Sicko Mode

Hook

Most hit records are built. "Sicko Mode" was assembled — in pieces, out of order, by people working in different cities, with the final component arriving at two in the morning on the day the album came out.

That last detail is the one fans still enjoy most. Drake reportedly turned in his contribution at around 2 a.m. on 3 August 2018, hours before Astroworld went live, which goes some way to explaining why his opening section ends the way it does: not resolved, not faded, just yanked offstage mid-thought. What sounds like the boldest arrangement decision in mainstream rap of the late 2010s may partly have been a deadline.

And underneath the track's most quoted moment sits something stranger and more tender. The hook is carried by a sampled voice belonging to Big Hawk — John Edward Hawkins, a founding figure in Houston's Screwed Up Click, murdered in 2006. Travis Scott publicly thanked Hawk's family for clearing the sample on release day. So the biggest rap single of that year was, among other things, a séance: a dead Houston legend announcing the ride.

Background

Jacques Webster II grew up in and around Houston, a city whose rap tradition runs on its own clock — literally. DJ Screw's chopped-and-screwed technique slowed records down until they dragged, warping voices into something syrupy and hallucinatory, and the Screwed Up Click tapes that circulated out of his shop became the region's private language for most of the 1990s.

The other thing Houston had was AstroWorld: a Six Flags amusement park near the Astrodome, the place where local kids spent their summers. It closed on 30 October 2005, when Webster was a teenager, and the land was eventually flattened for parking. He has described the loss in almost personal terms — that they took AstroWorld away from Houston — and said he wanted the album to sound like an amusement park being taken from children. That is the record's governing idea. Not nostalgia exactly. Grievance, dressed as a theme park.

Astroworld was recorded across 2017 and 2018 at studios including Cactus in Honolulu, Westlake in Los Angeles and Henson in Hollywood. "Sicko Mode" came together from parts that had been lying around. Hit-Boy has said he made his portion back in September 2016, on the night Scott's previous album Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight was released, then sat on it for roughly two years. Rogét Chahayed worked on that opening movement with him; OZ and the German duo Cubeatz built the middle; Tay Keith supplied the final stretch; Mike Dean, Scott's long-time sonic architect, did additional production and glue work. Because of layered sample clearances — The Notorious B.I.G.'s "Gimme the Loot" sits inside it, which in turn reaches back to Onyx, and Luke's early-nineties Miami bass staple "I Wanna Rock" is interpolated — the credits reportedly swelled to around thirty writers, pulling in names like DJ Premier and Q-Tip through the chain. Royalty cheques travelling down three generations of rap is, in its own way, the most Houston thing about the record: everything slowed, everything passed along.

For listeners in Britain, the song's afterlife has a nice symmetry. It reached number nine on the Official Singles Chart and was eventually certified triple platinum by the BPI, representing something like 1.8 million units. Scott made his Reading Festival debut in 2018, the year of Astroworld; by 2025 he was headlining Reading and Leeds for the first time, a rapper closing out the main stage of Britain's great guitar festival. There is an argument that "Sicko Mode" earned him that slot specifically. Its logic is not song logic, it is set logic — a DJ pulling the rug, dropping a second beat, then a third — and that is a grammar British crowds had already learned from garage, jungle and grime soundsystem culture long before American radio made room for it.

Core meaning

Taken at face value, the song is three flexes stacked on top of each other, and the title is the key to all of them. To go into sicko mode is to switch into an extreme gear — to stop being reasonable. "Sicko" is a word Drake had used before, tied up in Toronto's area-code mythology, the 416 and 647 that became "the 6." Here it functions less as a boast than as a setting on a dial.

The first movement, Drake's, is the slow climb. Everything is sedated and expensive: late-night rooms, cars, a woman's attention, the particular boredom of having arrived. He describes the aftermath of success rather than the pursuit of it, in a register so relaxed it feels like someone narrating from a hotel bed. Then the floor drops out.

The second movement is Scott's, and it is the opposite temperature — jittery, pressurised, full of movement. He catalogues speed, money, chemical fog, suspicion, and the sense that something is always about to go wrong. Where Drake was reclining, Scott is pacing. He drops in Houston coordinates and the inherited Biggie line surfaces, so the verse plays as a young star borrowing the authority of the city and the canon at once.

The third movement is the second drop — Tay Keith's section, built for an arena and sequenced like an encore, with both men trading lines over a beat that sounds like a crowd being commanded rather than entertained.

Read the three together and a meaning emerges that none of them states. The record is about momentum as a defence against emptiness. Nothing in it is allowed to settle: the moment a groove becomes comfortable, it is destroyed. That is exactly the sensation of a rollercoaster, and exactly the sensation of the life being described — the very thing the album's park metaphor keeps circling. AstroWorld was a structure built to deliver joy on a schedule, and when it vanished, what was left was the appetite without the machine. "Sicko Mode" reproduces that in four and a half minutes. It is thrilling and it is restless, and it never tells you where you are going next, because knowing would spoil it.

And then there is Hawk's sampled voice stitched into the hook: the park announcer, the ghost of the city, calling the ride from somewhere underneath it.

Cultural context and legacy

The chart story is almost absurd. "Sicko Mode" debuted at number four, then refused to leave — it spent seventeen weeks in the top ten before finally reaching number one on 8 December 2018, Scott's first chart-topper. Its climb was helped along by a Skrillex remix bundled with merchandise, a tactic of its moment. It went on to become the first hip-hop song to spend at least thirty weeks inside the Hot 100's top ten. By December 2020 the RIAA had certified it Diamond, and its certification has kept climbing since.

Drake, famously, got none of the chart credit. Because of how the single was officially credited, Billboard did not list him, which cost him what would have been another number one — a technicality that has annoyed his fans ever since, given that his voice is the first thing you hear.

Musicologists noticed something else: the three movements sit in different keys, which reportedly made it the only number-one hit of the entire 2010s to contain a key change. In an era of locked-loop pop, a chart-topper that modulates twice is a small act of vandalism. Critics responded accordingly — Billboard called it a three-part prog-rap odyssey, Pitchfork placed it nineteenth among the best songs of 2018, and Australia's Triple J listeners voted it third in their Hottest 100. It picked up Grammy nominations for Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song, both of which went, as it happens, to Drake's "God's Plan."

Dave Meyers' video, released in October 2018, made the Houston subtext explicit: it opens on the city skyline, shot partly at Screwed Up Records and Tapes, DJ Screw's own shop, with Big Hawk memorialised in graffiti on a passing train. Around that documentary core, Meyers piled surrealism — Scott's enormous red head mounted on a building, rows of saturated houses, Drake walking a dog beneath an eclipse, Scott on horseback. It passed a billion views.

Then the song went everywhere: the 2018 VMAs, the Super Bowl LIII halftime show alongside Maroon 5, basketball arenas, gym playlists, a million edits built around that first transition. For a stretch, the beat switch itself became a meme — shorthand for any abrupt change of mood anywhere.

It is impossible to write about this record's legacy honestly without noting what later attached to the name. In November 2021, a crowd surge at Scott's Astroworld Festival in Houston killed ten people, most of them very young. The word that had meant a lost childhood paradise now also means that night, and plenty of listeners cannot separate the two. The song did not cause it, but the record's whole design — propulsion, pressure, the deliberate refusal to let a crowd come down — reads differently afterwards.

Why it still resonates today

Partly because it solved a problem everyone else was still arguing about. By 2018 the industry's anxiety was attention: streaming had trained listeners to skip, and the received wisdom was to front-load a hook and keep things short. "Sicko Mode" went the other way. It gave you three songs for the price of one and made the switching itself the entertainment. Within a couple of years, beat switches were standard equipment across rap and pop, and much of that lineage traces back here.

Partly because it rewards relistening in an unusual way. You can love the opening for a year and then suddenly hear the third movement as the real song. It behaves less like a track than like a short compilation with a point of view, which is why it has survived a decade of playlist churn that flattened most of its contemporaries.

But mostly it lasts because the feeling underneath it is not exotic at all. Everyone has a demolished AstroWorld — some place that organised their happiness and then got closed, sold, flattened, or simply outgrown. The song's answer to that is to move faster, louder, and without warning, which is not wisdom but is extremely recognisable. You do not need to know anything about Houston, or chopped-and-screwed tapes, or Six Flags' 2005 balance sheet, to understand a record that keeps throwing the ground away and daring you to enjoy the fall.

How to dive deeper

🎧 Immerse in the sound

• Astroworld (2018) — hear the full ride in sequence. "Stargazing" opens with its own beat switch, so by the time "Sicko Mode" arrives the trick has already been established as the album's architecture rather than a one-off stunt.
• "Gimme the Loot" — The Notorious B.I.G. — the 1994 source that Scott's middle movement reaches back into. Playing it first turns his verse from a flex into an inheritance, and explains why the credits run to dozens of names.
• Big Hawk and the Screwed Up Click tapes — start with Hawk's own material, then find a DJ Screw mix and let it drag. The slowed, syrupy warp is the DNA "Sicko Mode" is built on, and it is where the hook's sampled voice came from.

📚 Follow the story

• Houston Rap Tapes by Lance Scott Walker — an oral history of the city's scene told largely by the people who made it, including the Screwed Up Click circle. It is the best way to understand why Houston rap sounds like it is underwater.
• DJ Screw: A Life in Slow Revolution by Lance Scott Walker — the full biography of the man who invented the tempo. Read it and the Hawk sample stops being trivia and becomes a lineage.
• Contemporary coverage of Astroworld's making — the XXL and Billboard features from 2018 are where Scott talked about the park's closure and his ambition to make a record that felt like loss disguised as a fairground. Worth reading alongside the far more sombre reporting from 2021.

🌍 Visit the places

• The former Six Flags AstroWorld site, Houston — south of downtown by the NRG Park complex. There is almost nothing to see, which is exactly the point: the album exists because this is now flat ground near a stadium.
• Screwed Up Records and Tapes, Houston — DJ Screw's shop, reportedly still trading, and a location in the song's video. It functions as a pilgrimage site for anyone who takes the city's slowed-down tradition seriously.
• Missouri City and south Houston — the suburban sprawl where Webster grew up. Driving it at night, with the album on, explains more about the record's restlessness than any interview.

🎸 Experience it yourself

• Watch the Dave Meyers video properly — not as background, but hunting for the Houston details: the skyline, the record shop, the Hawk graffiti on the train. The surreal imagery is the surface; the city is the substance.
• Slow the song down — pitch it down to chopped-and-screwed tempo using any player that allows it. The beat switches turn from jump-scares into something heavy and ceremonial, which is arguably closer to the tradition it comes from.
• Try mixing the three parts — load the track into any DJ app and attempt to blend out of each movement. Doing it badly for ten minutes is the fastest education in why the transitions land the way they do.

🎵 Listen to this song