Billy Woods is getting his dues. He’s a stalwart of New York underground rap who has been making records for more than 20 years. Despite a furtive approach to publicity, not showing his face in photos or revealing his real name, word is spreading. I tuned in myself when he released Aethiopes in 2022, a tour de force about race, power and history that scored highly in best-of-year lists.
At first glance, his new album Golliwog (stylised in capitals) represents a step-up in scale. Like the big-budget behemoths released by mainstream rappers, there are 18 tracks and numerous different producers. In comparison, Aethiopes had a solitary beatmaker. However, the results bear a similar relation to the world of commercial rap as the best independent film does to a multiplex superhero franchise.
In Woods’ description, the album’s inspiration is a story about an “evil golliwog” that he wrote when he was nine. The racist doll turns up at various points like a demonic force, accompanied by a sinister nursery rhyme jingle. The effect is reminiscent of horrorcore, the gory rap subgenre inspired by slasher movies whose most famous practitioner is Eminem. But Woods’ high-concept version is designed to unsettle rather than shock.
“Waterproof Mascara” (produced by Preservation, who helmed Aethiopes) makes supremely imaginative use of sampled sobbing and an eerie Portishead-style melody. Woods raps from the viewpoint of a boy watching his crying mother prepare to flee a nameless country following a change in regime. The rapper spent part of his childhood in Zimbabwe, where his father, a Marxist intellectual, now dead, was a politician. Meanwhile, the Jamaican homeland of his mother, a literature professor, can be detected in “Jumpscare”. Vividly phrased verses about colonial violence in what seems to be a Caribbean island are accompanied by the doll’s jingle and ominously pitched distortion.
“Corinthians” has tense production from Run the Jewels’ El-P and an electrifying cameo by another NYC rap veteran, Despot. Woods weighs in with densely packed lines about choosing to see how things are rather than “hide behind eyelids”. “All These Worlds” finds him watching an online video of a soldier in a warzone being killed by a drone. In “Blk Xmas”, he observes the eviction of an African-American family from their home at Christmas as a suffocating piano loop draws tighter. There is a bleak vision at work here, conveyed by a soundworld of the highest quality.
★★★★★
‘Golliwog’ is released by Backwoodz Studioz
