The thing Ludacris loves most about Atlanta
Ludacris wasn’t born in Atlanta, Georgia, but once he moved there as a teenager, it shaped his life and the successful music career that followed.
He ended up there as a high school student, having been born in Illinois before moving to Virginia for a spell and, finally, to Atlanta. There, he graduated from high school before beginning a course in music management at Georgia State University.
Luda later took an internship at an Atlanta radio station, which is where he met Timbaland and began his rap career, tapping into his long-term ambitions of making it in hip hop.
Ludacris may not have been born and bred in Atlanta, but it was certainly his home and an extremely important place in his musical development, and he remains a proud representative of the city.
In 2021, Luda sat down with his fellow Atlanta rapper Gunna, who incidentally attended the same high school as he once had, for a conversation on Rolling Stone’s ‘Musicians on Musicians’ series. They spoke about, among other things, their home city and what they liked best about it.
For Luda, it was about a sense of togetherness that artists from the city demonstrate, claiming that this trait is the envy of other cities like New York and Los Angeles, which, according to him, don’t quite have that same sense of camaraderie.
People in Atlanta, Luda said, “work together on businesses” and “inspire each other”, which he seemed to believe is a rare thing. It was something he treasured about his home city.
He argued that people in Atlanta came together in contemporary times more than they had done when he was living there and coming up as an aspiring rapper. “We were doing it at the time where there weren’t so many artists popping,” he insisted.
But nowadays, as he put it, there’s “a gang of them”. With a strong collection of artists coming out of Atlanta these days, Luda believes that “everybody’s working together more”, and that is precisely what he loves about the place.