If you’ve been to Atlanta and are interested in the city’s nightlife, it’s possible (maybe even likely) that you’ve stopped by “Magic City.” You’ve probably at least heard of it. The famous downtown strip club has been patronized and rapped about by Atlanta rappers since the 1990s, becoming an additional part of the lore of Atlanta as a cultural hub.
That impact and influence on culture, and especially hip-hop culture is the subject of a new five-part docuseries recently acquired by Starz, according to Deadline, set to debut this summer on the network that is also home to shows “BMF” and “Power Book III: Raising Kanan.”
“Magic City: An American Fantasy,” directed by Charles Todd, is a journey through the club’s history and how it became essential to the sound of hip-hop, especially in the 2000s and beyond. Famous anecdotes about “Magic City” all involve artists using the space and the women who worked there to decide which songs would become hits, effectively becoming a space as important as radio for breaking records. The story also focuses on the club’s founder Michael “Mr. Magic” Barney and the women who dance there and made the club a cultural mainstay and centerpiece of what’s hot (or not) in hip-hop.
“Magic City: An American Fantasy is a riveting behind-the-curtain look at one of the most unique places in Black culture. The docuseries’ unprecedented insider access and history unveiled from those who built its empire is a perfect complement to Starz’s slate of adult, culture-driving shows,” said Kathryn Busby, President of Original Programming at Starz.
Jermaine Dupri and Drake’s DreamCrew Entertainment, among several others, are executive producers of the series, which premiered at SXSW last year. Jermaine Dupri was recently an executive producer on Hulu’s “FreakNik: The Wildest Story Never Told.”
“Magic City” has been mentioned in too many hip-hop songs to name, especially by artists from Atlanta, proving to be so essential to the culture of Atlanta’s hip-hop scene that it was the site of the legendary Verzuz battle between Jeezy and Gucci Mane that took place in November 2020, where the two former enemies stood together for the city.
Jeezy, Future, and 2 Chainz—three artists whose success in hip-hop probably owes in part to the strip club—even released a song called “Magic City Mondays,” a nod to the club’s chokehold on Monday nights in Atlanta for all of the celebrities, rappers and ballers who would come through and “make it rain,” a nod to the cultural phenomenon of throwing thousands of dollars—in $1 increments—into the air and letting it fall to the floor in cinematic fashion.
