While the occasional joint like “The Ends” finds him riding weighty 808 kicks with a laid-back cadence that works due to its low-end complement, tracks à la “Sweet Sweet” sound downright lazy, Scott’s meandering croon better served for a ghostwriter’s reference track rather than a major label outing when not bolstered by dense or timely production values. Whereas Scott relied on producers to develop lush soundscapes for his autotuned flow and rough, blunt-smoke distressed rasp on Rodeo, Birds’s stripped-down approach bares an utter lack of finesse behind a microphone. Yet, with an album title lifted from a years-old Quavo verse and with various instances of outright musical plunder, the human medley of popular hip-hop has finally cashed in any remaining merit, an opportunist curator passing off as a youthful visionary no longer.īefore the release of Birds In The Trap Sing McKnight, Scott stated the record would be “cutting straight down to everybody want to eat,” but his decision to trim the figurative fat from his music proves to be the foundation of its fatal, ultimately revealing flaws.
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While Days Before Rodeo was driven by a dark, surrealist undercurrent for Scott to call his own, Rodeo provided a maximalist take on Atlanta trap that, in lieu of forgoing most of the identity its prequel developed in the process, provided a step-forward artistically. And yet, forgivable incidents they eventually became, as his output seemingly outweighed the sins. The reappropriation of a fan’s artwork on Days Before Rodeo’s cover was questionable at least, the similarities between “Antidote” and hitmaker-of-the-moment Swae Lee’s melodic croon baffling at most. Since his perceived lifting of Future’s “straight up” ad-lib during the beginnings of a career marred by accusations of artistic theft, it’s proved impossible to ingest Travis Scott’s work without consideration of its context.