake inhabits that forbidding twinkle. He used to ride the bus to school dances, and now he’s rolling up to private airports, but he’ll still lurk in the back of a car, stalking his enemies. Everything that Drake says on “Sicko Mode” sounds tossed-off or freestyled, and it probably is. But the song captures Drake in that mode where everything he says works as a hook. I have lots of happy memories of rapping along to Drake’s “Sicko Mode” verse with my kids in the minivan, all of us just yelling all that shit. When a rap verse can make me feel cool when I’m driving my kids around in the minivan, that’s an accomplishment.
When Travis Scott comes on after Drake, the two of them do a quick verbal do-si-do, and Scott sounds newly energized. He locks right into the same flow that Drake used, talking about getting cell phones to his friends in prison and his kid’s mother’s Forbes cover. Then the track slows down again, dissolving into screwed-up noise. That has become a clichéd way to end a pop song. When nobody can think of a proper finale, they just slow it down, briefly nodding at Houston screw, before the song stops. I’m not a huge fan of that convention, but it seemed cool on “Sicko Mode.”
Right away, “Sicko Mode” was the big hit from Astroworld. The week after the album came out, “Sicko Mode” debuted at #4. It remained in the top 10 when every other Astroworld track slid down the charts. “Sicko Mode” never really got much radio play, since it wasn’t built for that, but it became a huge party song. I got pretty used to hearing it back-to-back with Sheck Wes’ similarly noisy-gothy anthem “Mo Bamba.” (“Mo Bamba” peaked at #6. It’s a 9.) Sheck Wes, who Drake shouts out in his “Sicko Mode” verse, is a Travis Scott protege from New York. In 2018 and 2019, that Travis Scott batcave lurch-rap sound was what young people wanted to hear when they were getting fucked up.
But omnipresent party songs like “Sicko Mode” or “Mo Bamba” don’t usually reach #1 unless radio embraces them. “Sicko Mode” got airplay on rap stations, and it eventually crept into the top 10 of pop-radio airplay, but that wasn’t enough to push it to the top. Instead, Travis Scott had to work every angle he had to get there. He made a video, a trippy-ugly CGI nightmare that he co-directed with Dave Meyers. He put out a bunch of Cyber Monday merch bundles that helped push Astroworld back to #1 on the album charts. He released the Skrillex “Sicko Mode” remix at just the right moment. During a show at Madison Square Garden, Scott even asked fans to keep playing “Sicko Mode” so that he could get his first #1 hit. This was a concerted campaign on Scott’s part, and it worked.
Ariana Grande’s “thank u, next” was just starting to run out of momentum when Travis Scott gave “Sicko Mode” its big push, and it picked up more momentum when she released her video for the song. If she’d dropped that video a few days earlier, “Sicko Mode” never would’ve topped the Hot 100. But she was nice enough to wait, and “Sicko Mode” was just barely able to interrupt the reign of “thank u, next” for a single week. Travis Scott would pull similar tricks a few more times over the years, and that’s why he’ll keep appearing in this column. With “Sicko Mode,” though, he put all that muscle behind a song that actually did resonate.
“Sicko Mode” went diamond in 2020; it’s now platinum 15 times over. Travis Scott popped up at the 2019 Super Bowl Halftime Show to perform “Sicko Mode” alongside Maroon 5, which was not very inspiring but which does offer some sense of how huge that song was. At the end of 2018, Scott and Migos member Offset appeared on Kodak Black’s #2 hit “Zeze.” (It’s a 7.) Drake, meanwhile, went on a weird little run where he made big hits with his former enemies, putting his shine on Meek Mill’s #6 hit “Going Bad” and Chris Brown’s #5 hit “No Guidance.” (“Going Bad” is a 7, and “No Guidance” is a 3.)
In that “Sicko Mode” moment, Travis Scott and Drake were both on top of the world, and they both stayed there for a while. They kept making music together. In 2021, Scott appeared on Drake’s #3 hit “Fair Trade,” and the two of them both guested on “Bubbly,” a Young Thug track that peaked at #20. (“Fair Trade” is a 4.) In 2022, Scott showed up on Drake and 21 Savage’s “Pussy & Millions,” and that track reached #6. (It’s a 5.) In 2023, Drake guested on “Meltdown,” a Travis Scott song that peaked at #3. (It’s a 7.) Both Travis Scott and Drake eventually suffered some very different career calamities, but they’re both still making hits today. We’ll see both of them many more times.
GRADE: 9/10
BONUS BEATS: In 2019, someone released a “Sicko Mode” cover that was supposedly from KK Slider, the little dog from the video game Animal Crossing who plays guitar and sings in unintelligible electronic glitch-squeaks. I have no idea how this happened, but my seven-year-old son found the KK Slider version of “Sicko Mode” and absolutely fell in love. He wanted to hear it all the time. He wasn’t even playing Animal Crossing back then, but he still needed to hear the gibberish cartoon-dog version of “Sicko Mode.” I absolutely hated it at the time, but now I’m kind of nostalgic for it. Right now, I’m learning that there are multiple KK Slider versions of “Sicko Mode,” but I’m pretty sure this is the one that I’d always have to hear:
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Middle-aged Tom, he in booko mode. Buy it here.
