Originally, I was in Atlanta for business—two interviews with a new organization, trying to figure out if it would be the right fit, if I liked the city enough to make it that slippery notion that we call home, if I actually liked the Lou Williams wings at Magic City, or if I was just buying into the hype. During the first trip, I found that my time in the Marriott Marquis hotel seemed to be perfectly soundtracked by a demo my friend Salvador had sent me—VVS Lemonade by Classic Selena—a new project from the artist S. Paul, based in Atlanta at that time. In a sense, it felt like elevator music, but the elevator in that hotel had this sublime quality, as though you were moving up and down a spine, passing through these skeletal floors that resembled ribs. You became hyper-aware of your presence as a body within a greater body. I asked Salvador to connect me with Paul, who met me at Pulse Bar in the hotel lobby during my second visit, where we riffed about Playboi Carti, Rush Hour, mixtapes, and work.—Chad Masters

Thanks for meeting me here. I thought the most appropriate place to begin would be John C. Portman, Jr., the architect of not only this hotel, but many others in Atlanta, as well as the Westin Bonaventure in Los Angeles. Since the last track of VVS Lemonade is called “BONAVENTURE,” I was curious about the significance of Portman and his work to you? 

S. Paul: It’s funny picking the ending as the most appropriate place to begin. And that idea of needing to begin appropriately. The thing is I’m not so sure whether “BONAVENTURE” is even about the hotel as it is about a recursive loop that you slowly notice is falling apart, and then you realize that it isn’t even recurring, you’re not sure what to call it, but it’s still happening. I like Portman’s hotels, at least the ones that are here, but I’ve still never been to the Bonaventure in LA. Naming a track, naming anything is a strange activity, there’s so many ways it can happen, and then you’re left with the feedback loop of the name reacting to the world reacting to the name. 

At first, for me at least, Bonaventure was St. Bonaventure, and not the saint but the university and its basketball team, which popped up in March Madness a couple of times in the last decade, so it was this name that was already pretty divorced from its namesake. If there’s something I really like about the hotel, it’s that there’s so much writing about it, I can construct all of these different versions from essays on it, from the films shot there. It’s a little more difficult to do that here, the current forces that dictate Atlanta’s mythology aren’t as interested in a hotel with a bar as boring as this one. Maybe boring isn’t the right word, but there isn’t anything happening, there’s no event, at least in the sense of an event that might end up on Atlanta the TV show. 

So far I’ve felt that this is a city where the mythology is more difficult to inscribe upon, especially if you’re not from here. You go to a Hawks game or hit Onyx and you’re participating in these things that are much bigger than yourself, where it feels nearly impossible to make a scratch of impact unless you’re on the level of a Future or Joe Johnson caliber figure. 

They shoot a lot of films here but the city rarely ever plays itself in the way Los Angeles or New York does. Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver and Atlanta come to mind as recent examples, but they’re doing so at a time when film and television are on the way out. Even this hotel pops up on occasion, it's briefly in that Denzel [Washington] movie Flight, but it doesn’t exist in any recognizable public memory as “an Atlanta thing,” at least to outsiders. In a way, I prefer this lack of ability to contribute to the mythology. I’ve been living out east for a couple months, but it is like a hotel here: I’ll check in, I’ll check out. The whole process is largely invisible. Did you see the video of Bear1Boss meeting Playboi Carti in jail? 

Yeah, there were a bunch of posts saying it was like something that’d only happen on Atlanta. I immediately thought about how this is the only city that has that type of fame disparity between rappers—someone who’s a star like Carti, but also someone like Bear1Boss, who’s got a certain level of niche Soundcloud fame, and who also has a number of ties to Carti in the underground infrastructure that built both of their careers, to the point where Carti knows who Bear1Boss is even though they’re meeting for the first time. 

People were pointing out Bear1Boss and UnoTheActivist’s collab tapes and Playboi Carti’s “Splur Gang” collab with UnoTheActivist… It's crazy to think about the cousin rumors, how something like “Carti and Uno are cousins'' had to be repeated so many times by so many people before it became Atlanta mythology—and it still is, even though Uno came out and said that they weren’t related but just family friends. I think that video is great because of how much of a non-place it takes place in, where the Fulton County Jail is like this hotel, people check in and out, images are made there, albeit with body cameras, and it really becomes about the characters. Like Hollywood today has completely failed to produce a new face like Brad Pitt or Leonardo Dicaprio, but Atlanta’s given us not just Carti but Young Thug, Lil Baby, Gucci Mane, the list goes on. I think that video is one of the most important Atlanta films. It’s like [Carti and Bear1Boss], that video where Future says “she belongs to the streets” and Young Thug turns the camera out the car window and onto the road, and the Fresh Squad Crank Dat Soulja Boy video. And Kai Cenat’s Rush Hour Remake.

Why the Kai Cenat remake?

I think the best part about Rush Hour as a trilogy is how it moves through these quintessential cinema cities of Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and Paris that play themselves. When it’s reset in Atlanta, it takes place in the nowhere of a secret massage parlor, a costume shop, and a restaurant, all seemingly nested in the same warehouse complex flanked by forests. The film doesn’t become Atlanta through a location, but through Lil Yachty, and he’s only on screen for a couple of seconds max. Kai Cenat tells his massage lady he’s Lil Yachty and this causes a storm of girls who want pictures with him later. It engages with the mythology to create the place, whereas something like Baby Driver tries to graft on all of these Hollywood films and it doesn’t coalesce, it becomes this kind of muddled shitty mess. [Cenat and Wright] are both outsiders to the city, and of course you can look back and say Sunset Boulevard was directed by Billy Wilder who was Austrian, but that was a time when the image of the city was being constructed concurrently with the city itself, resulting in this feedback loop of place and myth that becomes impossible to replicate in Atlanta. But the sound of the city is a thing that is still being constructed, and this sound has an image too. With Baby Driver, it’s too jarring, Wright shapes the whole film around these songs that aren’t Atlanta, and you realize that it’s not a film trying to be an “Atlanta Film” but rather a film trying to do a Los Angeles film thing in Atlanta. Which just doesn’t work. Billy Wilder wasn’t making Austrian cinema in Hollywood, he was making Hollywood pictures. and Cenat just uses stock music in his film, but the openness of it, the way the non-place of the music matches the non-place on screen, it’s perfect. 

You were talking about names earlier, and Rush Hour is this thing that’s constantly named as well. I noticed that you referenced it in one of the texts on classicselena.com.

I don’t reference Rush Hour, but I reference its citation: the Veeze line “Eyes low like I’m Chinese, I should be with Chris Tucker.” But you’re right, it is one of those things that’s similar to Bonaventure, it pops up over and over again in different contexts and different versions. Babyface Ray had this line “I’m at Wi Spa relaxin’ look like Ricky Tan” that I think is really great because it uses Rush Hour as a sort of fuse between Detroit and Los Angeles. Even just that name—Rush Hour—it unfolds so much, both into time and space, it becomes really fun to unpack. It’s this metric of time that’s completely dependent on the space, structure, and design of the city. Of course, it refers to traffic, traffic means highways, and a map starts to form from that. I think when working with citation, that sort of Matryoshka doll mechanism is really important, you’re creating a sort of potential energy where every on-screen interaction becomes implicated into this choose-your-own-adventure structure. Even if there isn’t a link, the reader can leave the page, get more information to add to the narrative, and then return to splice the new info into the work.

I think that specific text and image—you titled it Palmyra—speaks a lot towards the Classic Selena project. You’re doing the nesting thing, you’re writing about the making of names while discussing the technologies we use to read and write, and you have to click on this painting that mixes City Girls lyrics with a photoshopped hybrid of Veeze and Justin Timberlake to get to the text. There’s also a video embedded into the background of the page and the site doesn’t exactly make reading easy. What were your main ideas going into this rollout? 

Honestly a lot of that stuff about Rush Hour comes back in a different way—it’s a different sort of traffic, but it’s the thought about how time and place are shaped, and the kinds of readings that can be designed. Naturally, a lot of thought went into the interplay between the physical and the virtual and how commodification has factored into that. I’ve got a romantic attachment to the mixtape as an outmoded form and there’s certain recent releases coming out of Atlanta like Tony Shhnow and 10K Dunkin’s RP’s and Plan B’s 2 that are really made in that ethos. They’ve got skits and Hoodrich Keem tags—and even Carti got the DJ Swamp Izzo tags on Evil Jordan—but the main reason mixtapes sold to begin with was their utility and relation to the local. I think the fact that [Detroit’s] TF Entertainment has releases floating around on eBay that are dated up until 2017 is pretty incredible. Even [Milwaukee rapper] SME Taxfree has a tape called Cartier Muzik 2 that came out in 2017 and is on the internet, but it implies that there’s a “Cartier Muzik'.' I’ve only ever been able to find one track off of it, but there are almost certainly still CDs scattered around Milwaukee with it. Same shit with how DJ Nate lost his archive but you could probably reconstitute it if you had access to every burned CD gathering dust in storage in Chicago. 

So I would say this romanticism was the strongest undercurrent, but I’d been running into this problem of form, with utility and with the digital and the inevitable outmoding that happens. To create and scatter a physical form felt essential and I settled on the paintings as this set of fragments that could be separated, dispersed, and fetishized. I guess that last part comes back to recursion, where the dispersion of the work shapes the work itself, and a loop forms, it keeps rerocking. And it both is and isn’t a different type of work being rerocked than what you’ll hear on most mixtapes. 

Classic Selena - VVS Lemonade is available on Nina and at classicselena.com.