Monique Williams is a business entrepreneur and ordained minister who recently contemplated a mayoral run in the Texas city where she lives before deciding against it.
“I feel like when you get into politics, you kind of get exposed,” said Williams, 48. “Not that I have any skeletons. Clearly, I don’t. I was in ‘Tip Drill.’”
That 2003 music video from the rapper Nelly was a staple of BET’s “Uncut,” the late-night show featuring clips deemed too risqué for daytime. Williams was then better known by her stage name, Whyte Chocolate, and was seen in the video’s most notorious scene. That’s when Nelly swipes a credit card between Williams’s buttocks, feigning as though the exotic dancer’s posterior was a literal cash dispenser.
The moment helped define an era of hip-hop excess as the genre reached new commercial heights. And it’s no coincidence that Williams was at the center of it. Before she broke though onscreen, she broke through onstage at Magic City, the Atlanta strip club that became a sort of cultural cathedral where movers and shakers congregated as dancers gyrated.
As the balance of power in hip-hop shifted to the South, the club was a crucial location, a phenomenon that’s examined in “Magic City: An American Fantasy.” A five-episode docuseries currently airing on Starz, it relays Magic City’s standing as a vital hub and the launchpad for dancers and hip-hop artists across its four-decade existence. Athletes like Shaquille O’Neal discuss spending thousands of dollars a night at the club, and hip-hop icons like Drake (an executive producer) detail the importance of getting their music played by the club’s D.J.s-turned-tastemakers.
Cole Brown, the docuseries’s creator and an executive producer, knew that he could not tell the club’s story without Williams’s input and the music video that initiated such heated debate.
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The post This Strip Club Was Central to Southern Hip-Hop. And a Notorious Video. appeared first on New York Times.
