After a week of suspense, the epilogue is very sad for Egyptian fans of Travis Scott. The Texas rapper’s concert scheduled at the foot of the Giza pyramids on Friday July 28 has been officially canceled. The bad news was announced by Live Nation Middle East, the organization in charge of the festivities. The company addressed major technical issues in a statement: “Complex production issues meant that the show could not be staged in the desert.”
A few days earlier, the Egyptian musicians’ union, which has the right to oversee any concert or music broadcast in the country, had expressed serious reservations about the holding of the concert, calling for its cancellation. The association said: “After examining the opinions expressed on social networks and the positions of the artist, the union has found images and documented information about the strange rituals he practices which go against of our traditions. It must be said that the conservative union is carrying out a real witch hunt vis-à-vis urban artists and in particular rappers in recent years. In 2017, the organization banned Lebanese group Mashrou Leila Band from performing because of LGBT flags waved at one of their concerts in Cairo.
This concert was to be the occasion for the American superstar to present his new album Utopia in preview. The project will indeed be released this same Friday and has been awaited since 2018 and the release of Astroworld by the rapper’s fans. Teased for many years, the album will explore new sounds and will graphically carry ancient and mystical inspired forms.
It will be accompanied by a film produced by A24 and broadcast from July 27 in the United States. Entitled Circus Maximus and shot between Iceland, Denmark, France, Nigeria and Italy, the project remained quite enigmatic until then. The rapper had only released a trailer on his social networks in order to keep his fans in suspense.
