On the drive to Norfolk, Luger pointed out some houses on the water with little boat docks. He’s got one of those now — five rooms, enough for him and his girlfriend and his two daughters. (The desktop image on his iPad is a picture of the younger one, in baby Ray-Bans, drinking a bottle, cool as hell.) He’s got a little dock, too.

We pulled up to Jay (Jaydaman) Coston’s place, a one-story house in Norfolk, shutters drawn, A.D.T. security sign on a spike in the lawn. Coston, along with his sister, Amy Lockhart, manage VABP, short for Virginia Boyz Productionz, the rap group Lex founded with a couple of his friends from high school a few years back. Lex made a lot of his most famous beats in the shed behind Coston’s house. To get to the shed, you have to traverse a mud puddle on a couple of swaybacked two-by-fours. Once we were inside, I realized I’d seen this room before, in an amazing YouTube clip called “Lex Luger Secret Formula for Making Beats,” in which Lex sits in a crappy office chair in a cluttered room that looks like a college-radio studio and bangs out a completed track in about 11 minutes.

As it happened, we were on the Internet at that very moment. Coston — a big guy in his early 30s — was doing a live Ustream broadcast. I hoped that Lex would jump on the laptop and that I’d get to watch him make a beat right there, but this was just a social call. Everybody crowded around the webcam for a minute — I caught a glimpse of myself in the background and slinked self-consciously out of frame — and then another blunt was sparked, and Lex and his crew smoked away another chunk of the afternoon.

I took notes on the décor. Shapeless couch cushions. Prison-oatmeal carpeting. Empty Ciroc vodka bottles — VABP have a song called “Ciroc Boyz” — assembled shrinelike on a shelf. There was a Dirt Devil vacuum in the corner, but it didn’t look as if it got a lot of use; if it’s possible for a home appliance to look depressed, this one did.

Then, with Jay driving the Expedition, we were off to Virginia Beach Boulevard, to this car shop Lex frequents, where we stared like chin-stroking art-gallery types at some really beautiful old “box Chevys” — square-bodied ’70s Caprices, painstakingly pimped, their trunks full of bass-cannon stereo equipment, their paint jobs rain-beaded like a Photoshop texture-tool demo. Lex went inside the rim shop next door to goggle at enormous chrome hubcaps, and I stood in the parking lot looking at the cars and thinking about lowrider culture making its way from Southwestern pachucos and L.A. hot rodders in the ’50s all the way to black Virginia in 2011, and the idea of workaday vehicles being transformed into one-of-a-kind objects by craftsmen creating within a set of very specific parameters and sold to guys who just want to drive around looking cool, and about the kind of music Luger makes, and how it’s like a factory-direct car customized in a way that doesn’t make sense as art to people who can’t perceive the subtle interplay of formula and flourish.

Some aspiring Jeff Foxworthy stopped at the light in a subcompact held together by what looked like masking tape. He took in this group of young, heavily tattooed African-Americans on the sidewalk and yelled, “Y’all got a gang or somethin’?” Everybody laughed; one of the car-shop guys gave him the finger as he drove off.

By nightfall Lex and Black and most of the other members of VABP were back in Suffolk, hanging out in the immaculate living room — vacuum tracks in velvety red carpeting — of Amy Lockhart’s house. They drank Alizé cognac in plastic cups, along with “dirty Sprite.” (Recipe: combine vodka and Sprite in half-empty Sprite bottle, serve.) Amy is a registered nurse who works for the Navy in Portsmouth, taking care of military families. Her son, a tall guy with shoulder-length dreads who goes by the rap name Kapital, was one of the kids trooping over to Lex’s house to record raps back in the day. Once VABP coalesced as a group and Amy found out how serious they were, found out they’d already laid a hundred songs to tape over Lex’s beats, she agreed to become their manager.