When Billy Woods was a child, he was afraid of lots of things.
Born in Washington, D.C., but raised in Zimbabwe, where his father was a member of Robert Mugabe’s revolutionary government, the boy who would grow into one of his generation’s beloved underground rappers was frightened by a storage room under the stairs in his family’s house. At night, he imagined that something was beneath his bed, and if his closet door was ajar, that was cause for alarm too. He was scared of apartheid South Africa, which bordered Zimbabwe to the south, and the soldiers he encountered at roadblocks. Sometimes he was scared of his parents.
“I didn’t grow up around reasonable people,” he said in a recent interview, a charged understatement about a childhood tumbled by history.
Woods typically plans his solo projects around a particular conceit or theme, and “Golliwog,” his 12th, which was released last week, is a collection of horror stories. Some are darkly comic, others decidedly less so. They draw on his youthful experiences and contemporary geopolitical terrors, as well as more mundane adult concerns, like romance and renting in modern-day New York, where he has lived on and off since 1995.
“Golliwog” arrives at a peak in his decades-long career as an independent artist, carrying on a local tradition of proudly trend-resistant, verbally inventive hip-hop that includes acts like MF Doom, the Juggaknots and Company Flow. All of Woods’s solo music is available through Backwoodz Studios, the label he founded in 2002, which also releases the work of like-minded artists including his frequent collaborator, Elucid; together the pair record as Armand Hammer.
“Something that my mother always was stressing was that if you wanted to do art, you couldn’t expect to pay your bills with it,” Woods said. He is in his late 40s now, the father of two children, and noted that “for most of my adult life I have been hustling to make ends meet.” He refuses to own a car, and up until 2018, lived with roommates to save money.
Woods certainly works hard. At a dinner in late April in Brooklyn, he was running on little sleep, and later dashed off to an album release party for an act on his roster. Dressed simply in jeans and a flannel shirt, he cut a low profile and spoke in a measured tone; he is serious about what he does, and draws on deep wells of history when making his points. The restaurant advertised its daiquiris, but Woods let the server know he wasn’t impressed with the rum options; details rarely escape his notice, but he paints in broad strokes, too.
“I love how impressionistic his lyrics are,” El-P, the Run the Jewels and Company Flow rapper and producer, wrote in an email. “There’s an abstraction and an imprinting of imagery that I love and connect to as a writer.”
With his rumbling, stentorian voice, Woods locates unusual pockets inside of beats and deploys a dense, pictorial songwriting style that Earl Sweatshirt compared to Public Enemy’s Chuck D, both in volume and his relationship to rhythm. “Worst dude to try and do any sort of espionage work,” Earl said of Woods. “He doesn’t whisper.”
But when it comes to true analogs, “We’re not talking about rappers, bro,” Earl said. “We’re talking about great American authors, bro.”
Earl said he hears echoes of his own father, the South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, in Woods’s songwriting: “My pops said, ‘The most important thing in poetry writing is being serious about playing with words.’ Woods is there. He operates there.” Or as Woods puts it on the new record, “The English language is violence, I hot-wired it / I got ahold of the master’s tools and got dialed in.”
When Woods’s daiquiri behavior came up, Earl wasn’t surprised. “It’s so annoying,” he said, teasingly. “I’ve watched him come across a pretentious bartender and just break them down so quickly that now they’re running things by him, like he runs the restaurant.”
Woods started releasing solo LPs in 2003. Billy Woods, which he styles in lowercase letters, is not his real name; he avoids showing his face in photographs. Protective of his privacy, he takes pains to keep his artistic persona distinct from certain details of his biography. But he is well known to rap fans who perform close readings of his regular releases and collaborations with artists as varied as Boldy James, Noname and Pink Siifu.
“Golliwog” is packed with vivid details: a “dog-eared Timberland boot” sitting on a stoop, a kiss from a polyamorous femme fatale burning for “all eight stops on the A-C-E,” a “wild-eyed rocking horse, mouth carved into a frown” idling on the street. The tracks are varied and unorthodox, if not outright challenging.
The producer Preservation’s beat for one of the album’s centerpieces, “Waterproof Mascara,” is little more than a bass line, wordless singing and a looped, trembling sob. Woods begins his verse describing a traumatic family scene: “Watched my mother cry from the top of the stairs, scared / When it came through the walls, I covered my ears / Half-hoping You-Know-Who would die, then he did.”
Woods lost his father when he was 11, and his family memories are complicated. “I grew up in a house with a lot of dualities, good and bad in all of the people,” he said. “I grew up with corporal punishment, which on a very basic level, the purpose of it is for children to comply or learn through fear.”
Still, “there was a lot of love in my childhood,” he said. Books figured prominently. From his mother, a writer and academic from Jamaica, it was Shakespeare, James Baldwin, the Brontës, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Bram Stoker. His father read Marx, Mao, the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney. His older sister shared Stephen King books with him — not a writer his parents would have appreciated — and Woods enjoyed the adult content (including sex scenes) they contained.
He’s currently working on a book of his own, a memoir that will not include his life as an artist. And unlike his music, it will not be independently released; he is working with a publishing house. “As of right now, there isn’t one thing written about rapping,” he said.
Growing up in a household where intense political discussion was the norm — against the violent backdrop of colonialism, liberation and, later, dictatorship — has given Woods a unique vantage on the world. The horror stories on his new album often deal with the products of history: old regimes, old wars, old racist caricatures that won’t stay buried. Historic fears take on new forms in the 21st century.
“As soon as they start to say ‘These people don’t get due process,’ eventually it comes knocking at your door,” he said. As a Black American, he added, “I’ve always felt that I and my children are vulnerable.”
He fears reading itself is at risk, too, and that the consequences could be dire. “Upon a precipice we sit, in my opinion,” he said of the political moment, and later linked his concerns to the decreasing primacy of consuming books: “A world where people don’t, or haven’t, read is terrifying.”
And yet he knows a number of talented artists who “have a powerful grasp of language” despite a disinterest in reading. “Maybe we’ll be all right,” he said. “Who knows?”
He paused. “Probably not.”
The post Billy Woods Is Scary Good at Rapping appeared first on New York Times.
