A-Trak, Young Thug, and 24Hrs take to the streets of New York in their guerilla-style, classic skate video-influenced clip for “Ride For Me.” The unlikely trio roam the urban jungle with a group of skate rats, shooting off fireworks, busting tricks, and making a fun-loving nuisance of themselves for the old-school, fisheye lens.
The grainy aesthetic clashes magnificently with the glossy, but hard-edged production and robotically engineered vocals from 24, but somehow, it all just makes sense. Here are two rappers who made it from the bottom with a DIY, break-all-the-rules ethos that reflects perfectly with the skate-punk attitude of the video’s co-stars.
In fact, to lend even more authenticity to the project, A-Trak even recruited renowned director and co-founder of Zoo York, Eli Morgan Gesner, to shoot the video, tying the street cultures together even more explicitly through the dynamic imagery (shot on Hi-8 film, no less) of skaters thrashing their way through the big city while two of Atlanta’s rising stars show of some next-level wordplay.
“My whole career has been about building bridges and finding juxtapositions,” A-Trak explains in a press release for the video. “To me that’s the essence of DJing. I grew up watching turntablist videos, skate videos, graf videos. Before the internet those were my portal to the outside world. Eli and I wanted to create a clip that communicates that same feeling.”
And, just to put the icing on the cake, A-Trak’s Fool’s Gold and Gesner also donated to the skate culture-promoting Harold Hunter Foundation, which seeks to “Use skateboarding as a vehicle to provide underserved youth with valuable life experiences that nurture individual creativity, resourcefulness, and the development of life skills.”
