I
ad-libs—I used to trap by the Subway.
Simple, autobiographical. I always laugh
when I hear it. So e≠ective. And yet also just
slightly whimsical. That’s Migos for you.
They go forward by stripping away all the
things they don’t need. (Also Quavo, earlier
in that same song: “When I’m onstage, show
me boobies!”) Atlanta is the most innovative
city in America, pop-music-wise. And Migos,
who are from the city’s north side—the
first major group to come out of Gwinnett
County, which is largely suburban, like a lot
of Atlanta—have been among the city’s most
innovative artists for the past three or four
or even five years. They’ve done this without
making a big show of it; their music is buoy-
ant and funny and skillfully direct. They do
a lot with comparatively little. They give you
energy and make it look easy.
“Hell yeah,” Quavo says, hanging up his
phone, his date having agreed to join him
for Criss Angel’s act. “I’m trying to see
some crazy shit.”
Mike Tyson lives these days on some dark
scrubland southeast of Vegas, past a cou-
ple of gates and a security guard. The Strip
stands tall in the desert distance. Someone
boards our van in order to remind Migos
that Tyson is sober and they should refrain
from smoking weed around him. O≠set looks
down at the blunt in his hand and nods.
The three Migos sit silently for a while and
then start talking about the reduced state
of Tyson’s menagerie. What it had (big cats)
and what it has (pigeons). “The first man I
seen with a tiger,” Quavo says.
Quavo says he’s thinking about getting a
tiger of his own, in that idle way people say
things they have no intention of doing. He
says he relates to Tyson—not exactly the
prison-era Tyson, but the scarred, fragile,
latter-day Tyson, who reads like an open
book that can’t shut itself: “It’s beyond box-
ing. I really feel like he a great guy.” Quavo
says people were too intimidated by Tyson
in his prime to let him open up and be him-
self. They didn’t give him a chance. He never
really got to enjoy what he had.
O≠set looks out the window and reflects on
how this is what success looks like: a house
behind a gate behind another gate. “You see
how special it is now, that we went No. 1?”
he asks. “Most people don’t make it to a sec-
ond album. There’s people out now, right
now, older rappers, older artists, they ain’t
even made it to they second album. They ain’t
doing shit.”
O≠set, 25, and Takeo≠, 22, nod in agree-
ment. Like Quavo, Takeo≠ is wearing John
Lennon sunglasses. His purse is by Fendi
and is currently supporting the weight of a
wholesale-size box of Gushers, from which
he methodically eats bag after bag in a way
that makes my teeth hurt just watching him.
Quavo, born Quavious Keyate Marshall,
and Takeo≠, born Kirshnik Khari Ball,are
uncle and nephew. They have the same deli-
cate skin, interrupted here and there around
their eyes by small tattoos. Quavo carries
himself with the easy confidence of a former
high school quarterback, which he is. Takeo≠,
whose face is rounder and softer, tends to
keep his eyes perpetually half closed, like
the Buddha. They open and shut in big, slow
cartoon blinks. His vibe is: kind astronaut.
O≠set, in the corner, is a cousin who lived in
Quavo’s mother’s house for a time. He was
born Kiari Kendrell Cephus. His goatee is
righteous. Right now his plaid pants are sag-
ging dangerously low toward his furry Gucci
slippers. They are literally being dragged
down by all the money in his pockets.
Quavo’s phone rings. “What’re you doing
tonight?” he asks the woman on the other
end. “I’m gonna go to this magic show,” he
says. He says they’re all going—he’s got ten
Criss Angel tickets. He asks if she maybe
wants to come.
This is the second day I’ve spent with
Migos, crisscrossing Las Vegas, and I can
testify that I’ve rarely seen anyone as excited
as Quavo got when our car window passed
the giant moody visage of Criss Angel on a
billboard. He was on the phone with their
manager, Danny, within seconds.
“Danny, can you see if Criss Angel got a
show tonight?”
“What?!” Danny said.
“CAN YOU SEE IF CRISS ANGEL THE
MAGIC MAN HAS A SHOW TONIGHT?”
Now Danny has come through. Quavo has
already warned everyone, despite the group’s
nonchalant tendency to do everything three
to five hours after it’s supposed to be done,
that he will tolerate no delays tonight when
it comes to seeing Criss Angel. This is a qual-
ity I have come to really like about Migos in
the short time I’ve known them: They are
genuine enthusiasts. Despite its occasional
dark or melancholy edge, their music gives
you the sense of people who are prone to
getting excited. Because, it turns out, they
are prone to getting excited.
I think a lot about one of Quavo’s lines on
“Bad and Boujee”: Yeah, that way! he says—
”that way,” one of the group’s many signature
They’ve had a song, “Bad and Boujee,”
at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 ever
since Donald Glover, who cast them on
Atlanta last year as woods-dwelling,
most-dangerous-game-playing drug dealers,
paid homage to them at the Golden Globes: “I
really wanna thank the Migos—not for being
in the show, but for making ‘Bad and Boujee.’
Like, that’s the best song ever.” Now they are
in that strange dreamlike state of success
where every morning the three of them wake
up and something like “Tour Mike Tyson’s
pigeon coop” is on the schedule.
Quavo, 26, keeps a carefully updated
calendar on his phone that is full of this
stu≠: Private-jet flights, photo shoots,
tour dates, appearances on late-night talk
shows. Pigeon coops. He fishes his phone
out of his Louis Vuitton purse, heavy with
rubber-banded stacks of money, just to
show me the calendar. “People want to
know where I’m going, and I just don’t ever
know,” he says. “I got tired of that”—wonder-
ing what city he was in. “It got too rapid.”
In the glittering twilight south
of Las Vegas, the clouds look
like dark mountains, and the
mountains look like clouds.
Migos—three guys from
Atlanta jammed shoulder to
shoulder in the back seat of a
Sprinter, like kid brothers—
are on their way to Mike
Tyson’s house. In January,
their second album, Culture,
came out and went to No. 1.
Their music is buoyant and funny
and skillfully direct. they give you
energy and make it look easy.
106-GQ-MAY-2017
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