Noisey Atlanta’: Stuntin’ on reality

Cooking crack in the kitchen.

That’s how the 10-part online documentary of trap rap Noisey Atlanta opens, with Curtis Snow of the infamous 2011 reality drama Snow on tha Bluff demonstrating his crack-cooking skills for the camera.

A pump-action 12-gauge shotgun leans against the kitchen counter while Snow, balancing a cigarette between his lips, uses a fork to whip up a saucepan of the illegal substance like mashed potatoes on the stovetop. An out-of-place white guy named Thomas Morton, who looks every bit as “scrawny” as The New Yorker magazine once described him, watches from the side as Snow breaks down the connection between neighborhood drug traps and Atlanta’s musical export du jour, trap rap.

“Trap music is like crack baby beats. When a rapper is rapping, you should be able to smell the dope cooking,” Snow says in the first episode of the series, which began airing Jan. 13. “You can’t have one without the other. You can’t have the trap without the studio without the dope. The dope is what inspires the rap.”

Morton, the bespectacled guy he’s talking to, is a longtime Vice writer/editor and documentary host/producer. He has a respectable knack for embedding himself into alien territory, per Vice’s signature style, which often means substituting political correctness for firsthand shock-and-aww-shit! reportage. It’s the kind of stunt journalism that has made the digital media and publishing group, which includes online music site Noisey, a wildly successful global brand that delights in turning an outsider view of deviant subcultures into an inside joke.

In Noisey Atlanta, Morton and crew give viewers unprecedented access into a segment of the city that people the world over celebrate in theory but rarely acknowledge in reality. Least of all, here at home. The documentary is everything a no-fucks-given look at that scene should be: ratchet, addictive, comical, informative, honest to a fault, and above all, fraught with the requisite stereotypes — guns, drugs, and polarizing young thugs.

With Morton at the helm, it’s also quite the hipster safari. Of course, that’s to be expected from the Williamsburg-headquartered media brand, which spells out its mission, in the intro of its HBO TV–series, to “expose the absurdity of the modern condition.”

“We wanted to make a documentary as raw as the music we’re covering,” Morton says in defense of its edgier elements when we talk by phone. “Coke cooking is an essential trapping of trap, if you will.”

The response has run the gamut, from laughing out loud to people crying foul.

“Noisey actually pissed me off with that shit,” Atlanta-based emcee Jarren Benton told website HipHopDX during an interview. “It would’ve been cool if they did that and then they would’ve shown another side of Atlanta.” His critique is echoed by many within Atlanta’s multilayered hip-hop scene who tire of the city’s eclectic sound being overshadowed by trap’s one-dimensional stranglehold on pop’s collective consciousness. But the doc isn’t supposed to be a comprehensive look at Atlanta rap. In fact, Morton initially wanted to call it Noisey Traplanta, a better alternate title considering the mix of mini-profiles on trap gods and upstarts including Jeezy, Gucci Mane, Migos, Young Scooter, Trouble, 2 Chainz, Rich Homie Quan, Young Thug, and Peewee Longway.

The distinction hasn’t stopped the weekly installments, which average 12 minutes in length, from racking up a total of more than 4 million YouTube views, and nearly as many incredulous comments over Morton’s surprising ability to maneuver through the hood. “Damn dis white boy went threw zone 6 east atl wow,” reads one beneath the episode titled “Shots Fired in Little Mexico with Young Scooter and Gucci.”

After a decade with Vice, 31-year-old Morton is used to crossing foreign borders and skirting potential danger. But he’s not the northern carpetbagger one might assume by his media credentials. Despite moving to New York nearly 15 years ago, he still maintains a 404 area code on his iPhone 4. At 18, the former teenage Goth and East Cobb native, who grew up outside of Marietta, graduated from Walton High School before embarking to NYU where he majored in English.

He hails from Atlanta, but not the Atlanta he experienced while filming here with a small crew for two separate weeks in the summer and fall (during the annual A3C Hip Hop Fest) of 2014. “Atlanta doesn’t seem big enough to contain things that I wouldn’t have been aware of but there’s an entire city’s worth of people and cultures and economies that completely flew beneath my radar,” he says. “It was really impressive to me how two cities can coexist in the same place, next to each other but also, like, completely independent of each other.”

Morton approaches the city’s underbelly with the same fresh eyes that guided him through last year’s eight-part documentary, Noisey’s Chiraq, which gave equal treatment to Chicago’s gang-infested drill scene, popularized by rapper Chief Keef. This time, Atlanta’s drug culture and the storied resonance of former criminal enterprise Black Mafia Family (BMF) intrigued him most.

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But Morton is the real star of this show. As on-camera host, he forgoes journalistic pretense to play the role of blind explorer. He doesn’t even like to call what he does journalism, preferring instead “to go in kind of dumb and leave room to learn stuff,” he tells me.

Even if it backfires, he tends to hit his target. When Morton innocently asks “Who’s Big Meech?” while talking to rapper and formerly convicted BMF affiliate Bleu DaVinci, the conversation comes to an abrupt halt. “You ain’t never heard of Big Meech?” DaVinci asks. “And you travel everywhere and learn about different things all over the world?”

Morton sheepishly responds: “Well this is how I learn about it is by asking.” DaVinci’s reaction serves to underline the mythic stature of convicted kingpin Meech and his BMF legacy, which is exactly what Morton was after. “Oh, I totally knew who Big Meech was,” he says. “I was kind of asking in a sense like, ‘Tell me who Big Meech is?’ And it came out, ‘Who’s Big Meech?’ ... I wasn’t anticipating that level of disbelief. I guess it’s like if I was in a Catholic church and I was like, ‘Who’s that dude up on the cross?’”

That white and nerdy cluelessness endears him to artists who might otherwise be wary of skeptical critics. By immersing himself into their world — swigging from Snow’s pint of vodka in one episode; hitting Trouble’s “LSD space weed” in another — Morton earns an honorary ghetto pass. Meanwhile, cameras capture known rappers dry snitching by proxy, brandishing semi-automatic weapons in suburban encampments, and cavorting in alleged trap houses.

The only thing missing is some much-needed context.

Morton’s voice-overs go deep on the history of BMF, the Gucci/Jeezy beef, and the regularity of shoot-outs in East Atlanta’s Little Mexico. But there’s no talk of the systemic conditions that undergird the subgenre’s soiled terrain, or the music industry’s role in exploiting urban pathology. Without that substance, Noisey Atlanta confirms the worst clichés about Southern rap and its native sons. In the wrong hands, it could make for an excellent piece of propaganda. Considering Rupert Murdoch’s corporate ties to Vice, via 21st-Century Fox, that kind of conjecture doesn’t seem so far-fetched. The right-wing media king — or, the “vaguely evil media conglomerate guy,” as comedian Aziz Ansari referred to him after Murdoch’s recent anti-Muslim tweets — gained a five percent ownership stake in the rising media empire upon giving Vice a $70 million shot in the arm in 2013. His son James Murdoch joined Vice’s board that year as a director, the London Evening Standard reported.

Pure coincidence, perhaps. In fact, Morton says that the church-and-state separation between editorial and sales remains holy at Vice. “I’ve not noticed anything different about our approach to subject matter or the way we do any of our editorial stuff,” he says. “We’ve held firm.”

Still, it doesn’t hurt to view Noisey’s recent forays into the hoods of Chiraq and Traplanta through a critical lens, especially at a time when the casual indictment of young black males seems to revolve around stereotypes sensationalized in mainstream media. If Vice is striving to become “MTV, ESPN and CNN rolled into one,” as co-founder and CEO Shane Smith has famously stated, it’s certainly deserving of such scrutiny.

When asked why the documentary fails to parse out the socioeconomic factors that helped birth the ubiquitous trap, Morton sums it up as a matter of fact. “This may be naïve on my part, but I kind of consider that a given,” he says. “Anybody who’s got a remote awareness of the black situation in America’s inner cities and of hip-hop understands that there’s this nexus with drug dealing and street violence and with guns.”

He assumes an awful lot about his audience for someone whose reporting style is to go in dumb and unassuming. The criticism is valid, Morton says, but “I also think there’s an element of it where, as an outsider, I don’t want to come into it with any kind of sanctimonious ideas,” he adds.

And therein lies the reason Noisey Atlanta matters in spite of the pointed critique. In a city suffering from the highest income inequality in the nation, choosing to ignore the stories behind trap rap’s cultural resonance — as mainstream and alternative news outlets both have — is more than a form of music snobbery. It’s classism.

“Everybody’s truth they told was their truth,” says industry insider and CEO of the Gloriam Group, Steven Dingle, who manages a roster that includes newcomer OG Maco. A native of the city who grew up between both the SWATS and Henry County, Dingle’s scope of Atlanta hip-hop was defined solely by the sounds emerging from the hood. Only in recent years has he become ingrained into the city’s artier black music scene, where he formerly managed rapper/singer Miloh Smith. “To me all of it is Atlanta,” Dingle says, “so I’m not even mad at Noisey wanting to capture that because that’s all they know.”

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With three more episodes left, the doc definitely has its redeeming qualities. Bright spots include a thoughtful exploration of trap’s psychedelic edge, where iLoveMakonnnen’s shroom-induced musings reside; a well-deserved focus on sound architects Mike WiLL Made-It, Sonny Digital, Metro Boomin and more; and possibly the first in-depth interview with Kevin “Coach K” Lee, the linchpin behind trap rap’s decade-long ascendancy as former manager of both Jeezy and Gucci, and currently, Migos.

Like most of Vice’s coverage, the series is driven by a fascination with the unknown. And it’s hard to provide “a window into a world more colorful and exciting than most of us dare dream experiencing ourselves,” as Morton articulates in one of the documentary’s early voice-overs, without turning reality to novelty.

But Morton shouldn’t be held responsible for creating a caricature of trap; many of the artists have done a fine job of that themselves. To gloss over the guns and drugs that come with the territory would be like trying to censor the subculture. “You can’t leave that out,” Morton says. “Those are fundamental elements of hip-hop music and everything that surrounds it. You don’t have to fetishize that shit but I think it would be completely irresponsible to try to pretend it doesn’t exist.”

By raising a middle finger to respectability, and traditional media, Noisey Atlanta ultimately gives trap the treatment it deserves. As for the rest of Atlanta rap, well, that’s another story.