Make it Reign: How an Atlanta Strip Club Runs the Music Industry
Make it Reign: How an Atlanta Strip Club Runs the Music Industry
To call it a mere strip club means you don't get it. It's more like hip-hop's ultimate proving ground—a legendary hive of hustlers and dreamers. Magic City is a place where fortunes rain from the rafters, where women with impossible bodies call the shots, and where a DJ who spins your track can make you a star. Devin Friedman explores the mixed-up, magical world within America's most important club
By
Devin Friedman
Photographs by
Lauren Greenfield
a month ago
More: Lauren Greenfield Takes Us Behind the Scenes at Magic City
PART ONE: "MAGIC CITY IS EVERYTHING"
The first dude I really talked to at Magic City was a man who goes by the name City Dollars. He was installed at a table in the back on a Monday night. I bet City Dollars figured that I was in some way a guy who could help him. He said come have a seat with me, man, right here. He was full of good cheer tonight, full of enterprise, full of love for life, a man who sees nothing but avenues and angles and opportunities.
"This is Magic City," he said. "Magic City is everything." Then he ordered me a beer.
City Dollars is 38, wears a woolly chin beard, and has eyes that twinkle from deep in his skull. "I'm a hustler," City Dollars told me. A hustler and a player and a manager of rap artists. He's also, he said, the proprietor of an auto-detailing business out by Atlanta Hartsfield. Tonight he'd brought one of his artists with him, Yung Stunt. Seated next to us at the table, Yung Stunt looked like he could have been 16 years old. He wore sunglasses, and for all I knew he was asleep. "I want to expose him to this!" City Dollars told me. "I want him to breathe this air. To be around these people. This is what I do for my artists, I give them that rock-star life." He drank from his beer. "They're called the Narly Dudes, by the way. YouTube that shyt."
A song called "Make Sum Shake" was on. The music you hear in Magic City isn't the music you might expect at a strip club. Magic City Mondays are the most important nights in the most important club in the most important city in the hip-hop industry. Magic City is the place where you hear music before anyone else does, and where it is decided if that music gets played anywhere else. "Make Sum Shake," the lyrics of which are mostly Make sum shake, is by a group called Cool Amerika, a few kids about 20 years old from the suburban hood of Stone Mountain, Georgia—and it was one of a handful of songs that seemed ready to break out of the strip club.
"You have to be in here every week if you want to do something in the rap game," City Dollars was telling me about Magic City Mondays. "You get the finest females in the state of Georgia. You get the Who's Who of the streets in here. You can have Young Thug, Future, 2 Chainz in here on the same night," he said, naming three of the hottest rappers in America right now, all of whom came out of Atlanta. "And you get DJ Esco. If Esco play your record...? Everything Esco touch out here is off the charts."
Then City Dollars took some bills from a stack and threw them at a naked woman who was standing in front of us. It was only then I realized that we were in the midst of getting a table dance. It is easy to forget, sometimes, that Magic City is a strip club.
We sat without talking, like we were waiting for something. It was early still. Most of the dancers were smoking languorously in the back corner, waiting for the club to fill up. The strippers: the piercings, the overgrown indecipherable tattoos, the wigs in their full spectrum of colors and lengths, the lounging of flesh against vinyl.
Occasionally, City Dollars threw some singles at the naked woman standing in front of us, the way an old man might absentmindedly feed some ducks the crust of his sandwich. This particular dancer had on white high-heeled lace-up booties, and she had a special trick. She could bend over at the waist so far that her face appeared again between her legs and she could look up at you and wink. Her pelvic bone, reversed, formed a flat mesa of flesh so that her vagina and anus pointed directly up at the ceiling. This was Aimee. I would get to know her later.
When the dance ended, Aimee began sweeping her money into a neat pile. But meanwhile, the club had changed. It was midnight, and the club was filling up quickly now. Men came in groups. Two or three together in denim and baseball hats. Ten men in hooded sweatshirts. One by one the dancers extinguished their blunts and came from their corner, down onto the main floor like crows dropping off a wire to check out some roadkill. DJ Outta Space was here. The producer Southside, who makes beats for Jay Z and Gucci Mane, and the producer TM88, who makes beats for Young Thug, and Coach Tek, who manages 2 Chainz, and the taciturn guys who travel with the rap group Migos—the eccentric insular little band of rappers out of Gwinnett County, Georgia, who live in a McMansion in exurban Atlanta with their weapons cache and wall-to-wall carpeting. T.I. would make an appearance later; he's known to bring his own backpack full of dollar bills to throw. Radio deejays would arrive as well, listening to hear which new songs are making the club moveand who's beefing with who. And: dope boys who want to be rappers; rappers who pretend to be dope boys; dope boys who just want to be dope boys; the married proprietor of a debt-collection agency, I think his name was Chuck (very nice guy), whose wife gives him a free pass once a month to come and look at naked ladies; a woman in a T-shirt that says "Turning Up Is My Cardio." (FYI: Don't be confused,dope boy just basically means drug dealer.)
Rico Richie, an artist trying to make it in the city, was up on the stage now, throwing $5,000 while his song played. There was a young NFL player in the back, quietly bursting out of a white Henley while showering two dancers with cash. Magic City had $80,000 in singles in a basement safe for people to "order up" and throw—on strippers, near strippers, on the floor—and the club will go through all of it tonight and have to begin recycling those singles, taking them down to the basement to be processed by two guys with money-counting machines under fluorescent lights.
When Rico was off the stage, Esco put on a track called "Preach" by a southern rapper named Young Dolph, a song made with the Atlanta producer Zaytoven, and the club began to move:
Zay got the motherfukking bass thumpin'
Dolph got the motherfukking trap jumpin'
City Dollars said: "Now you're seeing how it happens at Magic City."
Stunt had stood up. He was looking out over the crowd. Tomorrow I would visit City Dollars and discover that his auto-detailing business is a black pickup truck with a pressure washer in the bed. He parks it in the back of a Chili's on Camp Creek Parkway and does car washes there. Yung Stunt would tell me he dropped out of McClarin Success Academy, "an alternative school for bad kids." He has a 6-month-old child. When I asked him if he's living that rock-star life, he would say, Hell no.When I asked him where he lives, he would say, "I don't really live anywhere, I guess. My mama house, my grandmama, my baby mama." But I don't believe Yung Stunt was thinking about any of that right now. The kid had seemed comatose to me a minute ago, but he'd been awakened. He couldn't stop smiling. He was wearing sunglasses, but from the side you could see his eyes, and an actual single tear came down his cheek. He'd seen something new tonight. He'd been taken somewhere. This is a trip to the moon for Yung Stunt.
"It's a movie," he kept saying. For those of us not familiar with the current argot of Atlanta rappers—and you shouldn't be embarrassed about that—a movie is when something truly memorable happens to you, when a fantasy springs from your mind's eye onto, for instance, the sticky greige carpeting at Magic City. "It's a motherfukking movie."
If you make it out of Magic City, you may end up, like the rapper Future, at a mansion in Beverly Hills
PART TWO: BIG MAGIC
Man. Atlanta. The I-75 and the I-85. The 20 and the 285. The roads to Alabama and to Macon.
The roads to Florida and to South Carolina. The heavy foliage. The little wooded hollows right in the city. The cancerous urban sprawl. The unremarkable skyscrapers in their copses at Buckhead, at Midtown. The lack of any orienting landmark. The front porches, the moisture-soaked clapboards, the darkened attic windows. The factories where they used to build one thing or another. The lone man, tall and stick-figured like a locust, loping across the intersection and into an urban meadow. The man sleeping in the black lung of the underpass. The rich black people with their muscular metal cars. The rich white people with their slacks and loafers and frail ankles. Commuters released onto freeways at the pace of an IV drip by timed green lights at on-ramps. The sponge of the city absorbing country motherfukkers, absorbing people fleeing Chicago and Gary, Indiana, absorbing anyone with a hustle as Atlanta expands.
Magic City is a low concrete box glowing neon blue in the dark, nestled among a menagerie of unloved civic necessities downtown: the Greyhound station, the city detention center, disintegrating highway overpasses, shelters for the drug-addicted and mentally ill. But inside that concrete box, everything flows from the ethos of Magic himself, the founder of Magic City.
On the bigger nights at Magic City, you can find Magic patrolling the room in a taupe suit, parting the clouds of hookah smoke with a wineglass in his fist. His trim hair going gray, his lantern jaw set. He played football on scholarship at Duke and at age 60 still has the bearing of a man who knows he's physically more powerful than other people. He is called Big Mag, pronounced "big maj" (Lil Magic is his son), and he is an elder statesman of the street. Atlanta is balkanized—you might not be welcome in Bankhead if you're not from there. But as the proprietor of Magic City, as a man who has, in his parlance, been running around in the streets for thirty years, it's different for Magic. He can pass safely into any zone he likes; he can talk to almost anyone like family. "I've got a green card," he says. "You might be a dope boy or a producer or a famous rapper or a finesser or a millionaire or a thug, but it wouldn't take me a couple of phone calls to get your mama or your uncle or your people on the phone."
Magic, with his lieutenants Wolf and Charles Walker, has been running Magic City for three decades—with an eight-year hiatus when he was in federal prison on a drug charge. Wolf, the fixer, the back-of-the-house guy whom you can usually find in the basement office with his bifocals fastened to the top of his bald head, so hairless I could not detect the presence even of eyebrows. In the front of the house: Charles Walker, the Silver Fox, widely acknowledged to be the smoothest 67-year-old in Fulton County. Soft close-cropped silver hair brushed into waves, pressed pinstriped suit and well-knotted tie. He works in, I guess you could call it, stripper relations, and he keeps up a steady patter with basically every woman who walks into Magic City, employed there or not. He is also probably one of the few senior-citizen strip-club managers with a preschool-age child.
Magic, like Wolf and Charles, is a certain vintage of gentleman. An older dude who does not suffer fools gladly. That rare type of avuncular figure who, on one hand, would scold you if you littered on the street and on the other hand would sit you down and explain with authority and enthusiasm the preferred method for eating a piece of p*ssy. And it is in Big Mag's image that Magic City is constructed.
Magic's club is not fancy. It has a simple stage, a bar with some coolers behind it, a kitchen at the front that turns out hot wings and chicken and rice in Styrofoam boxes. There's no gilt, no crystal, no $40,000 mirrors cut in the shape of a bosom. There are no private rooms. Because private rooms violate the primary purpose of Magic City, which is to be seen. "It's a hype place," Big Mag says. "It's not a sex place. A sex place wouldn't bring anything but trouble, plus I wouldn't get any of the money for that sex, either."
"Everybody who's big in the strip club?" J-Nicks, the FM radio host, said. "They break out of the strip club."
"If you want to make it in Atlanta," the producer TM88 said, "you need to live in Magic City."
Consider the rapper Future. Not five years ago, Future was virtually unknown. He used to hang out at Magic City every week, back near the DJ booth. Esco started playing Future's music. Esco started playing his music a lot. Eventually Future started to dominate Magic City. And when he started dominating Magic City, suddenly he was played on the radio; suddenly he signed a major record deal. Suddenly, Future became a guy who gets engaged to Ciara and takes her to sit in the front row at Milan Fashion Week.
But at the same time, Big Mag wants no velvet ropes in Magic City, because the point here is not to separate by class. "It's gumbo in there," Esco told me. "You can see actresses, musicians, a weed man, a killer, probably a police officer. You can find anybody in Magic City, anybody." It's a place where part of the clientele can fantasize that they're still street while a different part of the clientele can fantasize that they're not. I can't think of another place in America where the one percent stand unprotected next to so many other percents at the bar. And all those elements are held together by respect for the institution Big Mag has created, by the collective ego of a whole room full of people who are dying to be seen, and by a common fantasy—they're all making the same movie. They are also held together, Magic would argue, by the power of booty, which was Magic's first real business innovation.
"What happened is," he told me when I asked him how he came to open Magic City, "I fell in love with strip."
"It was rough. It was one of those kind of motorcycle clubs. But I fell in love with strip right then."
What was it you fell in love with?
"I was just amazed at the atmosphere. It was the first time I ever experienced strip down here in the South. I didn't know you could get naked like that."
They can, indeed, get nakeder down here than they can in many places. Strippers can be fully nude in Atlanta. And in places like Magic City, you're encouraged to be creative with your nudity. Lil Magic says, "They don't just get naked here, they get a$$hole-naked. You could tell me to get naked standing in this room and I might do it. Then you'd tell me to bend over? Nope." Big Magic took notes. He ran some calculations about alcohol revenues and door take. And he saw an opportunity. "Like I said, the girls were rough in there. But I wondered: What if you had some pretty girls in the club? What the hell could happen then?"
He opened Magic City in 1985 with a single dancer. But a single dancer with, as he says it, a perfect balloon butt. Then he hired a woman named Indigo. "She brought one of the first big butts in Atlanta," he says. "Just a big round perfect butt. You could bounce a quarter off of it." But no one had yet thought up the kind of butts that you find in the strip clubs of Atlanta now, the anatomically impossible, fantastical, warped, unlicensed-plastic-surgeon-designed asses that have blown the minds of people like Yung Stunt for many years. "They weren't as big as today," Big Mag says. "This thickness wasn't the thing back then."
Alas, butts are just one ingredient that made Magic City into what it is today. Big Mag, and Magic City, also came of age at a propitious time in Atlanta, when Atlanta was just starting to become Black Hollywood.
"It was right when Deion [Sanders] and Dominique [Wilkins] came to Atlanta, that's when it all started," Big Mag says. "It was '89, '90. Michael Irvin—we were all party animals; I started to know all the wild guys. Then they all started coming in here. And Deion brought me [MC] Hammer when he was hot. And now we were starting to get a whole lot of little guys like that, and they were starting to make their moves. I knew L. A. Reid back when he was married to Pebbles. TLC. Bobby Brown. Whitney. And of course Jermaine Dupri. He should be where Puffy at, but he didn't have that close-out finesse that Puffy had. And Magic City was the first club in Atlanta that made them feel comfortable. Michael Jordan wasn't hanging out in strip clubs until Magic City."
But it wasn't Jermaine Dupri or MC Hammer or Michael Jordan who made Magic City into what it is now. It was BMF. You've heard of BMF, right? Yes? No? Well, BMF is the greatest subject of street lore in the history of Atlanta. There are songs, books, documentaries, three-part journalistic investigations of BMF. In the early 2000s, BMF, which stands for Black Mafia Family, was a drug organization. It was, according to the DEA, one of the most notorious drug-trafficking organizations in America, with profits of $270 million over the course of its short life. A man named Big Meech was its mastermind and overlord. And Big Meech did not have a discreet management style. I'm pretty sure BMF is the only major drug-trafficking enterprise ever to rent a giant billboard on a major interstate to advertise itself; if you'd driven into Atlanta in 2004, you would have seen a sign that read the world is bmf's. Big Meech also fancied himself a music mogul and, at the height of its largesse, made BMF into a record label; he was known for his relationship with the rappers Young Jeezy, T.I., and a certain Bleu DaVinci, whom you can still find hanging around Atlanta.
What BMF really was—more than a drug-trafficking concern or a hip-hop label—was the biggest socio-cultural thing to happen to Atlanta since, probably, Gone with the Wind. What BMF really was, was a rap song come to life. You know the world that's depicted in rap videos? The rapper at the wheel of a $300,000 car getting dry-humped by fourteen strippers driven into a kind of involuntary ecstasy simply by his presence? Watching reams of American currency being lit on fire or blown away into the streets while he just smokes a cigar and barely notices because he's somehow achieved a new consciousness of wealth in which there is no dollar figure large enough the loss of which would be of any emotional consequence? That was how BMF lived for real, and they liked to live that way in public, and the principal way to interface with that public was through the strip club.
Everyone speaks of that era kind of wistfully, especially strippers, who are still happy to make $5,000 in a night but know there was a time when that number was more like $20,000.
It was at Magic City where, in the early 2000s, you could experience most fully the world of BMF. At the apogee of their wealth and power, BMF would show up, order $100,000, throw it on the floor, and leave in forty-five minutes. This was the epoch, and the city, in which the concept of making it rain was born. Up until then, people were just putting money in garter belts. But that was not a sufficient expression of how little money meant to BMF. They had to throw it, fertilize the air with it like pollen. "BMF shut the club down," the radio host J-Nicks said to me. "It was strippers driving Bentleys and owning seven-bedroom houses." Just about everyone speaks of that era kind of wistfully, especially strippers, who are still happy to make $5,000 in a night but know there was a time when that number was more like $20,000.
"They was a little brutal back in the BMF," the dancer Aimee told me. "They would have joy slapping the girls in the face with the money. You get sucker punched in the face with a thousand dollars, but you laugh it off because it's so much money."
Big Meech and most of the rest of BMF went to jail seven years ago. But Big Mag still sees his business as one that operates in a world where people like BMF are your clients. It took a long negotiation to get Big Mag to sit down to be interviewed. It is not something he'd ever done before. Big Mag still sees himself as a denizen of what no small number of people described to me as a secret society. Magic City operates as a part of its own economy; as Lil Magic says, "The way some of these people throw money, you know it probably didn't come in check form." And Big Mag, not to mention the strippers and the hustlers, not to mention the doctors and the lawyers and the members of the Atlanta Falcons, all see Magic City belonging to a shadow side of the city.
PART THREE: AIMEE THE DANCER
On the stage at any one time you're going to have two to five dancers performing what they call a stage set. Take this moment on a Monday night: There's one woman hanging upside down from a crossbar that descends from the ceiling, and she's got her forearms locked with those of another dancer, who pulls herself up from the floor and kind of flips over so that the one on top can pantomime that she's performing oral pleasures on her partner. But what this is really about is the dismount, in which the bottom one lets go all at once and drops to the floor in a split. Meanwhile a woman with long Robitussin-red hair on another corner of the stage gets on all fours, her knees spread slightly wider than her hips. She pivots her butt into the air and then does a quick contraction of the pelvic floor, then just as quickly releases the butt backward and into a kind of rhythmic motion that seems almost self-perpetuating. It's like fly-fishing, but with a butt.
This is something called twerking. Which you know if you have an Internet connection. People think they know all about twerking. But if these people are like me, they are wrong. The twerking at places like Magic City, that is the only real twerking. Those other twerks, the Miley Cyrus twerks, even the twerks in regular clothes-on nightclubs, are meta-twerks. They are twerks in air quotes. I am not casting aspersions or making cultural judgments here. You guys are great, really, and I'm sure those twerks feel real when you're doing them. But it is not possible to glean the true meaning of the twerk except in the strip clubs of Atlanta. Twerks lit with blue neon, scented in Tahitian-vanilla body butter and antiseptic witch hazel.
Now on the stage at Magic City there is standing-up twerking and lying-down twerking and single-butt-cheek-isolation twerking, which calls to mind a kind of winking. But all twerking reverts to a common form: You have a stripper, or several, standing naked. Before the stripper(s), there is the customer, a man, often in a hooded sweatshirt. Usually, if you look around, you'll find the man's friends at a nearby table, checking their phones. And while fly-fishing with her derriere, as the man stands and nihilistically sheds wealth, the dancer is meant to look backward over her own ass at him. There's an overwhelming sense of the ritualistic here, divorced from lust or spontaneity, the way the taking of Communion is merely symbolic of the joy of Communing with God. Anyway, these are the optics, if you're part of this twerking, and it's an awfully specific kind of wish fulfillment, an awfully specific kind of movie you're making.
When they're done, the movie is over. The men sit together again, turning to themselves, while the dancers squat on the floor in their high-heeled ankle boots and, in short, brisk sweeping motions, push all of their money into a pile, stuff it into a plastic deli bag, and bring it downstairs to the house mother, who marks the bag with a pen and logs the amount into a ledger she keeps scrawled on the front page of a yellow legal pad.
I got to wondering what the scenario looks like from the other direction (the view from the other side of the butt, as it were). What kind of movie is that? Aimee, the exotic dancer, said this to me, which helped me understand a lot: "I found out I wasfine when I was 5 years old." She had agreed to meet me as long as I booked a table at her preferred lunching place, the Ruth's Chris Steak House in Midtown. "Sometimes I try not to look cute. But I can't. I'll go to the mall without my hair or face on point and people will still stop me."
She had brought her friend, the exotic dancer Viv, with her. "It's true," Viv said. "She is sought-after."
Aimee was a cheerleader in high school, and it's not hard to imagine her even at age 29 holding some pom-poms. Today she was wearing a Junior League-appropriate print wrap dress. Her hair and her face were, indeed, on point. Viv wore a hat with a coy little veil on it.
"It's so many beautiful girls, but you can tell who has it," Aimee said. Aimee started out our conversation being nervous and demure, but we somehow opened a seam of pure ego, a force of will. "Beyoncé has it. Solange don't. You don't have to be the best crayon in the box, but you have to have it. And I have it." She took a sip of her margarita. (She only drinks Patrón.) "You can't help but see me. I'm captivating."
I asked Aimee what she was after. "I don't expect to stop dancing until I get my million," she told me. "I'm a hustler."
For a while, I hadn't been able to understand why Magic City felt like such a hopeful place. Because strip clubs in general are depressing. And even the most optimistic and iron-willed of the dancers I spoke to will admit that the life narrative of a stripper involves, eventually, trying to escape being a stripper. But it's because of what Aimee was talking about. It's because everyone who comes to Magic City comes to make something of themself. It is a hall of aspirations. It's because everyone who comes into Magic City has a hustle. The people who want to be rappers have their hustle, the people who already are have theirs, Magic himself has his hustle, and the dope boys have theirs; the DJs and the producers and the managers and hype men, they are all here hustling. Even the dancers came here to be someone. I met women from Detroit; Miami; Columbus, Ohio; Milwaukee. If you thought you were prettier than the town you were in, if you thought you were better, if you just heard about the cash in the clubs here, you came to Atlanta.
"The money and the respect is different than anywhere else," Aimee said. "I'm famous in Atlanta."
I asked what she was after. "I don't expect to stop dancing until I get my million," Aimee said. "I'm a hustler."
Aimee has a savings account. She carries a book with her at all times called Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill. She tells me she's entrepreneurial. The many moments of degradation are made more tolerable because she’s telling herself a different story about them. "I'm not just picking up singles off the floor. You think I'm just picking up singles off the floor when there's real money out there?"
So where does that real money come in?
"I have my sponsors."
Sponsors? "They call it a situationship—I can't really call them boyfriends. I don'tclaim my boyfriends, because they're not claimable. They take care of me."
And who are your sponsors?
"A rapper, a professional athlete, another one who says he's a rapper, but he's probably a dope boy. If I feel overworked and underpaid, I'll invoice them!" Aimee said. It was fairly certain to me at this point that Aimee was talking about a fee-for-service situation with a purview greater than just stripping. I did not ask her to itemize what kinds of services she might invoice for. "I try to juggle no more than five. It's like a basketball team. I loved when T-Mobile had their 'favorite five.' That deal was perfect for me!"
The rap duo Cool Amerika, with their road manager Kingpin (left)
PART FOUR: LIL MAG, DJ ESCO, AND THE RAP-STRIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
Lil magic was born into this. He is 33 years old now and was 4 when Big Mag opened this club. He used to have to cover up his eyes when he walked past the dancers' locker room on the way to his dad's o∞ce. Magic City is in his blood, and yet at the same time he sees it from a distance of 4,000 miles. The world exhausts him. "I'm sick of being urban," he told me. "There's no room to be uncool in this world. There's no room for weakness. You can't be yourself. Everyone must be the same." And yet here he is, managing the club almost every day. The golden handcuffs of strip. Tonight the weight of the ass-naked world seems to sit even heavier on his well-gymed shoulders. His eyes are bleary. He confesses, as he stands near the bar waiting for Magic City Monday to get going, that he was up until five in the morning negotiating affairs of the heart of a type peculiar to the scions of Atlanta strip gods.
"I found out my ex fukked [two legitimately famous people]—at the same time," he said. This was years ago, she was a dancer at another club, and they were technically broken up at the time, anyway. But they'd been thinking about getting back together, and she'd come clean. Lil Magic is keenly intelligent, and he's a deep thinker, and last night's discovery has presented Lil Magic with some existential questions. "Is it better to know someone's transgressions or not?" he wondered out loud. "Everyone has a past, but some of our pasts are more public. I mean, when Kanye looks at Kim Kardashian, does he see Ray J's dikk?"
He scratches his head and looks around. "You can't find a wife here," he said. "You can't find a wife in Atlanta at all. You can find a bytch to put on your arm."
DJ Esco was in his booth, playing Future's "Real Sisters" and getting so joyful and absorbed in it you'd think he'd never heard it before, even though he performs the song with Future. Esco. There is not a thing that bothers Esco, as far as I can tell. He floats through life. The man has an ease about him. If he stepped off a cliff, he would probably land on a friendly bald eagle and never have been too worried, anyway. I can't imagine a situation that wouldn't be better if Esco were there. He was described to me as a rap hippie, and that seems right. A little light-skinned haricot vert of a man in skinny jeans, with his long dreads restrained by an American-flag scarf.
But besides being a low-impact social lubricant to any situation, Esco happens to possess a singular underground power in the American hip-hop industry. He is the gatekeeper to Magic City. If he doesn't play your song, it is like your song doesn't exist. As the producer TM88 said, if you want anything to happen in Atlanta, "you need to fukk with Esco." "Esco has the city on lock," City Dollars told me. "Esco is our A&R guy," one of Future's managers said. "We don't even listen to anything anymore if Esco doesn't like it."
I talked to Esco about the process by which a guy goes from being a nobody who shows up at Magic City with a song on a thumb drive to being, say, Future. Esco said that, first of all, he's not going to just play your song because he likes your shirt or you give him 200 bucks. (Though you should probably give him 200 bucks; this entire world operates on the tipping economy. More than half of Esco's fee for doing Magic City Mondays comes from the tips he gets from the dancers.) Esco won't even play your song just because he likes your song. Magic City, and Atlanta, as anyone will tell you, is about relationships.
"The girls pick what record pops in the streets. They pick what rapper pops in the streets," Esco had said to me earlier. "The girls at Magic City are the streets."
"They'll stand next to you all night," Esco said about all the people who approach him at the club. "Give you a song and stand next to you like you gonna play it right then. You don't just walk in here! You gotta work harder than that."
The other thing is, you're going to have to have some money. Once your song gets played, once people start to know who you are, you need to start throwing money at dancers whenever that song comes on. As Esco says, "I'm not going to let you up on that stage if you don't have no money." And you don't need just the $3,000, $4,000, $10,000 to throw at Magic City on Monday. You need to do that again tomorrow night at Blue Flame, and Thursday at Strokers, and Saturday night at Onyx. So you're going to need what I will call a sponsor. (As a producer said to me, "Everyone in Magic City either is a sponsor or has one.") A professional football player, the rapper T.I., a drug dealer. I saw a rapper named SoSay throw $30,000 in forty-five minutes at Magic like he was a busted ATM; his "sponsor" was some guy who hit the Powerball a few years ago. And the dancers—they're a lot more likely to request your song if they know you're going to throw $10,000 at them. That's how you get noticed in the room. And that's how the dancers start requesting your song.
Like a lot of the time, tonight there was a dancer in the booth with him. Wherever Esco is, there is always a dancer on his lap, or sidled up next to him like a house cat, or idly shaking her butt in his face while he's hanging out at the club on a night he has off. This woman had short dyed-blue hair and a long muscular body and looked almost post-human. She took a long drag off a blunt and passed it back to Esco, then, as they say, danced him while he was smoking.
"Turn-Up Twins, let's go!" Esco said into the microphone, calling an act to the stage. "Cali, Raven. Let's go."
Big Mag is always trying to persuade Esco not to date strippers. Of all the friction at a strip club, Mag said, most of it was between strippers. But, like Lil Magic, Esco ends up dating them anyway. "I come home at five in the morning," he said, "from working at a strip club! Or I'll be on the road with Future. Who I'm supposed to date, someone who works at Target?"
But what happens when you and a stripper break up? I asked.
"Then they'll tear the club up! My ex literally tore the fukking club up. They kicked her out the club, so then she went outside and she was trying to do shyt to my car. Then her homegirl tricked me and led me into a trap! She was like, 'Come out the back'—and my ex was right there! Tried to jump the fence and come after me."
It was time for her show, so the blue-haired sex alien moved past, briefly enveloping me in the tropical intimacy of her olfactory sense bubble before climbing onto the stage.
It seemed like the metabolism at Magic tended to change at nearly the same time every night: a little after midnight. You cannot be in a rush at Magic City. I did not see a single human being at Magic City—except for maybe a barback or waitress—who did anything more than, like, amble. You can't be the first dude in a hype spot. But neither, at a place where one must be seen, can one miss the part of the night when one has the greatest chance to be seen. And that equation seemed to mean that people really started to show up at about twelve thirty. One minute the crowd would be sparse, and then suddenly there was hardly anywhere to stand. It was getting close to that time, and by now a coterie of music-industry dudes had collected back where they do, near the DJ booth. Coach Tek, 2 Chainz's manager, was there. Blak, a radio deejay from Streetz 94.5. Zaytoven, perhaps the most well-known producer in Atlanta. There was a young independent artist named Rambo So Weird who Esco told me "has that sauce," and another artist named Bankroll Fresh whom Coach Tek was excited about; the veteran Atlanta rapper Pastor Troy was here, and the group Sacii Lyfe, whose song "Thug City" was currently on heavy rotation.
"Cool Amerika in the building," Esco shouted. The rap group Cool Amerika were just entering with their people. "Cool Amerika in the fukking building."
Cool Amerika—the group from Stone Mountain, Georgia, whose song "Make Sum Shake" seemed right on the precipice of breaking out of Magic City—is two rappers who go by the names of Bally and, of course, Stunt. Everybody's name is Stunt right now. Cool Amerika was tonight in the midst of being assimilated into the biome of Magic City.
Esco puts on "Make Sum Shake." Stunt and Bally get up onstage with wireless mikes. "I'm gon' make sum shake," Stunt says. "Make sum shake." It's a song about making it shake in the streets and hopefully everywhere else, and it's a song about making butts shake in clubs like Magic City (like Future's "fukk Up Some Commas" is about throwing figures with lots of zeros at strippers).
Only in hip-hop could a club like Magic City have the kind of place in the ecosystem that it does. No other segment of the music industry is dominated so fully by homegrown artists.
If you're Cool Amerika tonight, you're right at that spot. Right now everything has aligned. Esco knows you, and he's behind you. Your "sponsor," who's standing in the literal shadows near the stage as sponsors do, has given you the $3,000 to throw tonight, and the three you'll throw tomorrow night at Blue Flame, and the thousands you'll throw in the weeks to come. You're Cool Amerika, and people in the club are watching you drop money, and the DJs are saying your name, and the girls are your friends now. You're Stunt and you're 20 years old and you're making a movie. You're almost that thing you've been pretending to be for years and years, borrowing those cars to make your homemade videos, recording your songs in your basement in Stone Mountain, Georgia. You're just one of the hundreds of groups that get lucky enough to get on this stage, one of the thousands of rappers and producers and dropouts from McClarin Success Academy staying up all night recording songs in their garages, one of a swelling underground that makes the nocturnal zombie metropolis of Atlanta a kind of living moment-to-moment record of the evolution, or devolution, of hip-hop. Tonight Magic City is lifting you up, out of the little neighborhood you came from, offering you up to the world. And you're waiting to see how your movie ends.[/SPOILER]
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I can read it without issues. Them I got to that first pic 
