Reality Always Exceeds Fiction: A Review of Travis Scott’s Short Film - Birds in the Trap
Travis Scott’s Recently released short film Birds in the Trap, is an elegant piece of journalism depicting the muted chirps echoing in the hallows of the hood.
Unlike other films that glorify or employ caricatures of poverty, the characters in this film are familiar, not blown out of proportion gangsters, bums, or hood rats, but instead a believable and diverse community filing through art painted warehouses and abandoned corners; who’s morals and dreams are no more depraved than those reading this, and who’s hands are just as tied as the rest of ours when it comes to fate.
The minimalist cinematography gives the viewer a feeling of riding along with Travis in his trap as we come across friends and foes as a participant rather than just an onlooker. The muted tones are colored by the dissonant and woeful melodies from the album with cuts like “The Ends” which becomes a symphonic piece accompanied by the imagery of a car crash that leaves Travis walking between two worlds.
“Dimness, my old brother…” starts the original and existentialist poem that Travis spouts as he lays on the hospital table in critical condition; it reminds you of that old Simon and Garfunkel lyric, “Hello, darkness my old friend…” as we are consumed by the hopelessness of this trap. The world becomes surreal as we see Star Wars like androids and masks donning the latest season of Yeezy fashion floating among a decrepit baroque-ess building; intimately juxtaposing trap lifestyle with what we consider high European art.
When a split second accident becomes a calcified moment like broken greek statue depicting the many rapes of zeus, or the beheading of medusa, though horrendous, like death, it is still a moment of creation, but everyone is a critic.
Travis Scott’s film is a depiction of world that is more mental than we care to let on, some of these traps are self imposed, while others we create as a community, yet there is friction from struggling to drown out the incessant bird flapping of thot-filled drama while also trying not to be consumed by the monsters of depression and anxiety billowing out of your own mind. Can we ride the wave that washes us clean?
In life we remember the dead ones so we may live, perhaps imbue the next generation with life, giving voice to our story so it may influence just one to be different, and we fight everyday in our labels, and boxes, and prisons and stare at that careening asteroid heading straight towards us in the distance, our destiny, and a question is posed, is a trapped life worth living?
We are all effected by death, by pain, by suffering, even when it doesn’t make the news, even when all of our feeds don’t deem it important, evolution happens with every death and every birth, and the birds in the trap still sing like McKnight, even when you don’t listen.
Thx Travie .
Written by Négré Micheaux for F!!!RE magazine
2017
