The first thing you notice is the head. It rises from a dusty fairground like a felled colossus laid on its back and propped upright, an enormous golden face with braids spilling down its cheeks, eyes closed, mouth open in a soft O. Look closer and the mouth is not a mouth at all. It is a doorway, a glowing orange tunnel into which small figures are walking, silhouetted against a burst of light that could be sunrise or something less innocent. This is Travis Scott rendered as architecture, his own head turned into the gate of an amusement park.
The photograph is the work of David LaChapelle, who both shot it and directed the art, and who dreamed up the giant golden inflatable head that anchors it. The concept is a memorial disguised as a carnival. Astroworld takes its name from Six Flags AstroWorld, the theme park in Scott's hometown of Houston, Texas, that closed in 2005. The braids curling off the sculpture and the whole tunnel-mouth entrance nod directly to the park's Texas Cyclone ride, so the album cover becomes a way of walking back into a place that no longer exists.
LaChapelle stages the scene in bright, almost hallucinatory daylight. The sky is a wide Texas blue streaked with clouds, and strings of red and blue triangular pennants swing across the frame like they always do at a county fair. Behind the golden head, the machinery of the park crowds in: the arc of a Ferris wheel or swing ride on the right, weathered green tarps, a rust-bruised car half-collapsed at the edge of the lot. The ground is pale, cracked dirt littered with scattered trash, a fairground caught somewhere between thriving and abandoned.
Two children hold the foreground like bookends. On the left, a kid in a fire-red top and rainbow-striped pants leaps clean off the ground, one arm thrust up so that a red-and-white box of popcorn explodes into the air, kernels flying against the blue. In his other hand he clutches a toy rocket taller than his torso and a blue drink. On the right, a red-haired boy in a blue striped shirt and jeans stands planted and calm, sipping from a straw, holding his own popcorn, staring back at us. Between them, in the middle distance, more small figures file toward that burning orange mouth, some clearly children, drawn into the glow.
This is the wholesome one. LaChapelle actually made two covers for the album, a dual release: this family-friendly daytime version, all popcorn and blue sky and leaping joy, and a second, lascivious nighttime funhouse scene that trades sunshine for something seedier. The two images are meant to work as a pair, the innocent park and its shadow, the day face and the night face of the same golden head.
It was the nighttime version that lit a fire. In a cut of that second cover that LaChapelle posted himself, the trans model and icon Amanda Lepore appears on the right side of the frame. In the version Travis Scott shared on his own account, she was gone, edited out. The absence did not go unnoticed. Critics online seized on the omission, some reading a transphobic motive into the decision to erase a trans woman from the final image.
LaChapelle answered the accusation directly in Instagram comments. Lepore, he explained, was taken out because she simply upstaged everyone else in the shot, and that the choice had nothing to do with hating. His defense carried a particular weight, because Amanda Lepore is a recurring presence throughout his photography, a longtime subject rather than a stranger dropped into the frame. Whatever the truth of the editing room, the episode attached a note of controversy to a cover otherwise built on childlike wonder.
The album arrived on August 3, 2018, through Cactus Jack Records and Grand Hustle Records, distributed by Epic Records, a psychedelic rap record laced with trap that matches the woozy, sun-warped feeling of the artwork. The golden head was never confined to the album sleeve. During the rollout, physical replicas of it loomed over real-world landmarks: outside Amoeba Music in Los Angeles, in Times Square in New York, and at sites across Houston, Atlanta, London and Paris, turning the cover into a scavenger hunt playing out in cities around the world.
When the artwork finally landed on Scott's Instagram, it became one of the most engaged posts on his feed, pulling in roughly 1.5 million likes and more than 12,000 comments. The image had done exactly what a great fairground does. It stopped people in their tracks and made them want to go inside.
That pull is all in the composition. Your eye lands first on the golden face because it dominates the center and catches the light, then falls to the glowing mouth and the children walking into it, then snaps to the leaping boy and his exploding popcorn on the left. There is no printed title, no artist name cluttering the scene, only the small black-and-white Parental Advisory stamp in the lower right corner reminding you that this sunlit playground has a darker cover somewhere. The park is gone in real life, shuttered years ago, but here it stands again, gilded and open, its own creator's face holding the door.
