Jermaine Dupri‘s weekly visits to Atlanta strip club Magic City kept the venue in business.
The So So Def founder was a guest on the July 10 episode of podcast Joe and Jada to promote his five-part Starz docuseries, Magic City: An American Fantasy, about the famed strip club. Dupri also reflected on his Magic City drop-ins and how much cash he spent on the dancers.
Around the 13-minute mark of the video below, Dupri named his favorite Magic City dancers, including his “number one” pick, Whyte Chocolate. The producer added that he “spent $10,000 every Monday for 20 years” in the nightclub.
Dupri’s confession led to co-host Fat Joe admitting that after dropping his 2006 single “Make It Rain,” he didn’t go to the strip club for three years “until it got played out.”
Dupri, who mentioned his Monday night strip club visits on “Welcome to Atlanta,” dubbed Magic City the “hip-hop adult Cirque du Soleil” in a 2019 Atlanta Magazine article.
“I used to throw the money up to the ceiling and let it shower the girls,” Dupri said at the time. “So, what other people are doing now, I used to do it specifically just to hit the ceiling because then the money would just splatter everywhere.”
He continued, “I threw up a thousand dollars; the ceiling would make it fly all over the room. The money would stick to the ceiling, and the girls would stand with their feet on the couch and get their money back. I started that.”
Five years later, Dupri would say on The Estelle Show that the ‘make it rain’ motion originated from his “Money Ain’t a Thing” music video with Jay-Z.
“Talib Kweli talks about the first time that he ever came to Atlanta,” Dupri said, according to Vibe. “He went to Magic City with me and Janet [Jackson]. They’re throwing the money in the air and people seeing that, ‘Make it rain.’
He continued, “I actually was the person who created this because I did this first in [the] ‘Money Ain’t A Thing’ video. Me and Jay-Z are in the car throwing money throughout the whole video. That became my thing with that song, that became my thing going into these strip clubs.”
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