Goosebumps

Album: Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight (2016)
Charted: 8 32
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Songfacts®:

  • This love song finds Travis Scott so in love with his girl, he gets goosebumps. Goosebumps are a condition of the skin, like that of a plucked goose. The bristling feeling a person feels is due to the raising of hairs when they are cold or experience strong emotions such as fear, euphoria or sexual arousal.
  • This song features a verse by Kendrick Lamar. Travi$ Scott debuted his entire new album, Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight, during an episode of his .Wav radio show on Beats 1. "It's crazy how we got these legends on the album," Scott told his .Wav listeners. "It's so dope how they came to Trav world and turned up. Kendrick turned up... This is the illest rapper in the f--king game."
  • Scott first met Kendrick Lamar at the MTV Video Music Awards. He recalled to Billboard magazine: "He came up to me and was just like, 'Yo, man, I f--k with your music. It's super dope and inspirational'" I was like, whoa, this is the best rapper in the globe - he f--ks with my music! That's one of the things that made me want to keep working on my music and try to keep it going 'cause I'm not the most rappity rap ass n---a. That's not me but I really love Kendrick's music."
  • The song was recorded at Scott's home in Beverly Hills with production by regular Lamar beatmakers Cardo and Yung Exclusive plus German production duo Cubeatz.
  • It was Cardo who came up with the original beat. According to the producer, several rappers had access to the instrumentation before Scott. He tweeted:

    "U know how many niggas had the 'goosebumps' beat before Travis and they didn't do nothing to it ? U wouldn't believe it."

    Speaking with DJBooth, Cardo named the names that passed on his instrumentation. "Only three to four people had that beat," he said. "That was Drake, ScHoolboy Q, Future—don't know if he ever got it—Rihanna and I sent it to Young Thug as well."
  • During a May 12, 2017 gig at The Criterion in Oklahoma City, Travis Scott rapped this song 14 times in a row. Scott claimed this was a world record for most times a tune has been performed by an artist in a single concert, usurping Jay Z and Kanye West who back in 2012 during their Watch the Throne Tour, performed "Niggas in Paris" 12 times in a row. However, a quick search of the Guinness World Records database suggests that neither Jay-Z/West nor Scott's performances are officially recognized as record breakers.

    Apparently, that feat wasn't good enough for Scott, so he decided to break his own personal record by performing the song fifteen times in a row during his Birds Eye View tour stop in Cleveland on May 21, 2017. Scott couldn't wait to tweet the news. "GOOSEBUMPS GOT PERFORM 15 TIMES. I LEFT MY CLOTHES FOR ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME," he wrote. However, the rapper actually only performed the song's hook over and over again - so we're not sure if that counts?
  • Scott recruited the Brooklyn-based directing duo BRTHR, who consist of Alex Lee and Kyle Wightman for the song's music video. The pair told Genius that they wanted to create something that teenagers would remember. "The video is basically about this hellish freak show and Travis' kind of journey to hell" Wightman said.

    Lee added, "We wanted to have the video kind of hit hard right from the beginning and just draw people in."
  • BRTHR based the clip on their video for The Weeknd's "Party Monster." Scott told them in a meeting that he wanted a similar aesthetic, but with the addition of strippers.

    "Our goal wasn't to make this super, super dark video anyways," Lee said. "It was a mixture. It was dark and lighthearted. It's like, let's lighten the mood up with 3D girls in bikinis in hell."
  • The song featured in the 2018 movie drama The Hate U Give.
  • The Spanish DJ and producer HVME (an abbreviation of his civil name, pronounced "Hume") reworked the song in mid-2020. The Spaniard transformed Scott's trap-hop original into a sleek, deep-house banger. Released on June 11, 2020, it soon began clocking up streams and entering charts around the world.

    On January 15, 2021 HVME teamed up with Scott for the official remix.
  • "Goosebumps" soundtracks the trailer for the Disney+ 2023 series of the same title. The trailer for Goosebumps features several jump scares and bone-chilling scenes synched by the eerie and atmospheric track.

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