The Sixth Congressional District, which stretches from the suburbs south of Atlanta into rural west Georgia, fits Gingrich perfectly: It is booming, middle class, and economically revolves around the high-tech Atlanta airport, which vies with Chicago’s O’Hare as the world’s busiest. This is the New South, where spanking new highways crisscross the countryside, shopping centers seem to sprout up overnight, and the sparkle of new restaurants, new businesses and new homes is everywhere. This is the future.
The twelve-lane Connector plows through Atlanta like the Nile of pavement. Along its fenced banks lie the majority of the city’s attractions. Turner buildings, blossoming with neon network logos, lure Yellowjacket grads from the adjacent campus cluster with the sweet nectar of Powerpuff Girls money. Across the way, The Varsity serves grease between buns, communicating with an enigmatic fast food lexicon that rivals rhyming Cockneys. Tourists walk the overpass to the ghostly Olympic park, built on the graveyard of Techwood projects, in the shadows of Vick’s pastel dome. Hipsters and reluctant yuppies settle in the gentrified Five Points and Cabbagetown, giving their quaint subdivisions more verdant “___________ Park” monikers. And finally, there’s Turner Field, reverberating collective October sighs, before the highway splits back into its tributaries in East Point, the cultural fountainhead. The hip-hop id to New York’s ego: the home of Outkast.
[…]
Here, on the resulting Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, the two wander down the blacktop from East Point, each plotting their own distinct course: Andre, like I-85, shoots off to the airport and sky-high trips before dipping into the Mardi Gras marshes of New Orleans, while Big Boi rolls deep down I-75 into south Florida, home of booty bass and baby blue.
Magic City, Blue Flame, Cheetah, Diamonds of Atlanta, Follies: the way some cities are known for their restaurants or their museums or their turn-of-the-century architecture, Atlanta’s landmarks are strip clubs. In the way that people in Los Angeles or Miami might ask you if you’ve visited the beach, in Atlanta, you’re asked if you’ve seen any strippers.
Jon Caramanica, “Business and Pleasure,” The New York Times, September 5, 2012
I’m rather skeptical of this claim, though I’ve never been to ATL so what do I know? The city’s rappers — the article’s other subject — certainly seem to endorse Caramanica’s contention though.
And in Atlanta more than in any other city, hip-hop culture overlaps heavily with this world. The strip club is where new music is tested out, where stars go to be seen or to relax, where the value of a song can be measured by the number of dollars that fly skyward when it plays.
While the last decade has seen several hip-hop superstars come out of Atlanta — T.I., Young Jeezy, Ludacris — it’s also fostered more than its share of club-friendly onetime crossover wonders like Dem Franchise Boyz or Shop Boyz. Acts like these “were making songs to try to get played at Crucial and the Poole Palace, and they ended up on Billboard,” said DJ Drama, a mixtape D.J. who’s a fixture in Atlanta’s rap world. When success caught them unprepared, they fizzled.
Jon Caramanica, “Business and Pleasure,” The New York Times, September 5, 2012
Also:
I was in Atlanta for a week and never heard of that…
Evidently you don’t get strip club tips unless you’ve been in the city for at least a fortnight.
