EarthGang Saw Through the Algorithm to Create a ‘Perfect Fantasy’

Olu and WowGr8 began addressing their battle against the algorithm with 2023’s RIP Human Art, an EP that spoke on artificial intelligence gradually taking jobs from the world of the arts. Released in February, their second EarthGang Vs. The Algorithm project, Robophobia, addresses the actual mechanisms of the system. The two completed their series with Perfect Fantasy, a surrealistic album that dropped at the end of October. Unloaded on a Tuesday, its release date was designed as another way to buck a predatory system. Coated in disembodied harmonies and metaphysical songwriting, it’s the end of a saga that’s as ambitious as any they’ve told. Now, it’s time to look at how they put it together.

Speaking with Okayplayer, the Atlanta duo discusses the sound of Perfect Fantasy, seeing through the algorithm, working with Snoop Dogg and more.

Okayplayer: This is your second independent release after leaving Interscope. What made you two decide to go the independent route?

Olu: We decided to go independent just because we like being able to directly connect with our team rather than going through the red tape and getting lost in the shuffle. With major labels, it goes by how important they value you or your art to the bottom line. And once you get to certain levels like a Billie Eilish or The Weeknd, it’s like [they] take precedence. But for us when it comes to feeding our fan base, it's just way easier to do it and way faster to do it and way more effective to do it in our free way. Independent.

So with this series, Earthgang vs. the Algorithm, coming to an end, I have to ask: what about the algorithm are you two trying to beat?

Olu: We are constantly seeing where humanity fits in the midst of technology. Over the past four years, we've seen how this super emergence into technology has fully affected our lives to the point where niggas is getting married off of people they meet from their “For You” page. That's an algorithm that is matching people with people from different cities. So, we can't ignore the effects that it’s had in our lives. But then we gotta start looking at some of the effects that kind of just take away from the beauty of humanity. And sometimes it just happens. You see people get super distracted on the internet. I read this one article about this kid who committed suicide. He was talking to the AI version of [Daenerys Targaryen] from Game of Thrones. That's crazy.

WowGr8: He was 14 years old. He was born in 2010. He never stood a chance.

Olu: He never stood a chance. He’s been connected to some internet thing his whole life.

With you dropping an album on a Tuesday, you’re clearly bucking the algorithm. What’s it like trying to deal with the system on the business end of things?

WowGr8: The whole marketplace that we participate in is determined by a set of equations that we never consented to. So when you set out to sell your music, you say, “Okay, I'm going to do X, Y, Z, we'll make the music, I'm going to sell it.” When different generations were selling it physically, they said we had decided to get it made, get it manufactured and put it in a place where a person can go buy it. Just like any other product, once you take that product away and only leave it up to the equations, the same things are getting fed over and over again. There are ways to manipulate that a lot faster and a lot quieter, a lot more clandestine manipulation than we've ever seen in the game right now. And we have to fight that and compete with other artists and live our lives as human beings. It's an extra factor in the game.

That’s a lot of multitasking. But what’s interesting is the way technology has really taken over, sort of confirming conspiracy theories. If you two predicted the algorithm’s takeover coming years ago, do you feel vindicated now?

WowGr8: No. That's like saying we predicted the apocalypse and being like, ‘I told y'all we all going to hell.’ We’re all going to hell. I don't want to be right about that. It’s like how I feel about climate change. I feel like this is stuff that we've kind of known about or at least known the presence of since we were children and now everybody's like, ‘I told you, I told you!’ It's still hot in November. Now what? Okay, we was right. Now we’re right and hot and the polar bears are swimming.

Getting into the music, how did you two choose the sounds you wanted to use to evoke this kind of algorithmic atmosphere? It definitely sounds like a, “perfect fantasy.”

WowGr8: One big thing that was around this whole project since its inception about two years ago, was just [finding] what the future really sounds like and it's the future, just more and more of the same beats, more hard beats. Whenever things become trendy, then they're built for timestamps, but you kind of stay in that time period. So I think we wanted to not overdo it with ‘modern’ today. We wanted to go past modern take our guess at what's going to be next. Even in our lyricism, a lot of what we do is try to be a little prophetic with our music like The Simpsons, trying to predict where it's headed. So I feel like a song like “Deep Blue,” “Black Light.” These are like futuristic funk songs. We wanted to guess what would be next in terms of music reality.

Olu: I think it's just being present. Being in the present moment, a present awareness. A lot of the songs we making, we are looking for something that we haven't heard before. We are looking for something that piques our interest. We're looking for something that excites us, something that kind of just awakens us in the present moment and we hop on that and bring our whatever we got going on through life, we bring it through that right now.

If Perfect Fantasy were a soundtrack for an anime, which show would it be?

WowGr8: Damn, that's hard. I've been trying to [figure that out] this whole time, trying to see where it could go. That's hard. I would say maybe if they did a reboot of Cowboy Bebop, it could probably fit in that kind of space. There's some Inuyasha moments.

Olu: I would say the wholeStudio Ghibli world. The movies are just so humanistic. Even as fantastic as they are in the world of fantasy that they bring, they still deal with all superhuman themes.

One thing about y’all is that you always find a way to surprise me. I was super shocked when I saw Snoop Dogg on this. How did that one come together?

WowGr8: We met Snoop Dogg in 2019 or 2021. It was a few years ago. We met him at the Pro Bowl celebrity Black football game. He was a coach, but we did that song right when the pandemic started and sent it over to him. He's sent the verse back actually very quickly I guess he was chillin’ in the pandemic and it's just been cooling. It’s crazy — we did a song with him and a song with Pharrell, and I don't think either one of them knew that we did songs with the other.

www.youtube.com

- YouTube

That’s interesting. So you had already recorded the song with Snoop when I last spoke to you in 2020?

WowGr8: Probably the early version. We probably got Snoop on it the following year. But yeah, the early version was probably done.

You guys have dropped multiple projects since the pandemic. How do you two manage to compartmentalize when you’re working on multiple albums concurrently?

WowGr8: That’s the hardest part. We’re always recording. That's like the joy. It's like a good problem to have, right? Because we got so much material, but also organizing and putting it in the right place to be displayed and packaged is the hardest part of what we do.

Getting back to Pharrell — his LEGO movie was recently released. Would you two be interested in making something like that?

Olu: That appeals to us. I mean I feel like that's kind of like the next frontier. All of our crazy visuals and ideas need to be put into a large format for the world to see.

WowGr8: I haven't seen it, but I do like that he does that. I love stop motion as an art form no matter what the pieces that are moving. I would love to do a movie in stop motion or another technique if possible. I think the best thing about what Pharrell did is he told his story in a way that can be analyzed from a bunch of different angles. We all got a crazy story. You can always do an 8 Mile, like a classic, right? This is straight-up what my story is. ‘This dude, I was in the trailer park and then this dude was trying to have sex with my mom.’ That's what Eminem did. That's a great story. I love that story. I like how Pharrell did it in a way that's like, I can't even say he's necessarily trying to sell it to children, but he made it in a way that's like I said, you gotta analyze it from multiple angles.

www.youtube.com

- YouTube

Atlanta in particular has gone through a lot in the last few years, with the deaths of Trouble, Lil Keed and, of course, the imprisonment of Young Thug. How does it feel to see Thugger free?

Olu: He’s free. It’s beautiful.

WowGr8: It’s the best feeling. I prayed for this day. I’m so glad he’s free. We saw a huge vacuum in music because of him getting locked up. You mentioned Keed — that broke our hearts. We were cool with the whole YSL. We went on the road with them for the KOD Tour. The whole YSL always showed us love. Gunna is from over here where I currently stay. I used to see him doing his giveaways at Walmart around the time of his first mixtapes. To see that go down for them — it hurts. But also, it just left a huge void in music. It left a vacuum that a lot of people tried to fill with these other kinds of arts from Atlanta and it didn't really hit the same.

We need him back in the musical spectrum because what he brings to music is more than just what he's talking about. The way he approaches sound is very unique.

Circling back on the idea of detaching from the algorithm: Olu, you’ve become a licensed yoga instructor. How did that come about?

Olu: I got my 200 hour [certification]. I'm probably going to go back and do my 500 [hours] sometime in the future. But I got my 200 because I felt like, all of this influx of information, all of these people, all of this stuff going on, especially in the last four years, something that each one of us individually in our lives were like, ‘Okay, I got enough of this and I want to continue to move forward in life and not in what people are showing me or what people are telling me that I need to be doing.’

And yoga, it's simple. It's knowing yourself, like we said in the beginning, it's just having a better understanding of who you are, a better understanding of sitting with yourself, whether it's comfortable feelings or uncomfortable feelings or being able to look at certain situations and let the emotion pass through, but not let it take you and not let it overcome you.

My company is called Compxss, basically, our slogan is, ‘Find your way.’ It’s giving people the tools to find their way in life.

That’s dope. Do you teach any classes now?

Olu: So I taught at Dreamville Fest. I taught the Toronto Raptors and the Memphis Grizzlies. I taught at Bonnaroo, I taught at SXSW, and we’re scheduling more activations coming up. I got something that we're working on with Hulu and DND. So I mean basically it's just spreading this to the communities. Wellness for everybody. Everybody needs this. Sometimes people don't know where to go to therapy or sometimes people don't know what to do and it is like there are small things that you could do.

It is taking, I don't know when I was young, I'm saying it's as simple as brushing your teeth every day. It shouldn't be this huge thing with mental health or spiritual health. It should be small steps that you should do every day. Simple as brushing your teeth and washing your ass, be able to have access to, and then from there, what I'm saying, you can get crazy with it if you want to go on retreats or go do wild stuff. I mean, we’re lucky enough to travel the world. We've been to every continent damn near except for Antarctica.

And just that in itself has opened our eyes to what's possible in life and just how different life can be when you're present. You're in the present moment and when you're just doing what you love and enjoying yourself. So we want to be able to provide those types of experiences too.

That’s really awesome, especially in a world where Black men die too young.

Olu: Black men die so early in comparison sometimes. So we really got to get on it earlier. Talk about Black men, you’re lucky if you really could lock in with your family and they caring about you and they're taking care of you and you got good people around you. But there's so many Black men that just don't know who to turn to and it's like, damn, we’re supposed to be the strongest. We’re supposed to have all our shit together, but it's like, man, where do we go to recharge? Just to recharge and heal up, get back out into the world.

WowGr8, you’ve been doing some of your own side missions, with a comic book you’ve got coming out. What’s that been like?

WowGr8: I've been a pretty vehement comic book fan. I love how easy it is to translate comics to any type of motion media, whether it's film or animation. It's been difficult. I love the easy part. Coming up with stories and getting in the writer's room and I'm saying spitball and ideas with people is fun, but then how to lay out panels and stuff. It's almost like you're planning out a movie, which essentially you are. For example, the first Watchmen, a lot of that was ripped straight off the panels and they just reframed it. Zack Snyder made a masterpiece with that. So that's where I hope to elevate to eventually until I get to a place where I can make a movie; I'm going to put my stories down however I can get 'em down.

You two have quietly been a duo for over 16 years now. How has your working relationship evolved?

Olu: In the beginning, it was two people drawn on the same canvas, but it's like after a while, once you develop certain skills and certain ideas and certain, you know what I'm saying, themes and stuff, it's like, okay, let's take this one canvas and open it up to a gallery. Okay, let's change this gallery and open it up to different mediums and different forms of art so that all of these ideas can continue to flow and continue to come out. So that's it. It's kind of like the expansion of EarthGang.

WowGr8: I didn't have really any other studio to go other than Olu’s. Olu was one of my closest friends and he was one of my closest friends that had a place to record. So, if I wanted to experiment with sound in any way, that was the way I was going to do it. It wasn't necessarily like I went into it with the mindset of being like, ‘Yo, I'm going here and I'm going to establish my sound’ It was like, ‘No, let me just learn with people I enjoy being around.’ And then as we learned along the way, you do kind of establish your special moves. It's like seeing Goku eventually master the spirit bomb. It's like, yeah, I'm doing this spirit bomb now. It's just a different move now. Everybody's not doing this, but we were all throwing 'em ki blasts together in the beginning.