During a recent shoot with Champs Sports, Quavo reminded the entire internet that he led Gwinnett county in passing yards in high school and therefore can and will make it rain out here.
Shortly thereafter, Falcons wide receiver Julio Jones was inducted as an honorary fourth Migo. Together they made a kids-friendly song with DJ Durel called “11 Birds” that, come this fall, you’ll probably hear a lot on Sundays in Atlanta — in sports bars and out of the windows of passing cars as you walk to the Falcons’ new home at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, where you will probably hear it 10 more times before kickoff. It’s Migos — they could read the iTunes User Agreement over a trap beat and find a way to make it stick. They once freestyled for six minutes without completing a single thought, and it was somehow absolute fire.
But “11 Birds” is not absolute fire. It’s more like a match lit in total darkness. It’s unsure fire.
Offset has the best verse — which seems to be happening a lot lately — though Takeoff is a close second. Quavo uses an autotune preset that makes the whole thing sound like someone wanted to use a Migos song in a film, but couldn’t get licensing, and just made one from scratch instead. But the stepping-on-Lego-while-barefoot ad-libs are still there, so it’s fine.
Falcons fans will have convinced themselves it’s great by their first home game against the Packers. The accompanying video is generally uplifting; there’s X-Pro II’ed shots of downtown Atlanta, the four of them eating sweet potato pie, Takeoff’s gleaming late-model McLaren, Julio Jones throwing fade routes to kids in the street. All in all, it seems like a pretty solid weekend.
But here’s how their weekend actually went:
They sat courtside while John Wall played the Hawks clean off the court, about three months after Julio’s Falcons were up 28–3. If it sounds like I’m a hater it’s because I am — they choked away a 25-point lead in the Super Bowl, and with it, a piece of my dignity.
It was a monumental collapse punctuated by a game-winning, 2-yard touchdown run from a guy that shares a nickname with a fictional character from Holes. (Which, actually, is kind of awesome. The nickname part.) There’s “no ‘I’ in team” or whatever, but I feel it’s worth noting that if the loss was anyone’s fault, it probably wasn’t Julio’s.
Look, “11 Birds” is fine. Good, even. But it’s too late to be the anthem of a surging — well, moving Atlanta Hawks team, and if we’re talking the Falcons, then we must also be talking moral victories. And there’s nothing explicitly wrong with moral victories, but they are a little hilarious.
Migos and Julio might’ve made the exact same “11 Birds,” even if they didn’t have zero (0) rings. But they do have zero (0) rings, and they made “11 Birds” anyway. Proving in equal parts that success begins in the mind, and that you really lose an argument only when you stop arguing.