“It's a point where there has to be some acknowledgment, like, ‘This shit is not cool,’ ” he says. Scott has felt the urgency of the moment and has been moved by the outcry against police brutality. We are in a moment of serious reckoning during a critical election year, and it's all happening amid a global health crisis that has erupted into a civil war against basic science. Federal stormtroopers have landed in cities across the country while protesters are maimed for marching against racial inequity under the order of a president who has demonized Black Lives Matter groups. These days, to be Black and brown in America feels like living in a dystopia. And as people, we don't want nothing from each other but just to see each other happy.” “We got buildings, flying cars,” he continues. As just humans.” Scott's utopia has crazy, futuristic highways and “ fire” engineering and design classes. He sees “a place where we could just all sit across from each other and one side stops looking at the other side and where we all realize we're equal. He lights a second blunt and begins pacing the room while laying out his idealized future. What does utopia look like? Feel like? Sound like? Suddenly, the rapper who calls himself La Flame is in full Rage Mode-his eyes are tightly shut, and he's flailing his limbs to the beat and spinning in circles around his studio. He leans in close to the speakers to confirm he's playing the correct version before he launches into a series of high jumps. In person, as onstage, he's all energy and instinct, a ball of id that might get injured from stage diving off a lighting rig. Travis Scott's description of Tenet also happens to be a convincing working thesis for describing Travis Scott himself. “I can't even explain it,” Scott says when I ask him to tell me anything about the film. “His insights into the musical and narrative mechanism Ludwig Göransson and I were building were immediate, insightful, and profound.” The track is still untitled at the moment (and is currently known as “Travis mix 16”), which is a fitting accompaniment to an indefinitely delayed film that no one knows anything about. “His voice became the final piece of a yearlong puzzle,” the director tells me over email.

It's Scott's first foray into writing music for a film, but his contributions, says Nolan, were crucial. The track is for Christopher Nolan's enigmatic thriller Tenet, and it sounds like a brain-liquefying trip through time and space.

This May Sound Crazy by Piper Scott