Eric Barber Music

 One of his videos, for example, showcases World On Wheels – a roller skating rink with a difference. It's where locally-produced records are aired first, ever since the days of Ice T and Egyptian Lover.

 Los Angeles is the beating heart of West Coast rap, the birthplace of the distinctive sound of layers of synthesizers and groves that went global through the likes of Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg, Tupac Shakur and many more.

 The heartbeat of West Coast rap remains not only strong but interwoven into a large slice of LA life. It is no longer a "genre". West Coast rap has become a bona fide culture, a way of life that can be seen in many different ways.

 Another destination Nocando explores is the Slauson Supermall, known locally as the Slauson Swap Meet. Originally about 10 small kiosks in a strip mall, it is now housed in a massive warehouse with over 100 stalls and just about anything for sale that a self-respecting hip-hopper might require, from street fashion to custom jewellery to used video games and Jordans.

 Many rappers, DJs, producers and "kids from all over" visit the mall with influential hip-hop folk like Drake and A$AP Rocky among those who have had custom pieces made here. Haggling is acceptable – required, even – and the prices can be gloriously cheap. And it's not just the shopping, Slauson Supermall has some popular restaurants too.

 Still hungry? Nocando highlights Delicious Pizza – run by the same guys who launched indie record label Delicious Vinyl in 1987, booming the careers of Pharcyde, Young MC and Tone Loc.

 And this isn't just about pizza – they throw and host events, listening parties and regular community get-togethers with outlets on West Adams Street (the more hip hop side of town) and another closer to Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard.

 Chef Edwin "E-Dubble" Redway has opened a soul food spot on West Boulevard and Slauson – Grilled Fraiche. E-Dubble is known in Los Angeles for his food trucks (hunt them down on Instagram) and has linked up with and cooked for elite rap artists like The Game, Drake and T-Pain. Roy Choi is a world-renowned chef also linked with food trucks (Kogi BBQ taco trucks) and delicious Korean tacos – and has opened a healthy restaurant in Watts called LOCOL.

 Then there's Kaos Network, the famous (and LA's longest running) open mic workshop, an icon close to Nocando's heart as that's where he started, winning "battles" against many emcees. Kaos is now homer to an event called Bananas, a colourful, eclectic night of indie rap and alternative music held every last Tuesday of the month. A visit here could result in spotting the next big West Coast star.

 Beat Junkies, the O.G. Turntablists, recently celebrated 25 years as a crew and have now opened the Institute of Sound, a DJ school in Glendale where, on Saturdays, the best mixers, scratchers and selectors in the world of DJing and rap music give classes, tutorial and free workshops. Poo-Bah records and Amoeba Music are must-go record stores

 Talking of creative licence, a must-see (and must-do) is the Venice Art Walls where an ever-changing canvas allows people to (legally) express themselves with aerosol paint – though you have to submit your ideas first.

 The Fairfax district is the area Nocando calls "the Tigris and Euphrates of cool" – the home of street fashion in the US that ultimately influences what the hip hop world will be wearing in terms of footwear, hats, jewellery, T-shirts and more. Supreme, Pink Dolphin, DOPE, the Hundreds and Crooks & Castles all lodge here, attracting some big name shoppers.

 And then there is the Petersen Automotive Museum. With so much of hip-hop music and personality bound up with cars, this museum has the best examples of LA rides, including Gypsy Rose (the original Lowrider which spawned a generation of anti-establishment automobiles) and a cherry Snoop Deville ( the Cadillac made famous by Snoop Dogg).

 Seven hundred turkeys, two rappers, and an intermediate number of onlookers had assembled in the parking lot of a Kroger supermarket on Cleveland Avenue, on the scrappy south side of Atlanta. The rappers were Quavo and Takeoff, two of the three members of Migos, the dominant hip-hop group of the moment—known for exuberant, off-kilter tracks, like “Bad and Boujee,” that seem to consist of nothing but interjections. It was the Friday before Thanksgiving, and the two were standing in the back of a U-Haul truck, facing a growing crowd of people who wanted turkeys or pictures or both. Takeoff grabbed a carton and opened it. “We shipping them boxes out,” he barked—Migos can turn just about any handful of words into a memorable refrain.

 The turkey supply had already begun to dwindle when one of the event’s organizers arrived, pulling up in an elegant but inconspicuous Range Rover. His name is Kevin Lee, but everyone calls him Coach K, and, in the world of hip-hop, he may be better known than the Duke basketball impresario from whom he took his nickname. In the aughts, Lee managed two of the city’s most important rappers—Young Jeezy and then, a few years later, Gucci Mane—undaunted by the fact that the men had engaged in a bitter and apparently bloody feud. Nowadays, he is both a manager and a record executive, guiding the careers of Migos and a clutch of other young hip-hop stars, including Lil Yachty, who is twenty and calls himself the King of the Youth. Lee is forty-six, an age that offers some advantages of its own. “With this gray beard, I’m a O.G.,” he says. “When I say something, they listen—like, ‘Oh, the O.G. must have been through it.’ ” But he prides himself on being open to whatever musical mania is currently seizing the young people who tend to be his clients, and his customers. “When I visit my friends, I sit with their kids, and we talk about music,” he says. “And my friends be like, ‘How the hell do you understand that shit?’ I’m like, ‘This is what I love, and this is what I do.’ ”

 Lee is a former college basketball player, and he walks with a strut that turns out, on closer inspection, to be a limp, the lingering effect of an incident that ended his athletic career. He says that he was visiting some friends, who happened to be drug dealers, when they were raided—not by the police but by rivals with shotguns, who strafed Lee’s leg so thoroughly that he spent a year relearning how to walk. He is, in person, every bit as watchful as one might expect a hip-hop godfather to be, but a good deal friendlier. In Atlanta, his adopted home town, he seems to know and like everyone he comes across.

 When Lee turned into the parking lot, he was met at once by an acquaintance who was, like countless young people in the city, an aspiring musician. “I D.M.’d you a song,” she said. “Now I caught you in real life. I’ma keep D.M.’ing you until you get tired of me.” Lee responded with a warm but noncommittal smile, and asked where he should put his car—the crowd was filling up all of the closest parking spaces. She laughed and gestured toward a tow-away zone in front of the supermarket. “This Cleveland Ave.,” she said. “You ain’t got to park right.”

 The location of the turkey giveaway had been moved twice that afternoon, from a school to a day-care center to this parking lot, because no one was eager to contend with the crowds that would be sure to come. Between the popularity of Migos and the popularity of free turkeys, no advance notice was required, and, if some unsuspecting shoppers were surprised to be offered a turkey, none of them seemed particularly shocked by the sight of Quavo and Takeoff holding court in a U-Haul. Atlanta is the hip-hop capital of the world, which means that it is full of worldwide stars who are also—and perhaps primarily—neighborhood guys. Quavo, who is twenty-six, grew up in Gwinnett County, northeast of the city, with Takeoff, who is twenty-three, and who is Quavo’s nephew. The third member, Offset, is twenty-five, and he is Quavo’s cousin, although he may be better known, these days, as the fiancé of Cardi B, who this year became the first reality-television star to find a place on hip-hop’s A-list. Her show was “Love & Hip Hop: New York,” on VH1; her breakthrough hit was “Bodak Yellow,” which owned the summer. Offset’s proposal was made, and accepted, onstage during a concert in October. Their wedding hasn’t yet been scheduled. “Everybody’s calling about it,” Lee says. “I think maybe we should shoot a movie, put it out on Valentine’s Day. I mean, ‘Girls Trip’ just did thirty million in one weekend.”

 Offset never made it to the Kroger parking lot, but none of the attendees were complaining, especially not the ones staggering away beneath the weight of their free turkeys. Lee waded into the crowd and greeted his business partner, Pierre Thomas, known as Pee, who is a decade younger, and noticeably more cautious around people he doesn’t know. Thomas is relatively new to the music industry, having evidently been successful in his first career, which he declines to discuss. “He come from the streets,” Lee says, by way of explaining why neither of them will explain more. Unlike Lee, who grew up in Indianapolis, Thomas is from Atlanta, and, when the two began working with Migos, Thomas’s local reputation was a great asset—he was known to the proprietors of the city’s clubs as a generous patron, and an unusually well-connected one. “It all came together,” Lee says. “My skills, his credibility.”

Barbercraft

 Lee and Thomas launched their company in 2013. Its name, Quality Control, reflects the different sensibilities of its founders: Thomas wanted something starting with “Q,” to honor a friend of his who had been shot to death; Lee was inspired by a tag on the pocket of his designer jeans. For a time, their base of operations was a small, freestanding brick building up the street from the Kroger, which they turned into a bunker-like music studio. “Bricked up all the windows, because the music game dangerous,” Thomas says. The studio was in a residential area, and some of the neighbors resented the constant traffic and the occasional altercations; not long after a bullet shattered the window of a nearby house, Quality Control was forced to move. The company’s new headquarters is a purpose-built suite of offices and recording studios, tucked into an industrial corner of a burgeoning neighborhood near midtown. Lee drove there after the giveaway, which he judged a success, not least because it reflected the same unpolished quality that he prizes in music. A friend called, and Lee described what had happened, sounding exuberant. “We did it in the hood, man,” he said.

 In the course of Lee’s career, and in some significant part because of it, Atlanta has gone from being a regional music hub to hip-hop’s cultural home, the city that sets the musical agenda for the rest of the country. But, compared with Nashville, which hosts both the lucrative country-music industry and a thriving country-tourism industry, Atlanta is much less corporate. The hip-hop scene remains stubbornly decentralized; there is a profusion of great rappers and producers, but little in the way of major institutions, unless you count the city’s strip clubs, as you probably should. The big companies remain, for the most part, in New York and Los Angeles. “There are no labels here—no major labels,” Lee says. With Quality Control, he is trying to change that. The company has a full-time staff of eight, and operates as a joint venture with the Capitol Music Group, which is part of Universal; the label’s artists include Stefflon Don, a British vocalist who recently scored her first Top Ten U.K. hit. Lee and Thomas also run a management firm, Solid Foundation, which represents clients such as Trippie Redd, a rising hip-hop star. The firm is also aiming to move its clients into television and film—Lee sees no reason that Lil Yachty should not have his own sitcom.

 The goal, for Lee, is not just to build a company but to help build up Atlanta, a city that has transfixed him ever since he first began visiting, in the nineties. One afternoon, he took a call from Ryan Glover, a longtime friend and local entertainment executive. (Glover was formerly the president of Bounce TV, a network targeting African-Americans, which was recently acquired by E. W. Scripps, the media conglomerate.) They reminisced about the old days, and Lee recalled the excitement of arriving in the city for the first time. “I remember coming down here and thinking, These brothers driving Benzes? Off of music? I’m coming to Atlanta!” They talked about supporting a friend named Keisha, who turned out to be Keisha Lance Bottoms, who was running for mayor. Bottoms, like the previous five mayors of Atlanta, is African-American; in this and other ways, she fits Lee’s vision of the city as a place where black people can become successful without becoming anomalous. “There’s no feeling like when I’m coming back to Atlanta, I’m in that airport and I see all those black people with jobs,” he says. “When I travel to Phoenix or to Chicago, or even Indianapolis or Cleveland, Orlando—when you walk into those airports, it’s a few of us. But when you come to Atlanta it’s like, Whoa!”

 In a way, Indianapolis, where Lee grew up, was also a music city: the site of a pressing plant, operated by RCA Records, which was one of the world’s largest record manufacturers, until it shut down, thirty years ago. Lee’s mother and grandmother both worked there, which meant that he had the best music collection in the neighborhood; he remembers hearing an eight-track recording of “King Tim III (Personality Jock),” a 1979 B-side by the Fatback Band that is generally regarded as the first hip-hop record ever released.

 His mother had a friend in Harlem, and sometimes brought Lee, her only child, along to visit; there, he learned all he could about hip-hop, which still seemed like a peculiar subculture. As he grew older, his tastes broadened further. At seventeen, he and his friends began driving to Chicago, three hours away, and bribing doormen in order to get into the night clubs where a danceable new style called house music was being forged. House music remains Lee’s genre of choice, despite his career; more than one streetwise rapper has been shocked, on entering Lee’s car, to encounter some dreamy club classic from the eighties—say, “Mystery of Love,” by Mr. Fingers. Even after he moved to Atlanta, Lee found that local house clubs provided a pleasant respite from the hip-hop scene, where he was starting to build his reputation. “That was Kevin’s world,” he says. “And then Coach would go to the Bounce, in Bankhead”—a legendary night club, in a legendarily rough-and-tumble neighborhood—“and fuck with the drug dealers.”

 Although his mother had a steady job, Lee grew up in a neighborhood he describes as a “ghetto.” He was a gifted enough athlete to get a scholarship to Saint Augustine’s, a historically black college in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was a decent basketball player, and a better than decent party promoter, helping to organize “two-to-sixes,” late-night, locked-door events that drew revellers from throughout the region. After college, he returned to Indianapolis, where he tried and failed to start a record company; then he made his way to Atlanta, where he worked as a special-ed teacher. He reconnected with a childhood friend, Alan Henderson, who played for the Atlanta Hawks, and they formed a label called Hendu Entertainment, which was an education—although not, for Henderson, a cheap one. For a while, Lee managed a hardworking local hip-hop provocateur named Pastor Troy, and then, in a studio, he met a charismatic rapper from a small town called Hawkinsville, who named himself Lil J, at first, and then Young Jeezy.

 In the early aughts, Atlanta hip-hop, long defined by the exuberance of OutKast, and by a string of delectable party records, was growing slower and meaner, following the lead of an emerging star, T.I., who declared, in 2001, that he rapped “for the niggas and the j’s in the trap.” The j’s were junkies, and the trap was one of the tumbledown houses that often served, in Atlanta, as dealers’ headquarters. (“Trap” became a verb, too: trapping was what trappers did in the trap.) It was the dawn of what came to be known as “trap music,” a term that Lee doesn’t embrace: to him, this was simply the latest iteration of Atlanta hip-hop—characterized, as hip-hop often has been, by lyrics that presented a stylized version of street life. This was the world that Young Jeezy, too, chronicled in his rhymes. He favored tracks full of grand, gothic keyboard lines, and he made his words memorable by using fewer of them, drawing out his raspy syllables, or taking a few beats off for added emphasis.

 In the early aughts, Atlanta hip-hop, long defined by the exuberance of OutKast, and by a string of delectable party records, was growing slower and meaner, following the lead of an emerging star, T.I., who declared, in 2001, that he rapped “for the niggas and the j’s in the trap.” The j’s were junkies, and the trap was one of the tumbledown houses that often served, in Atlanta, as dealers’ headquarters. (“Trap” became a verb, too: trapping was what trappers did in the trap.) It was the dawn of what came to be known as “trap music,” a term that Lee doesn’t embrace: to him, this was simply the latest iteration of Atlanta hip-hop—characterized, as hip-hop often has been, by lyrics that presented a stylized version of street life. This was the world that Young Jeezy, too, chronicled in his rhymes. He favored tracks full of grand, gothic keyboard lines, and he made his words memorable by using fewer of them, drawing out his raspy syllables, or taking a few beats off for added emphasis.

 As Young Jeezy rose to prominence in Atlanta, he established a high-profile alliance with the Black Mafia Family, which was both a hip-hop crew and, more consequentially, a criminal enterprise that used Atlanta as the hub of a multistate cocaine-distribution network. The group’s leader, Demetrius (Big Meech) Flenory, appeared alongside Jeezy in his first video, which was filmed during the weekend-long birthday party of a top B.M.F. leader, who rented a Miami Beach hotel for the occasion. “It was very helpful,” Lee says now; the relationship made Jeezy’s rhymes more believable. “If you was in the city at that time, and you went out and you seen B.M.F., the shit Jeezy was talking about really was happening—it was like a fuckin’ movie.” Lee says that Flenory, in order to outdo all the little big guys who were throwing money around in night clubs, once hired a helicopter to drop thirty thousand dollars on the crowd outside Birthday Bash, an annual hip-hop concert.

 Although B.M.F. had a record label, Jeezy was never signed to it, and Lee says that he always kept Jeezy’s business affairs separate from his social life. (Jeezy’s alliance with the crew eventually frayed, leading to a flurry of resentful interviews and rhymes; virtually all the B.M.F. leadership, including Flenory, wound up in federal prison.) But Jeezy’s association with B.M.F. had a mixed effect on his early musical career. “Radio wouldn’t fuck with us,” Lee says—stations didn’t want to be seen to be endorsing B.M.F. or its activities. As a form of grassroots promotion, Lee connected Jeezy with a neighbor of his, DJ Drama, who was known for putting together unlicensed CD compilations of recent hits; they were called mixtapes, after their cassette-only predecessors. In 2004 and 2005, DJ Drama and Young Jeezy released “Tha Streets Iz Watchin” and “Trap or Die,” a pair of mixtapes that were really unofficial albums, full of tracks you couldn’t get anywhere else. (To promote “Trap or Die,” Lee took out radio ads that declared a national holiday: “All traps closed today.”) The mixtapes were hailed as underground classics, and hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of them were given away or sold, contributing to the success, in 2005, of Young Jeezy’s major-label début—and contributing, too, to the rise of the mixtape as arguably hip-hop’s most important format. Many of Young Jeezy’s fans found that they preferred his tapes to his official albums; some even grew to love DJ Drama’s tendency to interrupt the music with full-throated salutations, known as “drops”:

 For all the niggas in the streets! All the niggas in the hood! I don’t care if you’re in the A-town or your town—it’s how we get down! Young Jeezy! DJ the fuck Drama! Shout to Coach K!

 It was Jeezy who encouraged Lee to rename himself Coach K, because of the way he cajoled and nitpicked Jeezy in the studio. And it was Jeezy who ended the first phase of Lee’s career when, in 2008, he fired him, for reasons neither man will discuss. This was a disorienting experience for Lee, whose professional identity had for years been entirely subsumed in Jeezy’s. He bought a night club, worked with some local rappers, and was eventually recruited to manage an old friend who had become the most revered rapper in the city: Gucci Mane, an astonishingly productive and imaginative performer, whose tales of the trap were at once more vivid and more surreal than anyone else’s. Earlier in his career, Gucci Mane had feuded with Young Jeezy, and the feud seemed to culminate in a homicide, in which an associate of Jeezy’s was shot and killed, and Gucci Mane was arrested for murder. (Gucci Mane’s lawyer argued that he had shot the man in self-defense, and the charge was dropped.) Somehow, Lee had guided Jeezy through this dispute without being drawn into it, and, starting in 2009, he spent two years managing Gucci Mane, who released a steady stream of mixtapes even as he darted in and out of jail and rehabilitation programs, fighting an addiction to lean, a liquid-opiate cocktail. Todd Moscowitz was the C.E.O. of Warner Bros., Gucci Mane’s label, and he recalls that Lee was a steady presence during an unsteady time. “He’s really good at keeping the process moving, and not getting caught up in the nonsense,” Moscowitz says. “Every day, if I couldn’t find Gooch, I could find Coach.” Gucci Mane eventually demonstrated, to Lee’s satisfaction, that he was unmanageable, but their friendship endured. Gucci Mane is now free, professedly sober, and more popular than ever. This summer, Lee and Thomas attended Gucci Mane’s wedding. Thomas brought matching diamond necklaces for the bride and groom.

 Thomas, like many of the rappers he knows, often talks about hip-hop as an alternative to “the streets”—a way to make money without having to sell drugs. He says that he grew up hard on the west side of Atlanta, the child of drug-addicted parents who sometimes sent him next door, with a pot, to ask the neighbors for hot water for a bath. By twelve, he had become the most reliable person in the house, and so he went to work, building both a rap sheet—he first went to prison at fourteen—and, one surmises, a fortune. During a recent interview for a hip-hop podcast, he was discussing the high cost of launching a new performer when he started to reminisce: “Do you know what I had to do to get my first half a million dollars?” He paused. “I can’t even tell you—but it wasn’t easy.”

 Once Thomas had some money, he bought a few buildings and a day-care center, all of which he viewed, quite accurately, as safer investments than music. He got to know Gucci Mane through the Atlanta demimonde, and got to know Lee through Gucci Mane, but he was skeptical when Lee asked him to co-found a record label and to sign Migos: three kids who recorded their music in a grimy basement hideout they called their “bando,” which is a rough synonym for “trap” (it refers to an abandoned house, temporarily commandeered by dealers), and which was also the name of one of their first singles. Like many of the best rappers who have emerged from Atlanta in the past decade, Migos were spotted early on by Gucci Mane. Thomas, in order to sign the group, had to call Gucci Mane, in jail, to get his blessing, which he gave. Thomas stuffed a duffelbag with cash and showed it to the three Migos, as a way of demonstrating how much money he and Lee were willing to invest in the group’s career.

 Migos’ music was trap burlesque—they exaggerated and recombined the genre’s essential elements, like irreverent little brothers rummaging through their big brothers’ closets. Lee and Thomas ferried them to appearances at the city’s strip clubs, taking care to leave some cash behind, but the reaction was lukewarm, until Migos released a hit called “Versace,” in 2013. It was mistaken by some listeners for a novelty song, because its composition is so extreme: the members repeat the titular word nearly two hundred times, hammering the name until it sounds like nonsense syllables, and then hammering some more.

 “Even though I own the business, I like to have my hands in everything.” This was Lee’s stated explanation for why, early one afternoon, he was driving to a UPS store to pick up packages. The unstated explanation was more convincing: he was expecting a pair of Adidas Yeezy Boosts, the intentionally scarce sneakers designed by Kanye West. Thomas has a weakness for refractive adornment, but Lee’s main vices are European designer clothes and ostentatious sneakers, which are constantly arriving at the Quality Control offices, courtesy of various people who like him, or owe him a favor. Lee and Thomas are a complementary pair: Thomas is willing and eager to stay out late, keeping an eye on the local clubs, while Lee likes to be up by eight, so that he can swim some laps before he starts his day. He is also a practicing vegan, though he doesn’t practice every day.

 Lee is aware that he might never have built a label if there hadn’t been someone willing to gamble a duffelbag on an unproved group like Migos. Hip-hop in Atlanta may be an alternative to the streets, but, over the years, it has also been enabled by the streets, which have functioned as an informal, risk-tolerant source of venture capital. In Lee’s view, this helps explain why Atlanta’s hip-hop scene hasn’t been swallowed up by the mainstream music industry. “The money came from out the black market—it came from out the streets—to build the shit,” he says. “You’ve got to do it on your own.”