Donald Glover’s 2014 Childish Gambino mixtape, STN MTN, begins with a dream that he runs Atlanta. But when Glover opened for OutKast at their big homecoming show that same year, you could tell there was a divide within the crowd: There were those who seemed to recognize him from TV, and those who clearly had no idea who he was. The following year, when FX picked up Glover’s surreal, rap-driven dramedy named simply “Atlanta,” there was some wariness from those in the local hip-hop community. Though Glover grew up in the Atlanta suburb of Stone Mountain, you could say there’s a sensitivity among natives about rarely being in control of the larger narrative surrounding their city.

The specific world “Atlanta” depicts is a source of fascination that no one seems to get quite right. The booming musical economy around Atlanta strip clubs has been treated as some new phenomenon by the national press. People outside the city still debate over whether André 3000 or Big Boi was OutKast’s better rapper, missing the larger point and beauty of the duo’s existence: In Atlanta, they can peacefully coexist at Blue Flame, one of the go-to strip clubs. And no documentary has captured how 2 Chainz and Killer Mike grew up navigating the same hip-hop chitlin circuit together, probably because that would require a regional expertise.

Fortunately, at least for those who’ve helped mold the city’s hip-hop image, “Atlanta” felt like a reclamation. At the same time, many pointed out to me that the series, which returns March 1 for its second season, complicated their own notions of what a TV show about Atlanta rap could look and feel like.

Whether it’s “Empire,” “Nashville,” or Straight Outta Compton, Hollywood often treats the record industry as means for a soap opera, with climactic musical numbers signaling our heroes’ redemption by commercial success. By contrast, “Atlanta” centers around Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry), who raps under the moniker Paper Boi , his college dropout cousin-turned-manager Earn (Glover), and their mostly futile efforts to build lasting success off one local hit. The slow-going, aimless nature of Paper Boi’s early career is precisely what makes the series “the most realistic portrayal of the Atlanta music scene” to date, says Nick Love, whose work as a marketing impresario helped usher in the city’s modern trap era.

Admittedly, Love worked on “Atlanta,” helping music supervisor Jen Malone secure independent songs for select episodes. Between him and Dee Dee Hibbler, who authorized film permits for the new season in nearby DeKalb County, Georgia, two generations of Atlanta hip-hop are represented behind the scenes: Hibbler was the general manager for Organized Noize, the legendary production team closely associated with OutKast, and Love was the vice president of marketing for Jeezy’s CTE World during pivotal releases like Trap or Die before co-founding the influential strip-club-DJ conglomerate Coalition DJs. It was in these roles that they watched clients scrape money together to share a single pizza, if not front the cash themselves.

“There were days in the very beginning working with Big and Dre when nobody had cars, nobody had money, and nobody knew who they were,” Hibbler says. “Five of us would pile up in one car to go to interviews. When we did our first showcase, L.A. [Reid] turned OutKast down. He was like, ‘Uh, we don’t do rap at LaFace Records’ [eventually Reid signed OutKast to LaFace]. So I can really relate to those moments in season one where they try to connect the dots and introduce Paper Boi to the world, even some of those defeating moments.”