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Dreamville (with EARTHGANG), 'Everybody Ain't S***'

It's been a little over a little over a month since EARTHGANG's album GHETTO GODS dropped and already they're back, with "Everybody Ain't Sh**" off Dreamville's latest project, D-Day: A Gangsta Grillz Mixtape. Hype instrumentals, with deeply perceptive lyrics that often straddle confidence and arrogance, have become synonymous with EARTHGANG. No different here. In a world filled with fakers and pretenders, "Everybody Ain't S***" holds a mirror up to all the false pretenses and issues a warning: "Believe half what you see and none of that s*** you hear."

Olu and WowGr8 rap over a percussive beat laced with distorted mechanical whirring, with distinctive Atlantan bravado – discerning and brash: "Okay, he ain't s***, they ain't s*** / She ain't s***, guess we ain't s***/ Honesty ain't s***, the industry ain't s***." The track brazenly points out an uncomfortable truth we often avoid – everyone's pretending in some way to prove to each other that we're the s*** (whatever that may look like) when in fact, nobody is. So, as Olu says, "Live your life, f*** living it for likes."

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Taylor Jennings-Brown
Taylor Jennings-Brown is a 2021-2022 Kroc Fellow. She is a thoughtful writer from Durham, North Carolina and is a spring 2021 graduate from the University of South Carolina, where she received her bachelor's degree in mass communications and anthropology.