MIGOS OFFSET IN MORE TROUBLE.........
Last month, the three members of the rap group Migos were arrested after a performance at Georgia Southern University. Combined, they were charged with multiple felonies related to alleged gun and drug possession and booked into a Bulloch County prison. Two members, Quavo and Takeoff, were released on bail a few days later, but the other, Offset, remains in jail, from where he recently gave an interview in which he, at least in part, places the blame for his arrest at the feet of Vice and its music channel Noisey.
Noisey, perhaps the only valuable standalone site in Vice’s stable of verticals, recently produced a documentary series titled “Noisey: Atlanta.” The ten-episode package, distributed through YouTube, features Thomas Morton, the geeky face of Vice’s HBO show, interviewing and profiling Atlanta rappers.
That is the charitable reading of the videos; the uncharitable view is that Noisey cares less about explaining Atlanta’s rap scene than it does glorifying its subjects as lawless gangsters so that it can, by extension, sell itself as dangerous. This sort of branding has been a huge success for Vice proper, which parlayed early documentaries like “The Cannibal Warlords of Liberia” into its eponymous premium cable show. That same formula is now being applied to Noisey, which primarily produces writing, but has started to put together video series that chronicle American cities through the prism of rap: “Chiraq,” which preceded “Noisey: Atlanta,” purported to examine the intersection of violence and rap in Chicago.
In “Noisey: Atlanta,” Morton does intermittently talk with rappers about their art. But he spends as much, if not more, of the time gazing awkwardly at his subjects as they roll up weed, tool around with guns and throw money at strippers. Morton, in a break from how he usually handles himself on HBO, sheds his role as journalist so that he can fully represent the “viewer,” if the viewer is a suburban teen, pulled through his computer and dumped into a kitchen where a guy is cooking crack. At their worst, the videos feel zoological.
It’s instructive that the first episode, titled “Welcome to the Trap,” puts drugs ahead of music, opening with glossy, slo-mo shots of a drug dealer stirring a combination of cocaine and baking soda on his stove as a large shotgun leans against the wall next to him. Morton’s first words describe Atlanta as “the drug trafficking hub of the East coast, and the home of trap music,” an ordering of phrases that does not feel accidental. Later, the video transitions to Patchwerk Studios, where much of the city’s most well-known music has been recorded, and if they wanted to make a meaningful connection between the city’s drug trade and it’s rap scene, they should have tried harder.
