Album Review: GOLLIWOG by billy woods

Plugging away in the underground for over two decades, New York's billy woods has emerged as the primary abstract hip-hop act over the last five years. His 2023 collaboration with Kenny Segal, Maps, fully established woods as one of the genre's most intriguing voices, detailing the world-weariness of constant travel. His overlapping rhymes and observations invite you into a fascinating world that is familiar but with a constant feeling of uneasiness.

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The American rapper dwells on scary things - both fictional and real - for his latest album With a body of work that stretches back to the early 2000s and a steadily building profile over the past 10 years, billy woods is one of rap's most reliable practitioners of feel-bad music. His verses can be slightly shambling in their delivery, but there's an intensity behind every line, accompanied by production which can be low-key, off-beat or abrasive. STAR87 is a great example, with its loping groove and woozy strings courtesy of Conductor Williams.

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Over time, symbols eclipse the things they symbolize GOLLIWOG is violence personified through a caricature of a subhuman, perpetrated by the systematic atrocity of the English language, and witnessed through the dour, exhausted eyes of the increasingly prolific billy woods, whose creative renaissance shows no signs of slowing throughout the 52-minute runtime of his best solo project yet. While Maps occasionally showed signs of a guarded desperation that emerged only in the secluded outposts of a nomadic lifestyle, GOLLIWOG offers up its nightmare fuel front and center to weave a venomous web of abstract horrorcore brutality. woods's lyricism has long been punctuated by prophetic visions like ships full of skeleton slavers or awakening in the grisly wreckage of a plane crash, but they've never been as vivid or bone-chilling as they are on his latest release, a disquieting pulse-raiser whose astonishing beats and dizzying flows are bound to encourage rabid dissection for months to come.

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But if Maps blew the doors wide open, GOLLIWOG retreats back into a haunted house of creaks, moans and ominous voices, sounding a bit like the spooky soundscapes of 2022's Aethiopes and spiritually evoking the crumbling mansion that adorns the cover of 2019's Hiding Places. "Waterproof Mascara" is surely one of the most harrowing rap tracks in recent memory, a chronicle of domestic abuse made visceral by a woman's whimpering cry embedded into the beat. On "Born Alone," atop a seasick piano loop produced by Maps collaborator Kenny Segal, woods reveals, "I rock a clean pair of socks every day," just in case he gets murdered and someone steals the shoes off his body.

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Each chapter which follows is told from then perspective of a different member of the village, each of them with their own myths and superstitions about this strange, lonely figure, and each of them, in turn, through their trauma or their terror, contributing in some small way to her tragic death. Hurricane Season is one of the most brutal books I've ever read: blunt-force writing which churns a nauseating stew of raging machismo, small-town superstition and trauma begetting trauma, across lines drawn in blood. As I listened through the advance copy of Billy Woods' new album that small, haunted village of La Matosa was the first thing on my mind.

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Labeling something horror creates an ironic contradiction. If it’s referring to the horror genre, it serves as an advanced warning, a kind of shorthand that you’re about to experience a ticker tape parade of demons, psychopaths, and shredded viscera. By its very nature, works of art categorized as horror let you know you’re not in any real danger.

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The opening bars of "All These Worlds Are Yours," a track on Billy Woods's Golliwog, serve as a fitting distillation of the rapper's worldview: "Today I watched a man die in a hole from the comfort of my home/The drone flew real low, no rush, real slow/He curled up into himself, a fetus in the womb, the womb was the Earth/Grenades landed at his feet, and he scrabbled in the dirt. " His is a surreal vision of modern life where violence is both literally distant and figuratively intimate, where cruelty is systematized, state-sponsored, and chillingly arbitrary. Woods assumes the role of the poet laureate of our end times, chronicling the quiet horror of an existence where survival itself constitutes an act of defiance.

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That cover art gets even more horrifying the more you let it seep into your consciousness. To offer one interpretation of the eerie cover of billy woods' haunting, masterful 'GOLLIWOG'; the golliwog (an object intrinsically associated with systemic racism) is being placed into a horror film-like scenario; a figure lurking in the middle distance of the forest, adorned with an uncanny smile. It's an unnervingly successful attempt to mirror the tone of the album, which is likewise concerned with equating the black experience with all-too-real horror stories.

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At nine, Billy Woods was already creating worlds; he penned a story about an evil golliwog. His mother, a Jamaican professor of English literature, described it as derivative. His father, a Marxist exile from Zimbabwe, carried the scars of political warfare. These ghosts aren't just part of his past; they're woven into the very architecture of his music.

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