In 2008, director Lance Hammer released Ballast. It's an intensely quiet, slow-moving film about a Mississippi family. There's not a lot of words. Its narrative grows out of the Delta's landscape, is told entirely with light, postures and the ambient sounds of birds and strained cars. Watching Ballast is like sitting across the table from somebody with six lives worth of feelings and not hearing what they have to say. It's painful, a testament to the power of the film and how hard it is, in an internet age, to pay attention to something reserved and oblique.
Like Ballast's actors, Trouble never trained to be on film. The shoot for "World Goes Round" (filmed just before Christmas, before "Bussin") was his first ever. Trouble's manager Derek Schklar told us,
The video is ALL real—his real family, real mother and grandmother, and his real lil' brother's gravesight. The tears are real, the whole thing.
Over a grandiose but uncomplicated beat, Trouble slams a Lexus door and walks into a humid southern afternoon. He's smokes a cigarette, a line of white jail buses amble forward, his family sits down to eat. It's posed and melodramatic. But it has some of Ballast's sense of loss and place. "World Goes Round" is an excellent track, available now on Trouble's December 17th mixtape.
