Magic City, full of naked women and raining dollar bills and rappers both aspiring and established, is more than an Atlanta strip club.
It's "the most important club in the most important city in the hip-hop industry."
This according to GQ, who sent both writer Devin Friedman and photographer and documentarian Lauren Greenfield to explore the club's particular nexus of power, sex and musicians — what makes a "low concrete box" off Forsyth Street "the lynchpin of hip-hop."
Greenfield's complete, uncensored documentary film was released Friday, after Friedman's story. (Both pieces are sexually explicit, given the subject matter.)
Friedman focuses on the myth of the club itself and spends significant time trailing its titular founder, Magic, who has been running the club for three decades with only one interruption (when he went to prison).
But Greenfield, the acclaimed filmmaker behind "The Queen of Versailles" and the #likeagirl commercial aired during the 2015 Super Bowl, is after something else, with a focus on the dancers who attract everything else (men, music, money) in the building.
Jezebel's Julianne Escobedo Shepherd called her film "a complicated look into the wild economics of dancing at America’s most famous adult nightspot, where they’re carting home literally garbage bags full of money."
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