"It's a trip to see that the music we created back then is still dominant," he muses later in a photo studio overlooking the Magic City strip club, where the walls are covered in glossy Peewee Longway photos and a stately oil painting of 21 Savage in the style of Our Lady of Sorrows. "But I think the reason why I'm I'm still tied into what's going on is: all these new guys come from the music me and Gucci created way back then. They're adding their own little flavor to it, but it stems from the same thing. I get it—I understand why the kids like them so much. Like, Gucci, he couldn't stay on beat; some of the words, you don't really know what he talking about. And that's what they doing now."

Like his 18th-century namesake, Zaytoven was born in Germany—Frankfurt, specifically, where his father was stationed in the Army. He remembers little from that era, and his family moved constantly. After Frankfurt, they went to Mississippi, then the Bay Area, then finally landing in Atlanta. Zay's father was also a preacher, and his mother a choir director, so he and his siblings spent a lot of time in churches, looking for ways to entertain themselves. Around age six he started dabbling with the drums, then moved on to the organ and keyboard. "My parents tried to put me in lessons when I was real young, but I quit after two weeks," he admits. "It was an old lady that was teaching me at her house—an old, mean lady, and if I didn't hold my fingers right, she would take a pencil and pop each finger. So I was like, 'I ain't gonna do that no more,' and just started learning by ear."