Donald Glover’s 2014 Childish Gambino mixtape, STN MTN, begins with a dream that he runs Atlanta. But when Glover opened for OutKast at their big homecoming show that same year, you could tell there was a divide within the crowd: There were those who seemed to recognize him from TV, and those who clearly had no idea who he was. The following year, when FX picked up Glover’s surreal, rap-driven dramedy named simply “Atlanta,” there was some wariness from those in the local hip-hop community. Though Glover grew up in the Atlanta suburb of Stone Mountain, you could say there’s a sensitivity among natives about rarely being in control of the larger narrative surrounding their city.
The specific world “Atlanta” depicts is a source of fascination that no one seems to get quite right. The booming musical economy around Atlanta strip clubs has been treated as some new phenomenon by the national press. People outside the city still debate over whether André 3000 or Big Boi was OutKast’s better rapper, missing the larger point and beauty of the duo’s existence: In Atlanta, they can peacefully coexist at Blue Flame, one of the go-to strip clubs. And no documentary has captured how 2 Chainz and Killer Mike grew up navigating the same hip-hop chitlin circuit together, probably because that would require a regional expertise.
Fortunately, at least for those who’ve helped mold the city’s hip-hop image, “Atlanta” felt like a reclamation. At the same time, many pointed out to me that the series, which returns March 1 for its second season, complicated their own notions of what a TV show about Atlanta rap could look and feel like.
Whether it’s “Empire,” “Nashville,” or Straight Outta Compton, Hollywood often treats the record industry as means for a soap opera, with climactic musical numbers signaling our heroes’ redemption by commercial success. By contrast, “Atlanta” centers around Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry), who raps under the moniker Paper Boi , his college dropout cousin-turned-manager Earn (Glover), and their mostly futile efforts to build lasting success off one local hit. The slow-going, aimless nature of Paper Boi’s early career is precisely what makes the series “the most realistic portrayal of the Atlanta music scene” to date, says Nick Love, whose work as a marketing impresario helped usher in the city’s modern trap era.
Admittedly, Love worked on “Atlanta,” helping music supervisor Jen Malone secure independent songs for select episodes. Between him and Dee Dee Hibbler, who authorized film permits for the new season in nearby DeKalb County, Georgia, two generations of Atlanta hip-hop are represented behind the scenes: Hibbler was the general manager for Organized Noize, the legendary production team closely associated with OutKast, and Love was the vice president of marketing for Jeezy’s CTE World during pivotal releases like Trap or Die before co-founding the influential strip-club-DJ conglomerate Coalition DJs. It was in these roles that they watched clients scrape money together to share a single pizza, if not front the cash themselves.
“There were days in the very beginning working with Big and Dre when nobody had cars, nobody had money, and nobody knew who they were,” Hibbler says. “Five of us would pile up in one car to go to interviews. When we did our first showcase, L.A. [Reid] turned OutKast down. He was like, ‘Uh, we don’t do rap at LaFace Records’ [eventually Reid signed OutKast to LaFace]. So I can really relate to those moments in season one where they try to connect the dots and introduce Paper Boi to the world, even some of those defeating moments.”
Paper Boi is loosely modeled after local dope-boy rappers like Jeezy and Gucci Mane, who, as Glover has said, aren’t “trying to glorify” drugs and guns but simply discuss “what’s actually happening.” For the record, Love does not like Paper Boi's theme song—he hates it, actually—but he understands the logic behind it. “[Paper Boi] got this record that go, ‘Paper Boi, Paper Boi, all about that paper, boy,’ and he’s not balling,” Love says. “It’s a sharp contrast, but it’s Atlanta in a nutshell. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been managing or marketing for an artist and I’m the one with the money. They’re looking for me to pay for food, a photo shoot, to keep this look up.”
During the show’s pilot, Earn discovers that his cousin not only raps, but has a local hit gaining traction on YouTube—not firsthand, but from a coworker. Several industry figures I spoke to insisted that this occurs more than you’d think; Malia Murray, who runs social media for artists like 6lack and D.R.A.M., had this happen to her with Future, in fact. As the daughter of Hibbler and Ray Murray, who’s in Organized Noize with Rico Wade and Sleepy Brown, she used to see Wade’s cousin—then going by a different name—all the time at her dad’s garage studio. But she didn’t discover that he was Future until the rest of Atlanta started catching on. “I’m in the car with my dad, and [YC’s] ‘Racks’ comes on the radio,” Malia says. “I complimented it and he says, ‘You know that’s Meathead’ [on the feature]. I had totally forgotten that his stage name used to be Meathead Da Futurr!”
Though the characters and scenarios rang true, the first season of “Atlanta” offered only a few real-life glimpses into the city’s larger music-biz machine: a radio station, a celebrity basketball game, Migos before “Bad and Boujee.” It also didn’t feature a single landmark that could be found in sightseeing stock footage of the city, with Paper Boi, Earn, and their crew mostly floating from one modest house to another. For some, that vantage point was refreshing. But others still wanted to see more of metro Atlanta’s sprawling geography, if not to walk away with an overall sense of place. (Fortunately, Hibbler says, the upcoming season features certain locales that will please viewers who “wasn’t flown here, but grown here.”)
Years ago, Bem Joiner helped book Atlanta shows for Drake and Kendrick Lamar before they were household names. Today he concerns himself most with the city’s public image—and what its hip-hop cachet could lend to that—as the community relations manager at the Center for Civic Innovation. Joiner swears that he has seen parts of “Atlanta” play out in real life, from “Skrt” catching on (despite Kodak Black being from south Florida) to Earn sneaking some soda from Zesto Drive-In. But, as someone who thought Vice’s “Noisey Atlanta” show was a bit too exploitative (“They made it seem like the whole city was run on Curtis Snow,” as in the infamous drug dealer from Snow on tha Bluff), Joiner views “Atlanta” as a rare opportunity for Hollywood to capture the city’s multitudes.
Joiner rattles off ideas for future episodes: feature Chilly-O T-shirts, an unofficial city uniform, or have Paper Boi record a song with YFN Lucci, a fellow newcomer and real-life example of how local radio and grassroots efforts can translate to national fame. Last fall’s messy mayoral election—in which the hip-hop community got involved, resulting in T.I. and Killer Mike serving on victor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ transition team—seems ripe for an allusion. “I think it could use a few more of our specific cultural moments,” Joiner says.
Most of the key figures I spoke to are in agreement: “Atlanta” paints a richer portrait of the city, which Glover has described as “a beautiful metaphor for black people,” than what the mass media typically allows. Yet the biggest source of contention among them involves the show’s surreal bent—precisely what has made “Atlanta” a prestige TV darling.
Murray insists that the “weird and hood kids” who listen to both Korean cloud-rap star Keith Ape and Aussie psych-rockers Tame Impala exist in Atlanta, and Glover is proof. But to put someone with that perspective in charge of a show with as definitive of a title as “Atlanta” doesn’t sit quite right with everyone. When Glover described “Atlanta” as “‘Twin Peaks’ with rappers,” Love understood what he meant. But he also thought, “Niggas don’t know what ‘Twin Peaks’ is.”
“Atlanta supports someone like T.I.’s dialect because it sounds like whatever they on,” Joiner says. “They don’t support Donald Glover’s dialect, even though he is closer to where André went with his shit. It took him years of OutKast in southwest Atlanta, with that drawl, before he could wear shoulder pads with the fringe.”
By day, indie rapper blctxt is a photographer whose working-class clients around the city talk more about network-TV powerhouse Shonda Rhimes than buzzy auteurs like Donald Glover. He attributes their disconnect from “Atlanta” to its dreamlike aesthetic—how, with its perpetual haze of weed smoke, the show looks nothing like the Bravo treatment Atlanta has received in the past. That doesn’t mean “Atlanta” isn’t true to his city, particularly with arguments over identity reaching a boiling point, as Atlanta tries to maintain its reputation as a black mecca while still bidding for titles like the Silicon Valley and Ellis Island of the South.
“When you stay in the hood in the West End or all the way in the Southside, where I’m from, or somewhere in Buckhead and you don’t go anywhere past Lenox Mall or even Blue Ridge Mountain, you’re not going to see the weird shit that can happen in Atlanta,” blctxt says. “That, to me, is what the show is about: people who want to make it in a linear fashion but keep getting pulled into different directions because of the weird shit that keeps happening.”
Confounding expectations has been Glover's calling card. No one could have predicted that a “30 Rock” writer would eventually earn seven Grammy nominations with a funk record, enter the Star Wars universe, and be cast opposite Beyoncé in a Lion King remake. That Troy from “Community” would rap a crass line like, “I need some variation/More like very Asian” before rewriting how TV can address racial identity. Or that Glover would even want to return down South, figuratively and literally (he actually lives in town these days). But for some living within the scene the show depicts, “Atlanta” is a reflection of themselves that they didn’t realize they’d want to see.
