Naked Hip-Hop Ambition
ATLANTA — It was "Magic Monday" at the Magic City strip club, a windowless brick building near the downtown Greyhound station.
Inside, 57 exotic dancers with names like Isis and Peaches and NaNa were shaking it, as the song goes, like a saltshaker. The soundtrack was Southern hip-hop -- all simple synthesizer lines, raunchy party chants and the gut-rattling bass kick of a Roland TR-808 drum machine.
Tax Holloway pressed close to the stage, sipping champagne and watching the women twist themselves into exaggerated affectations of lust. But Holloway wasn't really here for that.
The aspiring rap star knew that on Monday nights, Magic City was packed with Atlanta's hip-hop cognoscenti, and he wanted to see how they responded when his new song played over the sound system.
"I need to see the reaction of the people to know if it's really going to be my first single," Holloway said. "Or see whether I need to go back in the lab."
Holloway is 23, and he wants to be rap's next big thing. So he moved from Detroit to Atlanta, where a burgeoning music business has earned it the nickname "the Motown of the South."
In the rap world, Atlanta is also known as the Dirty South, and for good reason: Some of the industry's key business is conducted in strip clubs. Stars and star-makers come to the clubs to preen, party and listen for trends bubbling up from the streets. Young rappers like Holloway come to create a buzz for their music, and network with disc jockeys, music producers and stars.
"Strip clubs is just the place here," says Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, the Atlanta rapper and actor who appeared in the Oscar-winning movie "Crash." "It seems they get all the good music first."
The success of local artists like Ludacris, OutKast, T.I. and Young Jeezy, among many others, has spawned a network of record labels, development companies and studios, and they have become crucial to Georgia's billion-dollar music scene. Nationally, Atlanta's influence has arguably never been stronger: At one point in March, local rappers were featured on seven of the top 50 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
That success has brought a new sense of glamour to a city previously known as the home of buttoned-down blue chips like Delta Air Lines.
It has also attracted a Hollywood-like subculture of aspiring stars.
"Sometimes it seems like everybody in Atlanta's got a hip-hop record," said Tosha Love, music director for WVEE, Atlanta's top-rated radio station.
