Photograph by Philip Montgomery for The New Yorker Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.

Seven hundred turkeys, two rappers, and an intermediate number of onlookers had assembled in the parking lot of a Kroger supermarket on Cleveland Avenue, on the scrappy south side of Atlanta. The rappers were Quavo and Takeoff, two of the three members of Migos, the dominant hip-hop group of the moment—known for exuberant, off-kilter tracks, like “Bad and Boujee,” that seem to consist of nothing but interjections. It was the Friday before Thanksgiving, and the two were standing in the back of a U-Haul truck, facing a growing crowd of people who wanted turkeys or pictures or both. Takeoff grabbed a carton and opened it. “We shipping them boxes out,” he barked—Migos can turn just about any handful of words into a memorable refrain.

The turkey supply had already begun to dwindle when one of the event’s organizers arrived, pulling up in an elegant but inconspicuous Range Rover. His name is Kevin Lee, but everyone calls him Coach K, and, in the world of hip-hop, he may be better known than the Duke basketball impresario from whom he took his nickname. In the aughts, Lee managed two of the city’s most important rappers—Young Jeezy and then, a few years later, Gucci Mane—undaunted by the fact that the men had engaged in a bitter and apparently bloody feud. Nowadays, he is both a manager and a record executive, guiding the careers of Migos and a clutch of other young hip-hop stars, including Lil Yachty, who is twenty and calls himself the King of the Youth. Lee is forty-six, an age that offers some advantages of its own. “With this gray beard, I’m a O.G.,” he says. “When I say something, they listen—like, ‘Oh, the O.G. must have been through it.’ ” But he prides himself on being open to whatever musical mania is currently seizing the young people who tend to be his clients, and his customers. “When I visit my friends, I sit with their kids, and we talk about music,” he says. “And my friends be like, ‘How the hell do you understand that shit?’ I’m like, ‘This is what I love, and this is what I do.’ ”

Lee is a former college basketball player, and he walks with a strut that turns out, on closer inspection, to be a limp, the lingering effect of an incident that ended his athletic career. He says that he was visiting some friends, who happened to be drug dealers, when they were raided—not by the police but by rivals with shotguns, who strafed Lee’s leg so thoroughly that he spent a year relearning how to walk. He is, in person, every bit as watchful as one might expect a hip-hop godfather to be, but a good deal friendlier. In Atlanta, his adopted home town, he seems to know and like everyone he comes across.

When Lee turned into the parking lot, he was met at once by an acquaintance who was, like countless young people in the city, an aspiring musician. “I D.M.’d you a song,” she said. “Now I caught you in real life. I’ma keep D.M.’ing you until you get tired of me.” Lee responded with a warm but noncommittal smile, and asked where he should put his car—the crowd was filling up all of the closest parking spaces. She laughed and gestured toward a tow-away zone in front of the supermarket. “This Cleveland Ave.,” she said. “You ain’t got to park right.”

The location of the turkey giveaway had been moved twice that afternoon, from a school to a day-care center to this parking lot, because no one was eager to contend with the crowds that would be sure to come. Between the popularity of Migos and the popularity of free turkeys, no advance notice was required, and, if some unsuspecting shoppers were surprised to be offered a turkey, none of them seemed particularly shocked by the sight of Quavo and Takeoff holding court in a U-Haul. Atlanta is the hip-hop capital of the world, which means that it is full of worldwide stars who are also—and perhaps primarily—neighborhood guys. Quavo, who is twenty-six, grew up in Gwinnett County, northeast of the city, with Takeoff, who is twenty-three, and who is Quavo’s nephew. The third member, Offset, is twenty-five, and he is Quavo’s cousin, although he may be better known, these days, as the fiancé of Cardi B, who this year became the first reality-television star to find a place on hip-hop’s A-list. Her show was “Love & Hip Hop: New York,” on VH1; her breakthrough hit was “Bodak Yellow,” which owned the summer. Offset’s proposal was made, and accepted, onstage during a concert in October. Their wedding hasn’t yet been scheduled. “Everybody’s calling about it,” Lee says. “I think maybe we should shoot a movie, put it out on Valentine’s Day. I mean, ‘Girls Trip’ just did thirty million in one weekend.”

Offset never made it to the Kroger parking lot, but none of the attendees were complaining, especially not the ones staggering away beneath the weight of their free turkeys. Lee waded into the crowd and greeted his business partner, Pierre Thomas, known as Pee, who is a decade younger, and noticeably more cautious around people he doesn’t know. Thomas is relatively new to the music industry, having evidently been successful in his first career, which he declines to discuss. “He come from the streets,” Lee says, by way of explaining why neither of them will explain more. Unlike Lee, who grew up in Indianapolis, Thomas is from Atlanta, and, when the two began working with Migos, Thomas’s local reputation was a great asset—he was known to the proprietors of the city’s clubs as a generous patron, and an unusually well-connected one. “It all came together,” Lee says. “My skills, his credibility.”

Lee and Thomas launched their company in 2013. Its name, Quality Control, reflects the different sensibilities of its founders: Thomas wanted something starting with “Q,” to honor a friend of his who had been shot to death; Lee was inspired by a tag on the pocket of his designer jeans. For a time, their base of operations was a small, freestanding brick building up the street from the Kroger, which they turned into a bunker-like music studio. “Bricked up all the windows, because the music game dangerous,” Thomas says. The studio was in a residential area, and some of the neighbors resented the constant traffic and the occasional altercations; not long after a bullet shattered the window of a nearby house, Quality Control was forced to move. The company’s new headquarters is a purpose-built suite of offices and recording studios, tucked into an industrial corner of a burgeoning neighborhood near midtown. Lee drove there after the giveaway, which he judged a success, not least because it reflected the same unpolished quality that he prizes in music. A friend called, and Lee described what had happened, sounding exuberant. “We did it in the hood, man,” he said.

In the course of Lee’s career, and in some significant part because of it, Atlanta has gone from being a regional music hub to hip-hop’s cultural home, the city that sets the musical agenda for the rest of the country. But, compared with Nashville, which hosts both the lucrative country-music industry and a thriving country-tourism industry, Atlanta is much less corporate. The hip-hop scene remains stubbornly decentralized; there is a profusion of great rappers and producers, but little in the way of major institutions, unless you count the city’s strip clubs, as you probably should. The big companies remain, for the most part, in New York and Los Angeles. “There are no labels here—no major labels,” Lee says. With Quality Control, he is trying to change that. The company has a full-time staff of eight, and operates as a joint venture with the Capitol Music Group, which is part of Universal; the label’s artists include Stefflon Don, a British vocalist who recently scored her first Top Ten U.K. hit. Lee and Thomas also run a management firm, Solid Foundation, which represents clients such as Trippie Redd, a rising hip-hop star. The firm is also aiming to move its clients into television and film—Lee sees no reason that Lil Yachty should not have his own sitcom.