* * * * * * * * * * * CLICK THE PHOTO TO DOWNLOAD THE MIXTAPE * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

In 2007, the idea that some kid in some suburb somewhere was making weird, scrappy sounding rap on a PC and posting it online was still a novelty. Now, it’s a more or less a genre – or career-move – of its own. The homemade sound of software driven beats, blown-out vocals, and questionable mixing, has the same DIY charm of early garage rock or punk or hard-core.

Around the same time that Soulja Boy released his first mixtape Supaman, Lil Texas and a crew of friends called Dem Homicide Boyz released a few dozen songs on their Soundclick and Spit Yo Game pages. Lil Texas put these demos together and got signed to a small local deal, but nothing official was ever released.

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“They were coming to the streets of Atlanta. Atlanta was their city, The Black Beacon, as the Mayor called it, 70 Percent black. The Mayor was black–in fact, Roger and the Mayor, Wesley Dobbs Jordan, had been fraternity brothers (Omega Zeta Zeta) at Morehouse–and twelve of the nineteen city council members were black, and the chief of police was black, and the fire chief was black, and practically the whole civil service was black, and the Power was black, and White Atlanta was screaming its head off about “Freaknik,” with a k instead of c, as the white newspapers called it, ignorant of the fact that Freaknic was a variation not of the (white) word beatnik but of the (neutral) word picnic.”

Seems like the varied spellings of Freaknic or Freaknik have been standardized into Freaknik, as evidenced by Adult Swim’s Freaknik The Musical and recent efforts to revive Freaknik (or iFreaknik?) in Atlanta.

Charlie Croker, the real estate magnate, good ol’ boy and self made billionaire at the center of the book, has just built a monstrous complex of towers on the far north side of the city. The property isn’t renting and he’s about to lose his shirt. The towers stand as a monument to his failing oversize ego and Atlanta’s dubious real estate boom. Reading the book, I always assumed “Croker Concourse” was The Concourse at Landmark Center, the King And Queen Towers in Sandy Springs — two buildings that seem to have been built with the hope that a smaller city would spring up around them (a new Buckhead). The two towers – the largest suburban skyscrapers in the country – are also on the cover of David Berman’s Actual Air, a book of poems from 1999. Berman’s not from Atlanta – but many of the poems feel like they’re taking place in the small overlooked parts of America’s Southern cities — somewhere between the suburbs and the city.

And then of all the great weird Atlanta tattoos out there, this might just be the most:


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*Notes on the list: Technically Shine Blockas came out as a single in 2009, but it got
its official release as part of the Sir Lucious Leftfoot record in 2010. Drake’s not
from Atlanta, but Jeezy’s verse makes up for that (there should probably be a separate
list for Atlanta guest spots). Something from Gorilla Zoe should be on here, maybe Mrs. Officer, or Fuck You Pay Me or Baddest Bitch, but 28 mixtapes was just too much to sort through.

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Mark Steinmetz

Mark Steinmetz

And then this year, The University Press Of Mississippi published Oraien Catledge’s Photographs, a collection of work by a Decatur photographer who’s been mostly unknown outside of Atlanta (also self taught and legally blind). His 1985 book Cabbagetown has been out of print for years. It’s great to look at Steinmetz’s pictures alongside Catledge’s – both have a quiet warmth and simplicity – some might call it ‘Southern’.


From Oraien Catledge: Photographs

Oraien Catledge

From Oraien Catledge: Photographs

And then it’s hard not to talk about Cabbagetown without mentioning Michael Ackerman’s photographs from there, from the late 90′s – not warm, or quiet.

Michael Ackerman

Michael Ackerman

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Announced yesterday – Travis Porter have signed to Jive Records. It’s only been a couple years – but if you’ve been following them, it kinda seems like it took forever. In July 2009 I shot the cover for their second mixtape Im A Differenter 2.

“The idea was to have the mixtape cover look like the poster for that Paul Rudd movie Role Models. CEO Charlie was telling me this over the phone. Paul Rudd is taking a piss on a wall, and the other dude, Sean William Scott, is sitting on a curb drinking a beer. So I found a white wall and we shot something like that, with a third guy hanging off the wall.” Someone pulled an umbrella out of one of the cars they’d came in. “The umbrella stuff looked better in the end. I gave Charlie the files, and he sent them off to a kid in Florida who does mixtape designs for a hundred bucks.” – Pg. 217 of Atlanta

Their latest – and best shot at a hit yet- ‘Make It Rain’, is dirtier and darker and more minimal than the early work (also, the umbrella makes more literal sense here). If anyone’s keeping track, Im A Differenter 2 might well end up being the best relic of 2009 Swag excess and glory. There’s a bunch of great Uncle Cracker and All American Rejects influenced songs, one legitimate hit – the original version of ‘Turnt Up’, as well as a pre- ‘Bedrock’ use of that same Kane beat on A.D.I.D.A.S. ‘Im A Differenter’, the title track, is easily one of the catchiest songs to come out of Atlanta in the last five years – I still don’t know why it hasn’t crossed over – seems like the perfect song for the trailer of a Paul Rudd buddy picture.

Im A Differenter — TRAVIS PORTER, 2009

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Later on, we went back to photograph some of the girls that worked there – a bunch of those show up in the book. The club wasn’t too far from Midtown, out on an industrial strip of Marietta Drive – but something about it always felt a little more Southern than the rest of the city. Will wrote a short piece about the club for S Magazine that helps explain things:

Body Tap is a giant rectangular bunker of a club that glows at night like a pilot light in an otherwise spartan and slumbering industrial stretch of southwest Atlanta. Pull into the lot through the gap in the chain link fence and roll down your window. A dude holding a wad of bills so big it can’t really even fold runs up and tells you it’ll be twenty. Nah, you tell him, I’m gonna park back there, in the grass lot, gesturing far out into the darkness, and he says Alright player – ten, then just pull on back.

The Body Tap experience begins with cars – more specifically your car, and how it stacks up with the other cars in the parking lot and those that can be expected later, and how much you’re willing to pay to put yours where. As you ease towards the back of the lot, a Rolls Royce Phantom and a couple Range Rovers parked in prime places up by the door quickly give way to high-riding box Chevys with electric kool aid acid paint jobs and cartoonishly-sized chrome wheels, which soon relent to customized Chrysler 300s and Dodge Chargers that eventually leave room in the cheap seats for beat up Tercels, Altimas, and whatever other compacts and pickups get the working stiffs, line cooks, and mechanics from A to B and back again. You park in the high grass up under the line of trees and get out of your car, then do the whole automotive pecking order on foot and in reverse, all the way back to the club. The bouncer pats you down. He feels your cell phone, knows it’s got a camera on it, and sends you back out to where the kudzu grows. Ain’t no pictures goin on in here.

Body Tap is essentially a warehouse set into the side of a hill, and when you get past the bouncer, pay the cover, and walk past the shower with the glass door and purple walls, past the DJ booth perched high above the main floor, and arrive at the top of a large set of stairs, you see the whole place broadly, and from above. It’s one A.M. and it’s heating up – just coming to the rapid boil that the DJ, the dancers, the MC, the bartenders, and the club-goers themselves have all been purposefully working towards. Standing at the top of the stairs, you look out and what you see is a frenetic, wild, unencumbered, chest-cavity rattling orgy – but sex is just one part of the swirl, and maybe a subordinate part at that, a minor player. Instead it’s an orgy of money, booze, weed, food, style, conversation, and yes, tits ’n’ ass, too—all set to music specifically calibrated to push the energy forever upwards.

The orgy starts when the DJ really starts dropping the shit-hot regional hip-hop hits that are burning up right now. The music is specifically designed for this exact environment: Girl pussy pop it, shake that monkey. There are girls working the floor of the room for lap dances – What’s your name player? You wanna dance?; girls on the pedestal-like side stages shake-shake-shakin’ it for a single crew that’s gathered around with their bankrolls in hand; girls on the main stage, spiraling dramatically down the 30 foot high poles and looking like they might need ropes and a harness, eventually joining at the front of the stage for a simulated sex. All of the girls respond to different of-the-moment records with lit up faces and ramped up movements like, This is my joint right here! Once you’ve installed yourself on the floor, the dancer closest to you is bouncing her unfathomably round ass below her impossibly slim waist as she swings her hair and snaps along with both hands, looking back over her shoulder a little bit, one cheek clapping rhythmically with the other, as though her core came factory-equipped with a motorized drive belt. Now dudes’ necks are snapping hard to the beat, countless blunts are lit, jet streams of weed exhalations shoot into the air, and on a good night so many green bills are fluttering through the air in shimmering clouds that the dancers who aren’t dancing just this minute are doing their part, shoveling the money into Hefty Cinch Sack garbage bags and handing it to bouncers who walk it back into the guts of the club. An MC encourages the fellas to throw more money, and more, all the while giving shout-outs to rappers, producers, producers-turned-rappers, rappers-turned-actors, and characters of unspecified notoriety in the building. The frenzy is a very collaborative effort.

The energy in the club, even when it’s jumping, is loose – every player and his money are welcome. Also: the club is dotted with couples as well as co-ed groups out partying; there is even a table full of women – girls night out – buying bottles of Grey Goose, soliciting lap dances from certain strippers for each other, and attracting as much attention from the fellas as the working girls gyrating and wearing nothing but a belly chain. In Atlanta, where the bar closes at four and the girls strip naked, Body Tap and places like it aren’t “the strip club” – they’re just called “the club,” full stop. The skeevy cliché of goateed men saddling up to the stage and holding a one or a five out until the overly-tanned girl of the moment saddles down to him and let’s him snap the money into her garter doesn’t happen. Here, when the spirit moves, it’s more disinterested; some would say even more vicious. You just throw a quarter inch stack of ones from the brick of singles in your hand into the air above the dancer on the pole – or maybe hold the stack above her ass as she’s on all fours, pushing a couple ones at a time off your bankroll so they waterfall over her ass and onto the floor. Here, money is spent for the sole purpose of having been spent – having been had and no longer needed. The spending – the no longer needing – is performed as publicly and ostentatiously as possible.

It hardly bears saying that in every single detail except for the holy trinity of nude girls, music, and floor-to-ceiling poles, Body Tap is something entirely different from the other clubs in the Strip Club Capital of America. Different from the Cheetah 3 – the ritzy strip club downtown near all the fancy hotels, with its endless chain of white stretch limos and its row of Benzes in the premier valet. It’s also something entirely other from the rundown strip joints that dot the Atlanta area’s endless exurban sprawl—the pickups, SUVs, and compacts that sit anonymous and lonely outside the Pink Ponys and TKs in the seedy back corners of the Georgia exurbs. At Body Tap and the handful of clubs like it—places like Magic City, Pleasers, and the Gentleman’s Club – there exists a whole culture – specifically Southern, specifically black – with its own signifiers and signifieds; it’s own tailor made music; its own unique rules and complex social structures. Understand the difference between this club and the places scattered across Everywhere, USA: At Body Tap, it’s the clientele that’s on display, as much or more than the girls at work inside. It is a social gathering spot first and foremost. People aren’t here to hide – they’re here to see and be seen, make themselves part of the show, make it rain. Forget that white-boy right of passage called the bachelor party. Nobody’s getting a ten-dollar grind to a washed up Motley Crüe song in an effort to work up a nut that’ll later get shot into a wad of toilet paper before the car gets put in gear and driven home to the wife. Shame has no place here; there are no shadows in this club. No, it’s all about display, and amidst the sensory spanning orgy – in the scrum for attention – that means the girls here have to be twice as good at what they do.

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Some of the good short scraps of video we shot during our time in Atlanta will be shown tonight at Offprint Paris as part of a Variety Show organized by Jason Fulford of J+L Books. You can also see some of those videos by following the VIDEO link on your left. Above — a not unusual response to Waka Flocka Flame’s O LEtS DO IT – from a party in Decatur last Fall (a full year before Flockaveli).

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