Some Thoughts: GOLLIWOG - billy woods
billy woods's newest album is the best kind of horror movie: scary good at making you think.
Whenever billy woods drops, a few of the same descriptors start floating around. “Lyrical.” “Experimental.” “Draconian.” One term, however, seems to get brought up more than any other: “abstract.” It’s no surprise — the designation of “abstract hip-hop” has become progressively more canonized by the discourse around left-field artists like MIKE and Earl Sweatshirt. The rub, in my opinion, is that there truly couldn’t be a more ill-fitted description for someone who writes some of the most tangible music in hip-hop history.
woods’s words are more than impressive; they hit with the potency of literary smelling-salts. His references aren’t just deep; they thumb through vast rolodexes of globalist intellectualism. His stories aren’t only vivid; their after-images burn in your brain long after the song has concluded. Pair that with his distinctive bellow and utterly untethered rhyme schemes; billy woods rejects the vaguely-defined platitudes of “lyricism” to the point of obsolescence. Take it from Earl Sweatshirt himself, who put it perfectly in a recent New York Times profile on woods: “We’re not talking about rappers, bro. We’re talking about great American authors.”
It’s been two years since we last heard a full LP from the enigmatic MC (a relatively vast gap in his prolific release schedule). 2023’s Maps, a collaborative effort with Kenny Segal, proved to be somewhat of a breakout album for woods. While still comfortably confined to the margins, Maps definitively asserted that billy woods’s indie-rap credentials were too illustrious to ignore. He might only have recently found his way onto your Discovery Weekly, but two decades of solo and group projects (i.e: Armand Hammer, with fellow esoteric genius, ELUCID), as well as the near-flawless output of his record label, Backwoodz Studioz, have long made billy woods an elder statesman of underground hip-hop.
“GOLLIWOG is an auditory horror film, starring a cast of the best MCs and beat-makers the scene has to offer.”
Thus, we arrive at GOLLIWOG. woods’s 12th studio album (or 14th depending on where you start the count) is quite possibly the darkest project he’s ever produced —and that’s saying something. woods has always thrived (dare I say delighted) in uncomfortable conversations. 2012’s History Will Absolve Me is a fiery post-colonial manifesto, 2019’s Terror Management grapples with the looming threat of climate change, and 2022’s Aethiopes is a harrowing trawl through the Black diaspora. What separates this latest album, however, is not necessarily its lyrical content, but the manner in which its subjects are framed. GOLLIWOG is an auditory horror film, starring a cast of the best MCs and beat-makers the scene has to offer.
Whatever kind of movie GOLLIWOG is, it’s certainly not a blockbuster. woods invokes plenty of typical horror tropes (vampires, murderers, zombies, etc.), but the true terrors of this album are far more insidious. These songs are claustrophobically tense, dripping with dread not unlike the long hall before a door you can’t leave unopened. The monsters here aren’t the ones you can’t see — they’re the things in plain sight which keep creeping closer. Take the eponymous rag-doll on the front cover. It’s an image reminiscent of pediophobic horror classics like Child’s Play, but bound to an inextricable history of real-world hatred and violence. Unlike other horror stories, the life that burns behind those button-eyes isn’t the soul of a serial killer or the spirit of a demonic little girl — it’s human nature in its most virulent, self-cannibalizing, and sickeningly familiar form.
From the get-go, things on GOLLIWOG are just not quite right. Opener “Jumpscare” grumbles to life with industrial ambience and an archetypally eerie music-box. woods sets the scene with some sickly imagery, “Ragdoll playing dead, rabid dog in the yard, car won't start, it's bees in your head.” As the beat suddenly deteriorates into a fuzzy collage of alarms, bass, and distant screams, he paints a new landscape: polluted rivers, rank mining pits, forests cut by colonizers’ airstrips — a place where even the ghosts flee before communing with the ones they’ve left behind. It’s bleak beyond bleakness, but woods shoulders the weight of retribution with wry ease: “The English language is violence, I hotwired it, I got a hold of the master's tools and got dialed in.”
Disconcertion continues on “STAR87,” where woods saddles a churning collage of atonal arpeggios and chattering phones (courtesy of Conductor Williams). His verses ramble haphazardly; the incessant crank-calls of a madman waiting to claim his next victim. He recounts a ghostly visitation with dead-eyed honesty: “‘It should've been you,’ whispered by dead friends… Knock-knock, ‘Guess who?’… Had to do 'em greasy like cold spare ribs in the sallow glow of an open fridge.”
The Kenny Segal-produced “Pitchforks & Halos” is similarly ungainly, comprised of a chugging sample loop and stabs of pitch-shifted piano. Despite only dropping a quick 16-bars, woods’s appearance is vivid as ever: “The blurring world of all them centuries, I wonder where the time gone… The hood of the time machine was still warm.” Songs like “All Of These Worlds Are Yours” drift fully into ambient abstraction, tethered by a background din of drone-operators’ radio chatter. “Maquiladoras” — its title taken from the term for Mexican factories established by companies seeking to outsource cheap labor — is a poetic thesis. Compassionate to the point of frustration, woods futilely reckons with the political writings of the late Frantz Fanon, specifically his concept of “self-amputation,” a spiritual severing he believed perpetuated the violent nature of colonization. It’s some of the strongest and most complex writing woods has ever produced, and I won’t even pretend to have insights into it beyond what can be read:
“Fanon dreamed of death every night in the desert/Woke in hospital bed, CIA handlers gently pressing/Wishing he died out there in the sand, bayoneted/He had the wrong answer to the right fucking question/Amputation how you survive/Can't get away if you don't leave something behind/Trapped a housefly in an upside-down pint glass and waited for it to die/It's still alive”
For all of his multi-dimensional deep-dives, woods also pulls plenty of thematic inspiration from some of horror’s most traditional tropes. On lead single “Misery,” another stellar Kenny Segal collaboration, woods plays the willing victim to a vampiric succubus, gladly offering up his neck for a chance to steal her away from her husband. “BLK ZMBY” reframes post-colonial Africa with the darkest of humors, painting the benefactors of post-colonial spoils as faux-zombies who gorge themselves on lobster and prawns. His imagery may be laughably on-point, but the horrors of its implications couldn’t be more serious: “Pan-African money folder, Arab money, Jew money/Keep new money somewhere sunny, it can't get frozen/Chinese funding, but keep everything in USD 'cause we really know them.”
More than any other movie monster, ghosts play a pivotal role in this record. At its core, GOLLIWOG is a deeply haunted experience. You can feel it in the re-interpolations of the late MF DOOM, or the various references to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or guest feature Bruiser Wolf dredging up the horrors of his childhood. It lives in the general mood of these songs, drifting helplessly from place to place, bereft of time and space. One of the most terrifying songs on the entire album, “Waterproof Mascara,” is a lyrical seance set to the sound of wailing vocals and a woman’s muffled sobs. Ghosts are everywhere throughout GOLLIWOG, and their presence is as frightening as it is gut-wrenchingly tragic.
Single “Lead Paint Test” is an example of this sort of stark, bone-cutting sorrow. The beat is beautifully unemcumbered, a simple horn loop which cuts through shuffling drums and muffled piano keys with the comforting repetition of a lighthouse in the distance. Lyrically, woods, ELUCID and Backwoodz-signee Cavalier perform last rites for their childhood homes, sage-ing bloodstains long since swallowed by rot. It’s a song that’s as stunning as it intolerable (are you noticing a theme with this album yet?), with woods’s verse in particular packing a stomach-churning punch: “Half-crushed by the car, dragged herself back and caterwauled/Father put her out her misery on the kitchen floor/Mom said, ‘Be proud of her, she made it home.’”
“Dislocated” ends the record on a shockingly soft note. Clanging cymbals tense your ears for an avant garde assault, but they quickly give way to gentle piano and weeping violins. ELUCID dominates the majority of the song, waxing poetic in his usual groaning delivery: “Why are we? Why arе we?/Guide my feet, I'm entirеly/Someone else's dream, someone else's dream.” woods’s closing verse pulls the final curtain on the album with a somnambulating weariness, acquiescing to existential anonymity with half-closed eyes and sagging shoulders: “I slept in the basement, false pride jotted on the paper, I can't be located… You can't come in here with me…”
It wouldn’t be a proper billy woods album if we didn’t give some shine to the murderer’s row of underground talent which bolsters this track-list. Behind the boards, heavy-hitters like El-P, The Alchemist, and Atmosphere’s own Ant offer up their distinct stylistic flavors, while familiar Backwoodz affiliates like Kenny Segal, Messiah Muzik, and Steel Tipped Dove handle the bulk of the production. On the mic, woods shares space with several first-time collaborators, namely Detroit’s Bruiser Wolf and the severely underrated Al.Divino. My favorite verse, however, has to go to Despot on “Corinthians.” Alongside El-P’s blood-pumping electronic soundscape, the Queens native goes insane, maintaining an unflinching flow chock full of walloping punchlines: “Take what’s your’s and I make it all mine/‘Til the money’s so long like it’s saying ‘bye-bye’ to you.”
GOLLIWOG is a lot like ghost stories told by campfire-light, where tales of specters and ghouls start to feel safer than whatever lurks beyond the reach of the flames. The beasts which inhabit the album become less and less frightening as you come close enough to realize the truth of their circumstances. By channeling so much horror and sci-fi, billy woods has created a shadow-version of our own world in these songs. While seemingly inhospitable and otherworldly at first glance, GOLLIWOG’s real-world signifiers leap out at you like well-timed jump-scares. The big twist of this album’s horror narrative is the same turn that’s informed the genre since its inception: you knew who the real monsters were before you ever stepped foot in the theater.
Favorite Tracks: Misery, BLK XMAS, Waterproof Mascara, Counterclockwise, Corinthians, A Doll Fulla Pins, Cold Sweat, Born Alone, Lead Paint Test, Dislocated