We live in a painfully stage-managed world these days. So much so that it’s often becoming hard to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t. For example, whenever politicians sit down to do interviews, the audience aren’t told that exactly what will be discussed has already been agreed in a number of cases.

A legion of minders and spin doctors are often watching, just out of camera shot, to make sure the politician doesn’t say anything which might cause problems later – or to place all manner of objections if the interviewer dares to ask a question which they don’t like, as if they were in a court of law rather than a comfortable TV studio. And rest assured similar nonsense happens in the world of music too.

This was the first thing to come to mind when I noticed that Travis Scott has done a puff piece interview with a man who bizarrely styles himself Charlamagne Tha God –  whose real name is the less exciting Lenard Larry McKelvey. Having watched a large chunk of the interview below, I get the impression a legion of lawyers acting on behalf of Scott – whose real name is actually Jacques Bermon Webster II – are watching every single word of this interview.

This isn’t exactly surprising. At the last count, Scott was facing something like 140 legal actions over what happened on that dreadful day at the Astroworld festival. One of them is a 1500 strong mass litigation action. Scott’s lawyers filed this week to have six ofo the lawsuits dismissed in their entirety. Lawyers have now asked the courts to combine and merge legal cases in order to speed the whole process up.

Scott’s lawyers will not want him to say anything whatsoever which could be seen as an admission of liability. Be in no doubt – they will have crawled all over every single second of the 60-minute interview before it was made public. Scott’s words are painfully short on accepting any responsibility for what happened – he attacks “professionals” a few times in the interview, but repeatedly fails to specify who any of these “professionals” were.

In the world of Scott’s lawyers, he’s a blameless victim of all this. Whether judges up and down the United States agree with this view is something we’ll soon find out, no doubt. No, this interview is all about an attempt to rehabilitate himself with the public. Legal actions are incredibly expensive and Scott needs money to pay those bills, no matter what their outcomes are.

Watch the interview if you like. You might find it interesting. You might just think it’s a shameless attempt to garner public sympathy. You can decide…