15 minute read
Collective Genius
COLLECTIVE
GENIUS
EarthGang and JID don’t match common perceptions of Atlanta rappers. But as the city that’s transformed hip-hop continues to evolve, these performers are ready to make a statement about the soul of Atlanta.
Words MAURICE G. GARLAND Photography CAM KIRK
EarthGang (left) and JID (above) are old friends who together formed the Spillage Village collective.
Cold air conditioning is a welcome guest at Cam Kirk Studios when it is hot-ashell o’clock in the afternoon in the heart of Atlanta. While it isn’t the busiest area downtown, it is still easy to get caught up here, as you are literally at the intersection of arrival time, a good time and hard time.
The entrance to the brick building the studio calls home is steps away from a Greyhound station where nomads loitering outside will ask you for loose change, food, a phone charger or depending on the time of day, all three. The tall windows of the studio offer a bird’s-eye view of the legendary Magic City strip club that has now added “kitchen” to its name; the food offerings gained popularity when hometown favorite and NBA basketball player Lou Williams risked it all breaking COVID protocols in the 2020 “bubble” to stop by the notorious breast-and-thigh showcase just to get a plate of wings. The backside of the building sits in the shadows of the Atlanta Detention Center (or as the locals call it: “the jail”), which in case you’re wondering currently has a 2.4-star average on Google Reviews, with the most recent comment saying “would not recommend.” Knowing that, this isn’t necessarily a corner that you want to get lost at, literally or figuratively.
But once you’re inside the building, it’s not difficult to find the actual studio. You can either follow the sound of music that spurts out every time the doors swing open, or you can secretly trail the first 20-something-year-old you see wearing something designed by Kanye, Virgil or Travis onto the elevator to the fourth floor. The walls of the studio are decorated with crisp, high-contrast photos of the studio’s long list of clientele, which consists mostly of Atlanta rappers who have defined the sound of rap (and by default, pop) music for at least the last seven years. Migos, Gucci Mane, Lil Baby, Young Thug, 2 Chainz and 21 Savage are among the many featured.
WowGr8 (left) and Olu formed EarthGang in 2008, while both of them were still in high school.
JID, who was photographed in Cam Kirk’s studio on September 2, got his moniker from his grandmother, who riffed on his jittery behavior as a kid.
EarthGang, who were shot in Atlanta on August 2, earned a Grammy nomination in 2020 for Best Rap Performance and another in 2021 for Best R&B Song.
Today’s talent, however, who has also achieved a decent amount of notoriety, has noticed his own portrait is nowhere to be found. “When you gonna put me on one of these walls bro,” asks JID jokingly, but equally puzzled, as he greets the studio’s owner and namesake.
“Soon—we’re going to change that today,” Kirk replies, laughing at the entourage of weed aroma that has followed JID into the space.
The omission, as unintentional as it might be, does speak to the Atlanta rap scene’s representation at large. JID is a part of the Spillage Village collective, which includes friends and Dreamville labelmates WowGr8 and Olu of EarthGang. While the three of them have Grammy nominations and passport stamps congruent to most of the faces on the wall and the photographer who put them there, they aren’t always the first, nor most mentioned when it comes to the city’s current wave of rap artists. Each of them expect that to change with their new albums—EarthGang’s Ghetto Gods and JID’s The Forever Story— dropping at different points this year.
“A lot of people, if they weren’t real fans of us like that, they wouldn’t even know we was from Atlanta,” says Olu, who along with WowGr8 graduated from Atlanta’s storied Benjamin E. Mays high school, which was also attended by all four members of legendary Southern Hip-Hop group Goodie Mob. “Because we may not look like the typical Atlanta artist that is portrayed in the media.”
In this case, “typical” has a colorful gray area since just about every Atlanta rapper, trap or not, shares either similar accents, hairstyles, fashion tastes or that lingering desire to prove “the South got something to say.” But much like how reality television show producers bypass the city’s rich heritage of Black accomplishments in the realms of business, politics, real estate, higher education, medicine and technology in favor of drink-throwing drama, much music coverage of Atlanta tends to spend most of its time exploring the trap genre, while almost completely ignoring anything outside of it. Which wasn’t always the case.
Before the rapper and producer T.I. branded it, “trap music” or anything street (Hitman Sammy Sam, Ghetto
“I AM TRYING TO GROW IT AND KEEP IT FRESH AND PROVE MY FANS RIGHT,” SAYS JID ABOUT HIS NEW ALBUM.
JID has collaborated with such talents as Method Man, J. Cole, Joey Bada$$, Hollywood JB and all the artists in Spillage Village.
Spillage Village was formed in 2010, when the members of EarthGang and JID were all going to Hampton University in Virginia.
Mafia) pretty much lived up to its title and stayed confined in a specific set of neighborhood borders, while combinations of positive (Arrested Development), player (Outkast) and party (Ludacris) music were what made it to Rap City and thus other cities in the process. But in the age of the internet, where more information and tools became accessible—and did so at a time when Atlanta was rapidly becoming number one in income inequality in the United States—all that was considered underground or lowly found a way in and eventually to the top of the charts.
“I know niggas like them, who are my friends,” says JID. “Their stories are real and representative of what I grew up seeing and admiring about my city. It’s real and authentic. Their stories will always be important and need to be told. I support that shit 100 percent.”
Olu agrees. “I’m from Atlanta, and if niggas from there don’t listen, it matter to me,” he says. “If we’re not making music that don’t someway connect to them, we’re not doing it right.”
WowGr8 has a perspective that has a hint of cynicism. “As much as I’m a product of the city, I’m a product of the internet,” he says. “You can’t tell me you like different styles of clothes but not different styles of music.”
Which is why with Ghetto Gods, EarthGang is intentionally going in a different direction from their 2019 breakthrough effort, Mirrorland. COVID is not being credited as an executive producer, but it did influence how the album was created. Between quarantine and live shows coming to a screeching halt, EarthGang couldn’t tour. This gave them an opportunity to lock in at home and reconnect with the energy that had fueled the early part of their career.
“Recording while traveling, you learn about the world but you learn a lot about yourself,” says Olu, admitting that the duo had not recorded a project in Atlanta exclusively since signing to J. Cole’s Dreamville in 2017. “It was like showing a reflection of everything you saw in the world and the cultures you experienced.”
But he also brings up a comparison that frequent collaborator and fellow Spillage Village producer Hollywood JB suggested to him. “He said with Ghetto Gods, it feels like we understood the assignment and did what needed to be done,” Olu says. “But with Mirrorland, we were all over the place. It was so dense, but sometimes you need shit like that. Something you can listen to for 10 years and still find something.”
Most if not all of the guest features on Ghetto Gods are fellow Atlanta artists—ranging from Yung Baby Tate to CeeLo Green—while the producers include platinum prodigies such as JetsonMade and local-legend progeny like Big Korey of Oomp Camp Productions. Pretty much, this album is EarthGang’s version of clicking their heels and saying “there’s no place like home.”
“Mirrorland was like ‘Atlanta: The Musical,’ a Broadway show,” says WowGr8. “Ghetto Gods is the movie, the reality show.”
“We just wanted [this album] to sound like Atlanta,” says Olu about EarthGang’s newest project, Ghetto Gods.
It’s a few weeks before JID’s visit, and when WowGr8 and Olu arrive at Cam Kirk Studios, they are too tired to be concerned about the pictures on the wall or why they aren’t in any of them. The question they have is simply “What are we doing here today?” To be fair, the photo shoot for this cover story is sandwiched between the Lollapalooza festival they performed at in Chicago the day before and the Gorillaz show they were booked to be at in London the following day. So yeah, they are probably just looking at calendar invites at this point.
With suitcases in tow, there’s a good chance that neither one of them is going to get to spend any real time at home to enjoy simple pleasures like cooking a meal, chilling with family or washing clothes. Which is why Olu is pondering just picking up some new clothes at Lenox Mall on the way to the airport and WowGr8 is negotiating a deal with stylist Daryl Mapp to buy the leopard-print Saint Laurent shirt he’s having a hard time parting with.
The situation is a familiar one given that both EarthGang and JID have essentially lived on the road since they went on their first tour in 2014, opening up for Ab-Soul. From there they would build reputations for being electric performers as they were each featured on tours with Mac Miller, Bas and J. Cole while also co-headlining their own Never Had Shit Tour.
“Ever since I’ve been on tour, I haven’t written a song without thinking about performing it,” says WowGr8, who also says he actually stopped writing altogether recently, citing how wordy lyricism should take a back seat to clarity that listeners can feel and understand. “Some people get so caught up in the sport of it, trying to show they can hit the most backflips. That’s cool, but to a crowd of people? No one is going to remember that.”
Although it’s worth noting that the one exception is actually in his crew. JID, who is known for microphone acrobatics and at times pausing after performing songs to catch his own breath, once almost made a stage and ceiling cave in during a show at Ithaca College in 2019. Surely, someone remembered that.
“I have one last personal goal to achieve as an artist,” WowGr8 continues. “Arena tour. I don’t feel like I have to beat the sales game or
JID, who says Sly Stone is his all-time favorite artist, was nominated for a Grammy in 2020 for Best Rap Performance.
EARTHGANG AND JID AIM TO TAKE ATLANTA WITH THEM AS THEY HIT THE ROAD.
streaming game, I have to beat the touring game. We just started headlining tours in 2019, so we should start doing amphitheaters next year and the arenas after that.”
That goal doesn’t seem beyond their grasp considering that EarthGang has a strong enough reach to do shows at the bottom of the planet during the height of a global pandemic. In December 2020, the duo damn near went viral when images of them performing for a maskless crowd surfaced on Instagram. Some fans left comments asking if the pictures were a photo dump of past years, while others accused them of being reckless. What they were seeing was EarthGang performing for crowds of 7,000 to 15,000 people over the span of three days, outside in New Zealand, which at the time was the safest country in the world, with zero positive COVID cases. The show was originally booked in 2019 for the following year, but we all know how that worked out.
“I’m playing Globally Monopoly, I keep trying to tell y’all,” their manager, Barry Johnson, bragged in the captions of one of his posts showing the concert. “EarthGang is the only hiphop act in America doing festival dates currently I’m pretty sure!”
At that time, it was true. Especially considering the dates were between December 31 and January 5. Meaning that EarthGang flew into New Zealand two weeks prior to quarantine before doing the shows, sacrificing spending the holidays with family and in WowGr8’s case missing Christmas with his 3-year old son.
“Missing Christmas is a big deal,” admits WowGr8, who is pretty open about how he is the primary caretaker of his child. “But coming back with a bunch of money is also a big deal.” A bunch of money and how one spends it is now the topic of discussion in JID’s dressing room. The artist, who opted out of a shave from the shoot’s hired barber and brought some of his own clothes because “I stay camera ready” has pulled out a delicate, vintage Sly Stone T-shirt he has packed in his Louis Vuitton duffle bag. He’s justifying spending $800 on it (the shirt, not the bag) because one, that’s his favorite artist, two, he’s never seen his face on a shirt before and three, because he “wears the hell out of it all the time,” including right now.
“Make sure you write that these pants are from the 1930s,” he says, inferring that the patchwork trousers he’s rocking today also cost a pretty penny. But at the same time, he’s trying to save a buck or two, asking stylist Kellye Mapp (Daryl’s partner), “Can I have these?” every time she pulls out a new pair of socks.
Bouncing around like that is a part of JID’s jittery personality. He talks in damn near the same cadence that he raps, short bursts with more words than you thought he could fit in there. But today, he doesn’t have many words to offer about his new album.
“I can’t tell you,” is one response when asked about specifics, and “It’s my favorite that I made so far” is what he says when asked about it in general.
“I’m just trying to grow it and keep it fresh and prove my fans right,” he says in one of the rare instances where he opens up about the new music on the album. “I want them to be able to brag on me like ‘this is a great body of work.’ That’s always the intense part, making something that someone never heard before.”
WowGr8 jokes that JID tends to overrap with the “Eminem disease,” but that sickness has helped him build a healthy mixed bag of features on songs from artists including Doja Cat, Dua Lipa, Conway the Machine, Denzel Curry, Free Nationals and even “up next” Atlanta rappers Grip and Kenny Mason. While he’s tightlipped about who will be on his The Forever Story album, he insists that the story is the product of an ensemble cast, because that’s the way it should be told.
“Music is communal,” he says. “You can’t just work by yourself and expect people to feel it. You need some outside feedback.”
EarthGang shares similar sentiments, revealing that a long list of artists including Andre 3000 and David Banner stopped by during the Ghetto Gods sessions, neither of whom are confirmed to actually appear on the album.
“I know a lot of niggas say you save money recording at home because you can wake up and create. That’s a beautiful thing,” says Olu. “But I love going to the studio. That’s like going to the gym to work out or going to the court to play ball. You get a lot of that energy that you can’t get being locked up at home in front of the computer. Even if you’re not making music, just being around the creative, that’s the real fun.”
Fun is something that both parties seem to be having as they, and the rest of the world, look forward to moving freely around the world again. But as EarthGang and JID start to return to their road lives, the hope is that they continue to take the city with them wherever they go, even if it doesn’t fit the rest of the world’s conception of Atlanta as the city changes by the minute.
“Really, being here for the past year helped me understand the world is coming here,” says Olu. “We gotta embrace that shit but keep our essence, too. There’s a connection between the stories we tell and the shit people see. Buildings have an expiration date; it’s about the spirits.”
Olu pauses and then continues. “We just wanted [this album] to sound like Atlanta,” he says. “Some stuff we do is so cerebral, which is cool and different. But niggas also need stuff they can’t stop looking at, too.”
Picture that, frame it and hang it.
