Thomas Morton will be the first one to tell you he has zero street cred. Yet, he spent three weeks on the streets of Atlanta anyway for his latest project for Noisey, Vice’s music site.
Morton’s project is an investigation of trap music, a subdivision of hip-hop that’s described in the videos as the “soundtrack to the streets.” The documentary-style series is broken up into digestible 10-minute episodes. Each illustrates the subculture that is “the trap” — a niche and sometimes violent scene that lends itself to a form of music. You may not be familiar with the term, but you know its artists: Migos, 2 Chainz, Young Jeezy, Gucci Mane.
In this immersive look at the trap, we see a world that seemingly exists only in a small part of the country and for a select group of people. (Morton relied on the reputation of several trap artists to make his way through neighborhoods, including one man referred to as “The Devil” who functioned as his “hood pass.”)
Noisey Atlanta goes inside the studios where trap music is made, and the trap houses where rappers live and spend their time. For a viewer unfamiliar with this environment, it can be a bit jarring. Trap houses often have barricaded front doors. Inside, they’re all decorated in a similar fashion, using guns, women, and drugs as its peripherals. Insert Morton — a short white guy with glasses who’s visiting from Brooklyn — and you can see just how out of place he is.
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