Photo by Natalia Vacheishvili
Ock Sportello knows every word to “Choppa Style.”
Abu Zubaydah awoke from a coma in a pool of his own blood. Zubaydah, who had been shot multiple times and fallen from a roof during a 2002 CIA raid, suffered what the Pakistani military doctor who treated him described as the most severe wounds he had ever seen a patient survive. According to the CIA man watching over the comatose Zubaydah, the first thing the captive did upon waking was beg to be smothered with a pillow.
An imagined Zubaydah is among the cast characters met on their deathbeds over the course of billy woods’ Golliwog. The cast also includes Frantz Fanon “wishing he’d died out there in the sand, bayoneted” while under CIA care in Maryland to woods himself. “Counterclockwise” ends with a clip of Zubaydah’s lawyer, Mark Denbeaux, finishing his client’s story. After gunshot wounds were treated by a trauma surgeon, Zubaydah was taken to a series of CIA black sites, where he was tortured for 24 hours a day, 17 days in a row. This barrage of torture included at least 83 waterboarding sessions. Denbeaux explains: because Zubaydah was the only man the CIA had at their disposal to torture, they knowingly “created a fictitious person…described as an Al-Qaeda rebel.”
If Golliwog is an album about monsters—zombies, vampires, landlords, dead-eyed drone operators, haunted dolls, crooked cops—then Zubaydah is a portrait of what happens to those who can’t outrun them. billy woods’ newest record is an atrocity exhibition rife with portraits of anguished lovers, scavenging fathers, and paranoid mothers, and it is through Zubaydah that these psychological tortures are made literal. From the standout “Waterproof Mascara”: “you can’t make this shit up, but you’re welcome to try!”
Across his formidable body of work, billy woods has demonstrated an uncanny ability to conjure up characters from some mercurial combination of memory and thin air, desperate would-be lick-hitters and sad sacks and chapped-lipped cops and hoverboarding, vaping drug-dealers, all of whom flit in and out of his songs like they were dos Passos novels. On Golliwog, woods affords these vignettes more space than ever, populating his bleak carnival with fleshed-out souls.
“BLK XMAS” portrays a neighbor whose dismay at a nearby family being evicted before Christmas transforms into unease and shame as he and others begin sifting through their abandoned possessions. There are times where the justification for atrocity speaks louder than the story itself, as on “Make No Mistake”: “it’s easy for you, but it’s hard for me to forget the things we did when we had to eat–at least that’s what we said when we did the deed.”
woods can afford to be bleak because he is as funny as he is perceptive. Golliwog, like any great work of horror, is paced with disarming laughs. “Cold Sweat,” which begins, “I had my community sick when they unraveled I time-traveled and still picked Darko Milicic,” casts woods as a tenant who refuses to move out of his apartment, much to his property-flipping landlord’s chagrin. Here is a record about language as a tool of control from an artist in control of language. From the album opener: “the English language is violence, I hotwired it, I got a hold of the master’s tools and got dialed in.” Golliwog depicts the contradictions and indignities of life in polycrisis, as woods is just as comfortable making his point by invoking American drones hovering over the Gaza Strip or Bobby Shmurda dancing on a table for label executives. This music is rich, not gratuitously dense, referential rather than labyrinthine.
Last month, I had the chance to speak on the phone to billy woods about Golliwog. We ended up discussing life as a working independent rapper and label-head, the mismanagement of the Chicago Bulls, fatherhood, and the infamous orchestra-backed Nas concert at Carnegie Hall. What stuck with me most, though, were woods’ remarks about childhood, childrens’ stories, and the role of children as the propulsive force throughout horror as a genre.
Due to, I suspect, an errant cat’s paw on my end, about fifteen minutes of the recording were lost. I’ve tried my best to paraphrase and summarize what I thought were a fascinating series of observations and anecdotes from woods, but the whole thing feels sort of fitting. As woods reflects on “Jumpscare,” “some things not for us to know.”
(This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.)
We have some very strong billy woods NBA bars on this record. The coach Thibs line especially had me laughing, and the Darko Milicic bit for that matter.
billy woods: I don’t feel I get credit for the sports references enough.
You’ve been on it for a minute, and then Bruiser had the Frank Gore line. So I’m curious, you do rap a lot about the NBA: are you a Knicks fan? Is that where you’re coming from?
billy woods: No, never.
What’s your team?
billy woods: Bulls.
You’re a Bulls fan?
billy woods: Yes, but they continually, over the last decade, have filled the team with people who I just don’t like. I feel like the start of that was Rondo. And it was like, Rondo? And I was like, why? Like, this team isn’t gonna be that good, but I have to like watch Rondo play? That was a down period.
Nikola Vucevic doesn’t do it for you?
billy woods: You know, like not everybody on the team right now is somebody that I don’t like. But just like historically…DeMar Derozan is not a bad guy or anything, but I never was a fan.
I’ve been finding more in Golliwog each listen. I feel like something interesting about your workflow, at least from the outside looking in, is that you often are approaching records with like a one collaborator, whether it’s Armand Hammer, or a record with one producer, or the really overlooked Moor Mother album. When it’s a situation like this, where it’s just an outright billy woods record, how do you find your ideas cohere?
billy woods: It’s been about five years since I last made one of these. Writing, it makes no difference. I mean, it makes a difference because what the person’s beats give me may put me in a particular mood, or whatever, but as far as concepts and what the record’s gonna be about, that’s really my job. Usually I work with people who give me a lot of leeway in that direction because I’m pretty good at it. I don’t waste time when it’s time to mix a record with Preservation, I just get out of him and, you know, Kenny or Blockhead, I get out of their way. Between Willie Green and whoever the producer is, they can figure out how to mix it. If there’s something I really don’t like, then we’ll go back to it, but don’t try to micromanage. So generally speaking, what you’re talking about has been my prowess, when I’m working with producers, so that doesn’t really matter, you know?
As far as sonically, again, that’s a job I have to assume responsibility for, but I feel like I do a good job of that too, overall. You know, over the years I’ve executive produced other people’s records besides my own, and I feel like I do a good job. I feel pretty confident in putting it together. I mean, I know some people would be like, well, Terror Management is… But to me, Terror Management was meant to be kind of jarring and all over the place as part of the idea, you know? Fragmentation was part of the theme. So, sonically, obviously, when it’s just me, I usually find that I have a good feel for those things. And on a record like this, sometimes I enlisted the producers of a track to, you know, collaborate or at least help put them together and create transition points when needed.
This record feels very dark. When you compare it to Maps, which is a little bit breezier—
billy woods: Oh, one hundred percent.
You feel like you’re channeling a serious darkness here, both sonically and lyrically, throughout the record.
billy woods: Well, the theme is relating to like horror and sci-fi, dystopianism, horror movies, stories. So, yeah, it was dark.
What were you watching and reading in the lead up to thinking through and then actually writing and recording this record? What inspirations were top of mind for you?
billy woods: Well, once I was working on it, the inspirations were pretty much worn on their sleeve and the record in terms of stuff that I’ve read or been a fan of since childhood or, you know, movies I watched. So there’s stuff like, Stephen King, Toni Morrison, Ray Bradbury, Creep Show, way out to more, Flannery O’Connor, or something like that. Lots of movies from like Black Christmas, Poltergeist, Rosemary’s Baby, stuff that I grew up with. As far as what I was actually intaking in the process of making this, less direct transference, but I did read this book, Things We Lost in the Fire, by this Argentinian woman before I started, that was a book of short horror stories. I thought it was really cool. And in that same time period, I also had read Her Body and Other Parties; that’s a bigger book, but a similar type of idea of like these short stories, horror-related or at the very least creepy. I did watch the movie Cure, a Japanese movie. It’s a cool movie, and this filmmaker I know put me onto it, so that was dope.
I wanted to talk to you specifically about “BLK XMAS.” It’s a song that grabbed me from the start. You know, the Bruiser Wolf verse is just, everything about his delivery, his register, is captivating. But I’m particularly fond of the songs where I feel like a large part of your verse is telling one sustained story. Like a longer vignette. And I feel like the vignette on “BLK XMAS” helped me crystallize something I’ve perceived in your music recently, which is the specific horror of fatherhood. And, flipping that around with stories about being a child, being a father, being a child. At least since “As The Crow Flies” off Maps, it seems there’s been a throughline about how scary it is to be a father.
billy woods: No, I mean, I did not think of it that way in “BLK XMAS,” but I do think that that is an astute observation and an interesting bit of analysis…I think what it is is just like whatever is happening in my life, or has happened in the past, is just where everything like starts and ends. I think that’s an interesting observation. And I guess, what would I say? Is it scary? Sure. Yeah. I would say so. I mean, there are all sorts of levels to that.
You know, I had two conversations with artists today around fatherhood and doing what we do and just, you know, adult life cost expenses, living in New York and being like that. When I was talking to these guys, I was talking about the idea of how difficult it would be to be a parent if you’re really struggling hand to mouth. And having lived as an artist and a writer and so forth, a lot of times from just hustling, doing whatever for a lot of my life, and not having a stable income and the sort of things that that can do to you. But being at peace with it would be, it would be a whole different thing if you had like a kid, you know?
I was curious to ask you about your journey as an artist. The last few years specifically have been a steady stream of output, a lot of critical acclaim, I assume a rise in listenership and people in the room at shows. How has that impacted your creative process?
billy woods: It’s interesting ’cause I do feel like show sales are pretty good and shows do pretty well, whereas my streaming listener base number is not crazy. It’s increased, but it increased from a low point to a… not low point, I guess (laughs). A lot of times there are people who maybe are my peers artistically or whatever, but if you looked at our streaming numbers, you’d be like, whoa, they’re in a whole different stratosphere from where I’m at. So, that is interesting. But I am thankful that I have cultivated a pretty strong fan base, in terms of attending shows and you know, that I’m able to also work with a lot of artists like Elucid and DJ Haram. People bring a lot to this stage, and I think we put together some interesting things, different projects.
I think to other people, it feels less gradual than it probably has to me, because when you’re not noticing something, you only notice when you notice, you know. For me, a lot of it has felt pretty gradual—I mean, it’s a long time. And there are things which of course now nobody mentions as big successes, but from the point where I was moving from, like it was a big deal to me when Blockhead hit me up to do Dour Candy. Like, no producer had ever really sought me out. So, sometimes there are things that I remember being psyched about, or were a big deal to me, that in retrospect might not come out. But each one of those things was like a rung of a ladder. Of course then there are some times where you’re like, oh, things took a bigger jump.
Obviously, you’re negotiating your own career, but you’re also wearing the hat of label head for Backwoodz. Y’all don’t keep a traditional roster, but I feel like you do put a lot of intention into making sure that your collaborators, and your peers and friends, that you can stand by their work and put them in a position to succeed. What does it feel like to negotiate both the artist side and the business side of a landscape that’s fractured and deeply fucked up right now?
billy woods: It’s tiring. Is it dee—well, the landscape of society, or what?
Well, society, I joke that I feel like I’ve been living in one of your lyrics for the last however many years.
billy woods: Society, no question.
Yeah, society’s cooked. I more mean the interplay of streaming, touring, making ends meet as a touring artist. Someone who’s trying to make it such that their artistry, whatever that looks like, can be what puts food on the table.
billy woods: I mean, it’s definitely a hustle. It’s definitely a grind. But at the same time, I come from a place of like—I’ve taken some tours where I was like four people in a sedan, merch in the trunk, and sometimes you’re staying somewhere where you’re like, “alright, we’ve gotta give the driver the bed, and I had the couch last night, so, whatever, I’m on the floor. So I’ve done some, pretty, pretty, pay-my-dues, pretty rugged, chore work. Like, actual, fucking empty gigs. So, I think in that sense, now doesn’t feel particularly awful in terms of live performance and getting out there, because I’ve already done the work. But yeah, it is hard for sure. And doing that while running the label at the same time is at times very draining. But it can also be invigorating, you know?
And it feels good when you have projects and people where you’re like, okay, I like this. I believe in this. And ushering that all the way through completion and people’s success and being part of it, you know? I mean, seeing the growth of a group like ShrapKnel. Or seeing somebody who’s been a legend like Cavalier, who’s been nice since the beginning.
Being able to put him maybe in a better position to just focus on his art and getting on the road, and we handle getting him out there in a way I feel not even a modicum of what he deserves as an artist, but seeing people peeping him. Feels great. And, the same thing for people who have gone off to do—you know, we still have this relationship—but to do their own records, whether it’s Elucid’s success with his record Revelator off-label, FIELDED’s self-released album she put out, Akai Solo has been doing a bunch of records. I mean, I’m proud to have played any part, and am excited for when I work again with some of those artists.
It must be such a rewarding experience, slightly alleviating some of the dues you paid for others. It must feel cool, like a full-circle moment.
billy woods: I mean, it’s definitely cool. Yeah. Everybody’s worked and you’re like, here’s some payoff, you know? It feels good.
You’ve written a children’s book, and both this record and your wider body of work have revolved around children’s stories, lullabies, dolls, whether it was Little Red Riding Hood in Hiding Places…
billy woods: Well, I feel like Hiding Places, one of the under-mentioned things about that record is that it was very much made with the idea of being about childhood.
There are specific vignettes of childhood throughout Hiding Places that you return to in Golliwog, specifically in the “mom told us where the passports are hid” line that you reprise. It felt like many of those themes of childhood are being revisited. I’m thinking also of “Waterproof Mascara,” where your character says “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 had died, then he did—surprise!” How do you find you’re able to import some of these ideas into the broader vernacular of childhood?
billy woods: That’s a very good question. I hope I can offer an answer, perhaps if not specific, then of some kind. I couldn’t really tell you how, you know it’s like if somebody was like, “how do you tie politics into your music?” I’d be like, that’s part of my life, so I wouldn’t be able to give an answer, really, that would seem useful. But, I guess my childhood is near and easily at hand for me. Sometimes I have known people who are like “I barely remember anything before X, Y, Z age,” but, for me it’s all near at hand. Good and bad. And I don’t think I’ve changed that much, I don’t know. So I just reach out and it’s there in the bag of things that are swirling around my imagination, my thoughts, when I sit down to write. That’s one of the things that comes.
I also think that when you’re doing something like this record, that’s about horror, etc., it’s kind of like a lot of horror stories and ideas involve children. Just for all of the reasons: children are vulnerable. Children have wild imaginations. Children can see things that adults don’t see. Sometimes the tables are flipped, and it’s like a scary child, which is its own sort of thing. The idea that a child might be evil or malevolent in some way is both a powerful thought and one that feels like you shouldn’t think it.
I’m thinking of one of the song’s next lines, “It’s just us in this room—that’s it!” It taps into this sense, like you were saying earlier, of this childish imagination, but also the idea that a child can see, for instance, this monster under the bed.
At this point, technology interceded to steal about fifteen minutes of conversation with billy woods from me—or, more truthfully, from you. I must resort to paraphrasing: woods informed me that I had heard the line wrong—that the “it’s just us in this room—that’s it!” line was not a mother disabusing a child of the notion that there was a monster under the bed, but a mother establishing a family-within-the-family, that the uncles outside of the room were not a part of. Amused by such an obvious misinterpretation, I asked woods about the interpretation of his lyrics generally. Specifically, I noted the level of trust he puts in his listeners with his dense, referential tapestries that reward repeat listening without ever veering into the tired domain of lyric-as-self-contained-puzzle, and asked if he felt a certain way when he sees his lyrics misinterpreted or whether he had a sort of death-of-the-author perspective on the whole thing.
For what it’s worth, I had at that point in the conversation already advanced at least two interpretations of his lyrics that he had not intended when recording them. woods assured me that he doesn’t go looking for people to get things incorrectly, even though sometimes he’ll see something preposterously wrong. He invoked his mother’s critical background to flesh out the idea that an artist’s intention is just one possible reading of a piece that, once put out into the world, meaning might be freely assigned to. To demonstrate the way in which understanding his intention might still offer listeners an inroad into the music, he pointed to “Moneylenders” on the Alchemist’s version of Haram, a song he had written while reading about Diogenes the Cynic, the ancient Greek philosopher who, in woods’ words, would do things that people would now perceive as “performative,” such as giving up all of his possessions or walking the streets in full daylight with a lamp and claiming that he was “looking for an honest man.” Per woods, “Moneylenders” is riddled with explicit references to Diogenes—“looking for an honest man, handgun in hand” comes directly to mind—which references, if understood, give listeners a sort of sub-basement view of the song at hand.
We then turned to Golliwog’s lead single, “Misery.” I complimented woods’ ability to write about relationships, specifically in the context of unrequited love. I asked, on the topic of deep textual intention, whether woods had at all chosen Stephen King’s Misery as the framing mechanism for his romantic hanger-on/obsessive fan/vampire track for the fact that the novel’s book-within-a-book, Misery’s Return, is an ostensibly Victorian, pulpy romance novel featuring the lead character’s traveling to Africa to search for her father alongside her two lovers. Believe it or not, he hadn’t. The recording picked back up as I asked about the valence of “Misery” coming from an artist who may well find himself the object of others’ obsessive fandom.
You cast “Misery’s” narrator as a fan or an obsessive.
billy woods: Well it’s definitely a fan of the person, but it’s not like a stranger.
Is there anything in “Misery” that reflects on your experience as the object of fandom? Like, how does it feel to have fans?
billy woods: It’s funny, because when I wrote it I was like, I wonder if people will think it’s like an opposite thing, where in my mind I was thinking of a person, or a situation, and just moving the furniture around. “Misery” was something I was writing from my own perspective, for whatever that’s worth. And in the midst of writing a song like that, I’m digging into my own emotions and experience. But I did think after I did it, I was like, “oh, I wonder if people would think this is me making a song about somebody being involved with me.” And I was like, no. I was thinking of a situation to do with my own life.
Setting the record straight that this is not just a reverse-“Stan.”
billy woods: No, I mean, there would be nothing wrong with that, but no, I was working in less…theoretical territory.
You have a real ear for turns of phrase. There are pithy little sayings that you frequently return to in your music that seem to serve as a way to communicate something far deeper, or to justify some act of violence that the audience of the narrator has just seen. This album also deals specifically with Palestine, whether it’s “Corinthians”’ “12 billion USD hovering over the Gaza Strip,” or when you rap about watching a man be killed by a drone strike from the comfort of your own home. I think right now, when I talk about living inside a billy woods lyric, what I mean is the sensation of living in the imperial core and watching Israel massacre Palestinians with United States money, and backing, and technology, and then see the contours of the debate back home revolve exclusively around what kind of language we use to describe it—is it a genocide? is it a war? Watching people get deported over language. You’ve been rapping about contested language and language-as-violence for some time. Does the modern policing and contestation of language play any part in your songwriting process, or is this just something that you’ve intuitively understood for some time.
billy woods: Well, we went a long distance there, which is not a bad thing. We started off on things overseas and now we’re bringing it to things happening here. So, if we’re going to have a conversation about foreign wars and US involvement, they can be connected conversations, but they’re different conversations. For example, you can have whatever opinion you want of the Ukraine war, and it doesn’t seem to be something that “threatens national security,” apparently. But holding certain views of the war on Gaza is viewed differently. So, it’s a lot of times things are put into the same boxes because they’re similar, but they’re not actually that alike, you know? American motives and reasons for involvement overseas vary from situation to situation, even though there may be throughlines.
But as far as policing of speech in America, I mean, if we’re going to talk about the current regime and it’s textbook fascist, repressive, authoritarian behavior, which always involves antithetical false equivalencies. So I’m sure lots of people would be like, “what about when the wokesters wouldn’t let you say what you wanted online,” and compare that to actual state action, as opposed to, “you lost your job because you were yelling racial slurs at people,” or they found them in your old tweets or something. Not that someone couldn’t have an opinion about that, but it’s not analogous to what is happening now, you know? But, yeah, I feel like language is something that is always in contest. Always. Even within in-groups. Even the question of whether or not somebody wants to use the genocide. To many people, that could define in some way their stance on the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
An interesting thing is also the extensive use of words sometimes where you’re like, I wonder if everyone has agreed on what this word means. For example, what makes somebody a Zionist? Having grown up in a very anti-Zionist, anti-Israeli atmosphere at home, to me that simply means that you, in some way, do not contest Israel’s right to exist, or you have conceded Israel’s right to exist. That could be what some people say. Some people might be like, you have to be an active supporter of Israel’s policies, some people might mean that…I don’t know. I don’t want to speak for people. But it can mean a lot of things. And so people say something, and sometimes you’re like, I wonder what that actually means?
Language can be specific and vague at different points to serve different people’s needs. You know, like even Donald Trump and Make America Great Again. It’s like, everybody is allowed to dream of a different time that it was great. You know? The lack of specificity of key here, because certain people might be like, maybe they’re talking about, you know, 1890s, I don’t know if that’s the same time that Snoop Dogg’s thinking of, you know, or whoever. The vagueness allows you to sort of fill in the blank there. And as, as such, you know, like most great pieces of propaganda, uh, there’s a lot of room for different people to imagine that they’re standing under the same umbrella.
I think that’s like some of the language you use that I’m really fascinated by. I think of turns of phrase like “no hard feelings,” sayings that are so vague and often repeated that they’re meant to be a kind of just form apology, or this broad way to make you rationalize whatever you’ve just seen. It’s a really evocative thing you do time and time again.
billy woods: Yeah, sometimes there are things that you think about them, and you’re like—that’s a funny one. Sometimes I also think there are phrases that are really familiar somewhere, like how New Yorkers will be like “at the end of the day.” And you’re like, “ah, people do really say that!”
With “no hard feelings,” I think the other interesting thing about it is if you move the emphasis of the phrase to “no hard feelings,” that is an interesting way to think about it as well. Which is part of it—when I was writing that song, it was both of those meanings at once. Like, I don’t want to deal with anything that’s going to be difficult to think about or contextualize as well as of course, an apology of sorts that the same time makes no concessions.
It feels very Scorsese. Have you seen The Irishman?
billy woods: Yes, for better or worse.
The CGI is not to be forgiven. Scorsese does it always, but specifically in that movie, they’ll repeat to each other “it’s what it is,” as a way of both describing and rationalizing the fact that they’re going to have to kill Jimmy Hoffa. I feel like it’s so in keeping with the way that you use those kinds of turns of phrase: it’s meant to mask something we understand to be far worse, but we’ve all agreed to push it out of sight and out of mind. And I feel, for lack of concrete examples, like it’s something I heard throughout Golliwog, which for me makes it a particularly effective billy woods album.
billy woods: I dig that.
Something under-discussed about you is that you’re a very funny writer, and you’re particularly funny when rapping about rap’s ruling class. You’ve taken Dr. Dre to task a few times, I think about the Nas at Carnegie Hall line.
billy woods: Which is not a diss of Nas in any way! It was something that actually happened. Somebody was like, “I got tickets,” and I told her I didn’t really want to go. She was very annoyed. My thing was always like—there is a wry observation in there, but it really it’s a personal decision. Not that nobody should do it, play music with an orchestra. The girl who invited me, I was like…I can see why you’re—because sometimes when you don’t want to do something when people are like, “this is amazing, I have these tickets!” and you’re like “actually, I’m good,” then it’s like, do you think “I’m corny, do you think I’m a loser for that?” (Laughing). Because you’re really excited. Nah it’s just like, that is not the Nas show I want to go see at all. At all. I’m not mad, I think everyone who does want to see it should go. There’s nothing that says hip hop can’t be played with an orchestra. And there might even be rappers I would want to see with an orchestra, but that was not what I was looking for.
You rap a lot about gentrification, and I know this isn’t specifically gentrification, but watching the New York you knew kind of melt away. The twin line is “selling legal weed from a fake hole in the wall,” and now we have Carmelo Anthony selling legal weed.
billy woods: Oh yeah, well that was the feeling of like being in California somewhere and it’s like…it was before we had dispensaries here…and it was this fake, had the vibe of like a “hood drug spot,” but it was legal. And at that point, it’s weird. Like I remember one time, and this is not to say that this restaurant was…there was a restaurant called Madiba, in Brooklyn, Fort Greene. It was a South African restaurant and lots of African people would, young African people would like meet there and it was a good restaurant. They had pretty good drinks and it just had like a little cultural vibe at the moment. The thing that always weirded me out, and other southern African people, was that the design of it was like a shanty town, like beer hall club vibe? That was the design. That’s a little weird (laughter). A little weird. But wouldn’t be recognizable to an American. But if you’re from that area, then you get it, you know? And later on, somebody was like, “the owners are white South Africans.” That was fucking weird. But at the same time, it did manage to kind of be like a cool little place, because of the people who went there or whatever. I didn’t even go there that much. But I always feel weird about the commodification of poverty or something, you know?
You announced the record with a piece of criticism that your nine-year-old self received from your mother. How was this record, and your music, shaped by her very blunt criticism?
billy woods: (laughing) No, not really. Except in the sense of, my mother was always very—it’s funny, because a lot more people have asked me about this than I expected. It was a…pretty normal thing for my mother to offer pretty substantive critiques of my writing when I was a kid. And I think that, A, that’s just the person she is, and B, I think it’s different if you have a child who you think is really good at something. Like if you think your kid is not just like, oh, they’re decent at sports, but like, oh, this person is actually really great, at whatever, baseball or something. Then probably, if they ask “what do you think of this,” and you’re a former baseball player, or if LeBron is your dad and you’ve got some actual skills and you’re like, “hey, what did you think of my game tonight,” it’s not going to be the same thing as what Johnny’s dad might tell him because it’s just like “did you have fun?” But at a certain point it’s like, you’re beyond that, and if you’re taking this seriously then you need to work on your left hand, you know, you scored thirty points tonight because you’re playing eleven year olds and you’re better than everybody out there, but eventually you’ll be playing with other people who are good and people aren’t gonna let you just drive to your right and score every time. So, I think that’s the type of context in which it all happens.
You’re certainly not just driving to your right.
billy woods: Yeah, I think those things would be a challenge at the time sometimes, but then later on you’ll go and read something and be like…really the one I remember the most was some story I wrote, which was a horror story too, where you’re a little kid doing stuff like that and you just take something that you read that you thought was cool and a movie that you thought was cool and combine them into one sort of amalgamation of the story. And anyway, I had some story where there was like, the main character was a divorced ex-cop. And my mom was like, that’s very cliched. And I remember being annoyed and then later being like, “actually it is.” And that changed how you like look at things in the world after that, because then you notice, I remember the same thing about like, in the era that I came up, like seventies and kind of eighties TV, where there’s always like the police chief, who’s a Black guy, who’s like “you can’t do that to the people!” And there’s always a cop who’s like “fuck the rules! Too many fucking rules! That’s why the city’s falling apart. No one can actually kill the bad guy!” That’s like the plot of all of the seventies, eighties movies, is the cop who isn’t allowed to be vicious enough, which is why society is teetering on its edges.
Which, you know, also reflects the seventies and eighties in America in lots of ways. People’s fears and anxieties, real and imagined, or white society anyway. But also this idea that it’s also a more racially progressive era. So I feel like the boss a lot of times would be like a Black cop. Anyway, just things like that where you start to be like, oh, this is a cliche thing. This is just a thing people do. And then sometimes when writing as an artist, now that’s never left me, where sometimes you write something and you’re like, nah, I mean, that is the easier way to go, or it fits. But then you’re like, now I have to spend an extra hour sitting here trying to think of a way to get there without doing that.
That’s helpful, because that’s what I was trying to grasp at earlier with what I was calling your turns of phrase. You’re great at finding those cliches that society keeps returning to and serving them up decontextualized to show how absurd they are.
billy woods: And the things that we tell ourselves. The stories we tell ourselves about our own lives and the people around us.
I think to other people, it feels less gradual than it probably has to me, because when you’re not noticing something, you only notice when you notice, you know. For me, a lot of it has felt pretty gradual—I mean, it’s a long time. And there are things which of course now nobody mentions as big successes, but from the point where I was moving from, like it was a big deal to me when Blockhead hit me up to do Dour Candy. Like, no producer had ever really sought me out. So, sometimes there are things that I remember being psyched about, or were a big deal to me, that in retrospect might not come out. But each one of those things was like a rung of a ladder. Of course then there are some times where you’re like, oh, things took a bigger jump.
Obviously, you’re negotiating your own career, but you’re also wearing the hat of label head for Backwoodz. Y’all don’t keep a traditional roster, but I feel like you do put a lot of intention into making sure that your collaborators, and your peers and friends, that you can stand by their work and put them in a position to succeed. What does it feel like to negotiate both the artist side and the business side of a landscape that’s fractured and deeply fucked up right now?
billy woods: It’s tiring. Is it dee—well, the landscape of society, or what?
Well, society, I joke that I feel like I’ve been living in one of your lyrics for the last however many years.
billy woods: Society, no question.
Yeah, society’s cooked. I more mean the interplay of streaming, touring, making ends meet as a touring artist. Someone who’s trying to make it such that their artistry, whatever that looks like, can be what puts food on the table.
billy woods: I mean, it’s definitely a hustle. It’s definitely a grind. But at the same time, I come from a place of like—I’ve taken some tours where I was like four people in a sedan, merch in the trunk, and sometimes you’re staying somewhere where you’re like, “alright, we’ve gotta give the driver the bed, and I had the couch last night, so, whatever, I’m on the floor. So I’ve done some, pretty, pretty, pay-my-dues, pretty rugged, chore work. Like, actual, fucking empty gigs. So, I think in that sense, now doesn’t feel particularly awful in terms of live performance and getting out there, because I’ve already done the work. But yeah, it is hard for sure. And doing that while running the label at the same time is at times very draining. But it can also be invigorating, you know?
And it feels good when you have projects and people where you’re like, okay, I like this. I believe in this. And ushering that all the way through completion and people’s success and being part of it, you know? I mean, seeing the growth of a group like ShrapKnel. Or seeing somebody who’s been a legend like Cavalier, who’s been nice since the beginning.
Being able to put him maybe in a better position to just focus on his art and getting on the road, and we handle getting him out there in a way I feel not even a modicum of what he deserves as an artist, but seeing people peeping him. Feels great. And, the same thing for people who have gone off to do—you know, we still have this relationship—but to do their own records, whether it’s Elucid’s success with his record Revelator off-label, FIELDED’s self-released album she put out, Akai Solo has been doing a bunch of records. I mean, I’m proud to have played any part, and am excited for when I work again with some of those artists.
It must be such a rewarding experience, slightly alleviating some of the dues you paid for others. It must feel cool, like a full-circle moment.
billy woods: I mean, it’s definitely cool. Yeah. Everybody’s worked and you’re like, here’s some payoff, you know? It feels good.
You’ve written a children’s book, and both this record and your wider body of work have revolved around children’s stories, lullabies, dolls, whether it was Little Red Riding Hood in Hiding Places…
billy woods: Well, I feel like Hiding Places, one of the under-mentioned things about that record is that it was very much made with the idea of being about childhood.
There are specific vignettes of childhood throughout Hiding Places that you return to in Golliwog, specifically in the “mom told us where the passports are hid” line that you reprise. It felt like many of those themes of childhood are being revisited. I’m thinking also of “Waterproof Mascara,” where your character says “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 had died, then he did—surprise!” How do you find you’re able to import some of these ideas into the broader vernacular of childhood?
billy woods: That’s a very good question. I hope I can offer an answer, perhaps if not specific, then of some kind. I couldn’t really tell you how, you know it’s like if somebody was like, “how do you tie politics into your music?” I’d be like, that’s part of my life, so I wouldn’t be able to give an answer, really, that would seem useful. But, I guess my childhood is near and easily at hand for me. Sometimes I have known people who are like “I barely remember anything before X, Y, Z age,” but, for me it’s all near at hand. Good and bad. And I don’t think I’ve changed that much, I don’t know. So I just reach out and it’s there in the bag of things that are swirling around my imagination, my thoughts, when I sit down to write. That’s one of the things that comes.
I also think that when you’re doing something like this record, that’s about horror, etc., it’s kind of like a lot of horror stories and ideas involve children. Just for all of the reasons: children are vulnerable. Children have wild imaginations. Children can see things that adults don’t see. Sometimes the tables are flipped, and it’s like a scary child, which is its own sort of thing. The idea that a child might be evil or malevolent in some way is both a powerful thought and one that feels like you shouldn’t think it.
I’m thinking of one of the song’s next lines, “It’s just us in this room—that’s it!” It taps into this sense, like you were saying earlier, of this childish imagination, but also the idea that a child can see, for instance, this monster under the bed.
At this point, technology interceded to steal about fifteen minutes of conversation with billy woods from me—or, more truthfully, from you. I must resort to paraphrasing: woods informed me that I had heard the line wrong—that the “it’s just us in this room—that’s it!” line was not a mother disabusing a child of the notion that there was a monster under the bed, but a mother establishing a family-within-the-family, that the uncles outside of the room were not a part of. Amused by such an obvious misinterpretation, I asked woods about the interpretation of his lyrics generally. Specifically, I noted the level of trust he puts in his listeners with his dense, referential tapestries that reward repeat listening without ever veering into the tired domain of lyric-as-self-contained-puzzle, and asked if he felt a certain way when he sees his lyrics misinterpreted or whether he had a sort of death-of-the-author perspective on the whole thing.
For what it’s worth, I had at that point in the conversation already advanced at least two interpretations of his lyrics that he had not intended when recording them. woods assured me that he doesn’t go looking for people to get things incorrectly, even though sometimes he’ll see something preposterously wrong. He invoked his mother’s critical background to flesh out the idea that an artist’s intention is just one possible reading of a piece that, once put out into the world, meaning might be freely assigned to. To demonstrate the way in which understanding his intention might still offer listeners an inroad into the music, he pointed to “Moneylenders” on the Alchemist’s version of Haram, a song he had written while reading about Diogenes the Cynic, the ancient Greek philosopher who, in woods’ words, would do things that people would now perceive as “performative,” such as giving up all of his possessions or walking the streets in full daylight with a lamp and claiming that he was “looking for an honest man.” Per woods, “Moneylenders” is riddled with explicit references to Diogenes—“looking for an honest man, handgun in hand” comes directly to mind—which references, if understood, give listeners a sort of sub-basement view of the song at hand.
We then turned to Golliwog’s lead single, “Misery.” I complimented woods’ ability to write about relationships, specifically in the context of unrequited love. I asked, on the topic of deep textual intention, whether woods had at all chosen Stephen King’s Misery as the framing mechanism for his romantic hanger-on/obsessive fan/vampire track for the fact that the novel’s book-within-a-book, Misery’s Return, is an ostensibly Victorian, pulpy romance novel featuring the lead character’s traveling to Africa to search for her father alongside her two lovers. Believe it or not, he hadn’t. The recording picked back up as I asked about the valence of “Misery” coming from an artist who may well find himself the object of others’ obsessive fandom.
You cast “Misery’s” narrator as a fan or an obsessive.
billy woods: Well it’s definitely a fan of the person, but it’s not like a stranger.
Is there anything in “Misery” that reflects on your experience as the object of fandom? Like, how does it feel to have fans?
billy woods: It’s funny, because when I wrote it I was like, I wonder if people will think it’s like an opposite thing, where in my mind I was thinking of a person, or a situation, and just moving the furniture around. “Misery” was something I was writing from my own perspective, for whatever that’s worth. And in the midst of writing a song like that, I’m digging into my own emotions and experience. But I did think after I did it, I was like, “oh, I wonder if people would think this is me making a song about somebody being involved with me.” And I was like, no. I was thinking of a situation to do with my own life.
Setting the record straight that this is not just a reverse-“Stan.”
billy woods: No, I mean, there would be nothing wrong with that, but no, I was working in less…theoretical territory.
You have a real ear for turns of phrase. There are pithy little sayings that you frequently return to in your music that seem to serve as a way to communicate something far deeper, or to justify some act of violence that the audience of the narrator has just seen. This album also deals specifically with Palestine, whether it’s “Corinthians”’ “12 billion USD hovering over the Gaza Strip,” or when you rap about watching a man be killed by a drone strike from the comfort of your own home. I think right now, when I talk about living inside a billy woods lyric, what I mean is the sensation of living in the imperial core and watching Israel massacre Palestinians with United States money, and backing, and technology, and then see the contours of the debate back home revolve exclusively around what kind of language we use to describe it—is it a genocide? is it a war? Watching people get deported over language. You’ve been rapping about contested language and language-as-violence for some time. Does the modern policing and contestation of language play any part in your songwriting process, or is this just something that you’ve intuitively understood for some time.
billy woods: Well, we went a long distance there, which is not a bad thing. We started off on things overseas and now we’re bringing it to things happening here. So, if we’re going to have a conversation about foreign wars and US involvement, they can be connected conversations, but they’re different conversations. For example, you can have whatever opinion you want of the Ukraine war, and it doesn’t seem to be something that “threatens national security,” apparently. But holding certain views of the war on Gaza is viewed differently. So, it’s a lot of times things are put into the same boxes because they’re similar, but they’re not actually that alike, you know? American motives and reasons for involvement overseas vary from situation to situation, even though there may be throughlines.
But as far as policing of speech in America, I mean, if we’re going to talk about the current regime and it’s textbook fascist, repressive, authoritarian behavior, which always involves antithetical false equivalencies. So I’m sure lots of people would be like, “what about when the wokesters wouldn’t let you say what you wanted online,” and compare that to actual state action, as opposed to, “you lost your job because you were yelling racial slurs at people,” or they found them in your old tweets or something. Not that someone couldn’t have an opinion about that, but it’s not analogous to what is happening now, you know? But, yeah, I feel like language is something that is always in contest. Always. Even within in-groups. Even the question of whether or not somebody wants to use the genocide. To many people, that could define in some way their stance on the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
An interesting thing is also the extensive use of words sometimes where you’re like, I wonder if everyone has agreed on what this word means. For example, what makes somebody a Zionist? Having grown up in a very anti-Zionist, anti-Israeli atmosphere at home, to me that simply means that you, in some way, do not contest Israel’s right to exist, or you have conceded Israel’s right to exist. That could be what some people say. Some people might be like, you have to be an active supporter of Israel’s policies, some people might mean that…I don’t know. I don’t want to speak for people. But it can mean a lot of things. And so people say something, and sometimes you’re like, I wonder what that actually means?
Language can be specific and vague at different points to serve different people’s needs. You know, like even Donald Trump and Make America Great Again. It’s like, everybody is allowed to dream of a different time that it was great. You know? The lack of specificity of key here, because certain people might be like, maybe they’re talking about, you know, 1890s, I don’t know if that’s the same time that Snoop Dogg’s thinking of, you know, or whoever. The vagueness allows you to sort of fill in the blank there. And as, as such, you know, like most great pieces of propaganda, uh, there’s a lot of room for different people to imagine that they’re standing under the same umbrella.
I think that’s like some of the language you use that I’m really fascinated by. I think of turns of phrase like “no hard feelings,” sayings that are so vague and often repeated that they’re meant to be a kind of just form apology, or this broad way to make you rationalize whatever you’ve just seen. It’s a really evocative thing you do time and time again.
billy woods: Yeah, sometimes there are things that you think about them, and you’re like—that’s a funny one. Sometimes I also think there are phrases that are really familiar somewhere, like how New Yorkers will be like “at the end of the day.” And you’re like, “ah, people do really say that!”
With “no hard feelings,” I think the other interesting thing about it is if you move the emphasis of the phrase to “no hard feelings,” that is an interesting way to think about it as well. Which is part of it—when I was writing that song, it was both of those meanings at once. Like, I don’t want to deal with anything that’s going to be difficult to think about or contextualize as well as of course, an apology of sorts that the same time makes no concessions.
It feels very Scorsese. Have you seen The Irishman?
billy woods: Yes, for better or worse.
The CGI is not to be forgiven. Scorsese does it always, but specifically in that movie, they’ll repeat to each other “it’s what it is,” as a way of both describing and rationalizing the fact that they’re going to have to kill Jimmy Hoffa. I feel like it’s so in keeping with the way that you use those kinds of turns of phrase: it’s meant to mask something we understand to be far worse, but we’ve all agreed to push it out of sight and out of mind. And I feel, for lack of concrete examples, like it’s something I heard throughout Golliwog, which for me makes it a particularly effective billy woods album.
billy woods: I dig that.
Something under-discussed about you is that you’re a very funny writer, and you’re particularly funny when rapping about rap’s ruling class. You’ve taken Dr. Dre to task a few times, I think about the Nas at Carnegie Hall line.
billy woods: Which is not a diss of Nas in any way! It was something that actually happened. Somebody was like, “I got tickets,” and I told her I didn’t really want to go. She was very annoyed. My thing was always like—there is a wry observation in there, but it really it’s a personal decision. Not that nobody should do it, play music with an orchestra. The girl who invited me, I was like…I can see why you’re—because sometimes when you don’t want to do something when people are like, “this is amazing, I have these tickets!” and you’re like “actually, I’m good,” then it’s like, do you think “I’m corny, do you think I’m a loser for that?” (Laughing). Because you’re really excited. Nah it’s just like, that is not the Nas show I want to go see at all. At all. I’m not mad, I think everyone who does want to see it should go. There’s nothing that says hip hop can’t be played with an orchestra. And there might even be rappers I would want to see with an orchestra, but that was not what I was looking for.
You rap a lot about gentrification, and I know this isn’t specifically gentrification, but watching the New York you knew kind of melt away. The twin line is “selling legal weed from a fake hole in the wall,” and now we have Carmelo Anthony selling legal weed.
billy woods: Oh yeah, well that was the feeling of like being in California somewhere and it’s like…it was before we had dispensaries here…and it was this fake, had the vibe of like a “hood drug spot,” but it was legal. And at that point, it’s weird. Like I remember one time, and this is not to say that this restaurant was…there was a restaurant called Madiba, in Brooklyn, Fort Greene. It was a South African restaurant and lots of African people would, young African people would like meet there and it was a good restaurant. They had pretty good drinks and it just had like a little cultural vibe at the moment. The thing that always weirded me out, and other southern African people, was that the design of it was like a shanty town, like beer hall club vibe? That was the design. That’s a little weird (laughter). A little weird. But wouldn’t be recognizable to an American. But if you’re from that area, then you get it, you know? And later on, somebody was like, “the owners are white South Africans.” That was fucking weird. But at the same time, it did manage to kind of be like a cool little place, because of the people who went there or whatever. I didn’t even go there that much. But I always feel weird about the commodification of poverty or something, you know?
You announced the record with a piece of criticism that your nine-year-old self received from your mother. How was this record, and your music, shaped by her very blunt criticism?
billy woods: (laughing) No, not really. Except in the sense of, my mother was always very—it’s funny, because a lot more people have asked me about this than I expected. It was a…pretty normal thing for my mother to offer pretty substantive critiques of my writing when I was a kid. And I think that, A, that’s just the person she is, and B, I think it’s different if you have a child who you think is really good at something. Like if you think your kid is not just like, oh, they’re decent at sports, but like, oh, this person is actually really great, at whatever, baseball or something. Then probably, if they ask “what do you think of this,” and you’re a former baseball player, or if LeBron is your dad and you’ve got some actual skills and you’re like, “hey, what did you think of my game tonight,” it’s not going to be the same thing as what Johnny’s dad might tell him because it’s just like “did you have fun?” But at a certain point it’s like, you’re beyond that, and if you’re taking this seriously then you need to work on your left hand, you know, you scored thirty points tonight because you’re playing eleven year olds and you’re better than everybody out there, but eventually you’ll be playing with other people who are good and people aren’t gonna let you just drive to your right and score every time. So, I think that’s the type of context in which it all happens.
You’re certainly not just driving to your right.
billy woods: Yeah, I think those things would be a challenge at the time sometimes, but then later on you’ll go and read something and be like…really the one I remember the most was some story I wrote, which was a horror story too, where you’re a little kid doing stuff like that and you just take something that you read that you thought was cool and a movie that you thought was cool and combine them into one sort of amalgamation of the story. And anyway, I had some story where there was like, the main character was a divorced ex-cop. And my mom was like, that’s very cliched. And I remember being annoyed and then later being like, “actually it is.” And that changed how you like look at things in the world after that, because then you notice, I remember the same thing about like, in the era that I came up, like seventies and kind of eighties TV, where there’s always like the police chief, who’s a Black guy, who’s like “you can’t do that to the people!” And there’s always a cop who’s like “fuck the rules! Too many fucking rules! That’s why the city’s falling apart. No one can actually kill the bad guy!” That’s like the plot of all of the seventies, eighties movies, is the cop who isn’t allowed to be vicious enough, which is why society is teetering on its edges.
Which, you know, also reflects the seventies and eighties in America in lots of ways. People’s fears and anxieties, real and imagined, or white society anyway. But also this idea that it’s also a more racially progressive era. So I feel like the boss a lot of times would be like a Black cop. Anyway, just things like that where you start to be like, oh, this is a cliche thing. This is just a thing people do. And then sometimes when writing as an artist, now that’s never left me, where sometimes you write something and you’re like, nah, I mean, that is the easier way to go, or it fits. But then you’re like, now I have to spend an extra hour sitting here trying to think of a way to get there without doing that.
That’s helpful, because that’s what I was trying to grasp at earlier with what I was calling your turns of phrase. You’re great at finding those cliches that society keeps returning to and serving them up decontextualized to show how absurd they are.
billy woods: And the things that we tell ourselves. The stories we tell ourselves about our own lives and the people around us.
I also think that when you’re doing something like this record, that’s about horror, etc., it’s kind of like a lot of horror stories and ideas involve children. Just for all of the reasons: children are vulnerable. Children have wild imaginations. Children can see things that adults don’t see. Sometimes the tables are flipped, and it’s like a scary child, which is its own sort of thing. The idea that a child might be evil or malevolent in some way is both a powerful thought and one that feels like you shouldn’t think it.
I’m thinking of one of the song’s next lines, “It’s just us in this room—that’s it!” It taps into this sense, like you were saying earlier, of this childish imagination, but also the idea that a child can see, for instance, this monster under the bed.
At this point, technology interceded to steal about fifteen minutes of conversation with billy woods from me—or, more truthfully, from you. I must resort to paraphrasing: woods informed me that I had heard the line wrong—that the “it’s just us in this room—that’s it!” line was not a mother disabusing a child of the notion that there was a monster under the bed, but a mother establishing a family-within-the-family, that the uncles outside of the room were not a part of. Amused by such an obvious misinterpretation, I asked woods about the interpretation of his lyrics generally. Specifically, I noted the level of trust he puts in his listeners with his dense, referential tapestries that reward repeat listening without ever veering into the tired domain of lyric-as-self-contained-puzzle, and asked if he felt a certain way when he sees his lyrics misinterpreted or whether he had a sort of death-of-the-author perspective on the whole thing.
For what it’s worth, I had at that point in the conversation already advanced at least two interpretations of his lyrics that he had not intended when recording them. woods assured me that he doesn’t go looking for people to get things incorrectly, even though sometimes he’ll see something preposterously wrong. He invoked his mother’s critical background to flesh out the idea that an artist’s intention is just one possible reading of a piece that, once put out into the world, meaning might be freely assigned to. To demonstrate the way in which understanding his intention might still offer listeners an inroad into the music, he pointed to “Moneylenders” on the Alchemist’s version of Haram, a song he had written while reading about Diogenes the Cynic, the ancient Greek philosopher who, in woods’ words, would do things that people would now perceive as “performative,” such as giving up all of his possessions or walking the streets in full daylight with a lamp and claiming that he was “looking for an honest man.” Per woods, “Moneylenders” is riddled with explicit references to Diogenes—“looking for an honest man, handgun in hand” comes directly to mind—which references, if understood, give listeners a sort of sub-basement view of the song at hand.
We then turned to Golliwog’s lead single, “Misery.” I complimented woods’ ability to write about relationships, specifically in the context of unrequited love. I asked, on the topic of deep textual intention, whether woods had at all chosen Stephen King’s Misery as the framing mechanism for his romantic hanger-on/obsessive fan/vampire track for the fact that the novel’s book-within-a-book, Misery’s Return, is an ostensibly Victorian, pulpy romance novel featuring the lead character’s traveling to Africa to search for her father alongside her two lovers. Believe it or not, he hadn’t. The recording picked back up as I asked about the valence of “Misery” coming from an artist who may well find himself the object of others’ obsessive fandom.
You cast “Misery’s” narrator as a fan or an obsessive.
billy woods: Well it’s definitely a fan of the person, but it’s not like a stranger.
Is there anything in “Misery” that reflects on your experience as the object of fandom? Like, how does it feel to have fans?
billy woods: It’s funny, because when I wrote it I was like, I wonder if people will think it’s like an opposite thing, where in my mind I was thinking of a person, or a situation, and just moving the furniture around. “Misery” was something I was writing from my own perspective, for whatever that’s worth. And in the midst of writing a song like that, I’m digging into my own emotions and experience. But I did think after I did it, I was like, “oh, I wonder if people would think this is me making a song about somebody being involved with me.” And I was like, no. I was thinking of a situation to do with my own life.
Setting the record straight that this is not just a reverse-“Stan.”
billy woods: No, I mean, there would be nothing wrong with that, but no, I was working in less…theoretical territory.
You have a real ear for turns of phrase. There are pithy little sayings that you frequently return to in your music that seem to serve as a way to communicate something far deeper, or to justify some act of violence that the audience of the narrator has just seen. This album also deals specifically with Palestine, whether it’s “Corinthians”’ “12 billion USD hovering over the Gaza Strip,” or when you rap about watching a man be killed by a drone strike from the comfort of your own home. I think right now, when I talk about living inside a billy woods lyric, what I mean is the sensation of living in the imperial core and watching Israel massacre Palestinians with United States money, and backing, and technology, and then see the contours of the debate back home revolve exclusively around what kind of language we use to describe it—is it a genocide? is it a war? Watching people get deported over language. You’ve been rapping about contested language and language-as-violence for some time. Does the modern policing and contestation of language play any part in your songwriting process, or is this just something that you’ve intuitively understood for some time.
billy woods: Well, we went a long distance there, which is not a bad thing. We started off on things overseas and now we’re bringing it to things happening here. So, if we’re going to have a conversation about foreign wars and US involvement, they can be connected conversations, but they’re different conversations. For example, you can have whatever opinion you want of the Ukraine war, and it doesn’t seem to be something that “threatens national security,” apparently. But holding certain views of the war on Gaza is viewed differently. So, it’s a lot of times things are put into the same boxes because they’re similar, but they’re not actually that alike, you know? American motives and reasons for involvement overseas vary from situation to situation, even though there may be throughlines.
But as far as policing of speech in America, I mean, if we’re going to talk about the current regime and it’s textbook fascist, repressive, authoritarian behavior, which always involves antithetical false equivalencies. So I’m sure lots of people would be like, “what about when the wokesters wouldn’t let you say what you wanted online,” and compare that to actual state action, as opposed to, “you lost your job because you were yelling racial slurs at people,” or they found them in your old tweets or something. Not that someone couldn’t have an opinion about that, but it’s not analogous to what is happening now, you know? But, yeah, I feel like language is something that is always in contest. Always. Even within in-groups. Even the question of whether or not somebody wants to use the genocide. To many people, that could define in some way their stance on the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
An interesting thing is also the extensive use of words sometimes where you’re like, I wonder if everyone has agreed on what this word means. For example, what makes somebody a Zionist? Having grown up in a very anti-Zionist, anti-Israeli atmosphere at home, to me that simply means that you, in some way, do not contest Israel’s right to exist, or you have conceded Israel’s right to exist. That could be what some people say. Some people might be like, you have to be an active supporter of Israel’s policies, some people might mean that…I don’t know. I don’t want to speak for people. But it can mean a lot of things. And so people say something, and sometimes you’re like, I wonder what that actually means?
Language can be specific and vague at different points to serve different people’s needs. You know, like even Donald Trump and Make America Great Again. It’s like, everybody is allowed to dream of a different time that it was great. You know? The lack of specificity of key here, because certain people might be like, maybe they’re talking about, you know, 1890s, I don’t know if that’s the same time that Snoop Dogg’s thinking of, you know, or whoever. The vagueness allows you to sort of fill in the blank there. And as, as such, you know, like most great pieces of propaganda, uh, there’s a lot of room for different people to imagine that they’re standing under the same umbrella.
I think that’s like some of the language you use that I’m really fascinated by. I think of turns of phrase like “no hard feelings,” sayings that are so vague and often repeated that they’re meant to be a kind of just form apology, or this broad way to make you rationalize whatever you’ve just seen. It’s a really evocative thing you do time and time again.
billy woods: Yeah, sometimes there are things that you think about them, and you’re like—that’s a funny one. Sometimes I also think there are phrases that are really familiar somewhere, like how New Yorkers will be like “at the end of the day.” And you’re like, “ah, people do really say that!”
With “no hard feelings,” I think the other interesting thing about it is if you move the emphasis of the phrase to “no hard feelings,” that is an interesting way to think about it as well. Which is part of it—when I was writing that song, it was both of those meanings at once. Like, I don’t want to deal with anything that’s going to be difficult to think about or contextualize as well as of course, an apology of sorts that the same time makes no concessions.
It feels very Scorsese. Have you seen The Irishman?
billy woods: Yes, for better or worse.
The CGI is not to be forgiven. Scorsese does it always, but specifically in that movie, they’ll repeat to each other “it’s what it is,” as a way of both describing and rationalizing the fact that they’re going to have to kill Jimmy Hoffa. I feel like it’s so in keeping with the way that you use those kinds of turns of phrase: it’s meant to mask something we understand to be far worse, but we’ve all agreed to push it out of sight and out of mind. And I feel, for lack of concrete examples, like it’s something I heard throughout Golliwog, which for me makes it a particularly effective billy woods album.
billy woods: I dig that.
Something under-discussed about you is that you’re a very funny writer, and you’re particularly funny when rapping about rap’s ruling class. You’ve taken Dr. Dre to task a few times, I think about the Nas at Carnegie Hall line.
billy woods: Which is not a diss of Nas in any way! It was something that actually happened. Somebody was like, “I got tickets,” and I told her I didn’t really want to go. She was very annoyed. My thing was always like—there is a wry observation in there, but it really it’s a personal decision. Not that nobody should do it, play music with an orchestra. The girl who invited me, I was like…I can see why you’re—because sometimes when you don’t want to do something when people are like, “this is amazing, I have these tickets!” and you’re like “actually, I’m good,” then it’s like, do you think “I’m corny, do you think I’m a loser for that?” (Laughing). Because you’re really excited. Nah it’s just like, that is not the Nas show I want to go see at all. At all. I’m not mad, I think everyone who does want to see it should go. There’s nothing that says hip hop can’t be played with an orchestra. And there might even be rappers I would want to see with an orchestra, but that was not what I was looking for.
You rap a lot about gentrification, and I know this isn’t specifically gentrification, but watching the New York you knew kind of melt away. The twin line is “selling legal weed from a fake hole in the wall,” and now we have Carmelo Anthony selling legal weed.
billy woods: Oh yeah, well that was the feeling of like being in California somewhere and it’s like…it was before we had dispensaries here…and it was this fake, had the vibe of like a “hood drug spot,” but it was legal. And at that point, it’s weird. Like I remember one time, and this is not to say that this restaurant was…there was a restaurant called Madiba, in Brooklyn, Fort Greene. It was a South African restaurant and lots of African people would, young African people would like meet there and it was a good restaurant. They had pretty good drinks and it just had like a little cultural vibe at the moment. The thing that always weirded me out, and other southern African people, was that the design of it was like a shanty town, like beer hall club vibe? That was the design. That’s a little weird (laughter). A little weird. But wouldn’t be recognizable to an American. But if you’re from that area, then you get it, you know? And later on, somebody was like, “the owners are white South Africans.” That was fucking weird. But at the same time, it did manage to kind of be like a cool little place, because of the people who went there or whatever. I didn’t even go there that much. But I always feel weird about the commodification of poverty or something, you know?
You announced the record with a piece of criticism that your nine-year-old self received from your mother. How was this record, and your music, shaped by her very blunt criticism?
billy woods: (laughing) No, not really. Except in the sense of, my mother was always very—it’s funny, because a lot more people have asked me about this than I expected. It was a…pretty normal thing for my mother to offer pretty substantive critiques of my writing when I was a kid. And I think that, A, that’s just the person she is, and B, I think it’s different if you have a child who you think is really good at something. Like if you think your kid is not just like, oh, they’re decent at sports, but like, oh, this person is actually really great, at whatever, baseball or something. Then probably, if they ask “what do you think of this,” and you’re a former baseball player, or if LeBron is your dad and you’ve got some actual skills and you’re like, “hey, what did you think of my game tonight,” it’s not going to be the same thing as what Johnny’s dad might tell him because it’s just like “did you have fun?” But at a certain point it’s like, you’re beyond that, and if you’re taking this seriously then you need to work on your left hand, you know, you scored thirty points tonight because you’re playing eleven year olds and you’re better than everybody out there, but eventually you’ll be playing with other people who are good and people aren’t gonna let you just drive to your right and score every time. So, I think that’s the type of context in which it all happens.
You’re certainly not just driving to your right.
billy woods: Yeah, I think those things would be a challenge at the time sometimes, but then later on you’ll go and read something and be like…really the one I remember the most was some story I wrote, which was a horror story too, where you’re a little kid doing stuff like that and you just take something that you read that you thought was cool and a movie that you thought was cool and combine them into one sort of amalgamation of the story. And anyway, I had some story where there was like, the main character was a divorced ex-cop. And my mom was like, that’s very cliched. And I remember being annoyed and then later being like, “actually it is.” And that changed how you like look at things in the world after that, because then you notice, I remember the same thing about like, in the era that I came up, like seventies and kind of eighties TV, where there’s always like the police chief, who’s a Black guy, who’s like “you can’t do that to the people!” And there’s always a cop who’s like “fuck the rules! Too many fucking rules! That’s why the city’s falling apart. No one can actually kill the bad guy!” That’s like the plot of all of the seventies, eighties movies, is the cop who isn’t allowed to be vicious enough, which is why society is teetering on its edges.
Which, you know, also reflects the seventies and eighties in America in lots of ways. People’s fears and anxieties, real and imagined, or white society anyway. But also this idea that it’s also a more racially progressive era. So I feel like the boss a lot of times would be like a Black cop. Anyway, just things like that where you start to be like, oh, this is a cliche thing. This is just a thing people do. And then sometimes when writing as an artist, now that’s never left me, where sometimes you write something and you’re like, nah, I mean, that is the easier way to go, or it fits. But then you’re like, now I have to spend an extra hour sitting here trying to think of a way to get there without doing that.
That’s helpful, because that’s what I was trying to grasp at earlier with what I was calling your turns of phrase. You’re great at finding those cliches that society keeps returning to and serving them up decontextualized to show how absurd they are.
billy woods: And the things that we tell ourselves. The stories we tell ourselves about our own lives and the people around us.
With “no hard feelings,” I think the other interesting thing about it is if you move the emphasis of the phrase to “no hard feelings,” that is an interesting way to think about it as well. Which is part of it—when I was writing that song, it was both of those meanings at once. Like, I don’t want to deal with anything that’s going to be difficult to think about or contextualize as well as of course, an apology of sorts that the same time makes no concessions.
It feels very Scorsese. Have you seen The Irishman?
billy woods: Yes, for better or worse.
The CGI is not to be forgiven. Scorsese does it always, but specifically in that movie, they’ll repeat to each other “it’s what it is,” as a way of both describing and rationalizing the fact that they’re going to have to kill Jimmy Hoffa. I feel like it’s so in keeping with the way that you use those kinds of turns of phrase: it’s meant to mask something we understand to be far worse, but we’ve all agreed to push it out of sight and out of mind. And I feel, for lack of concrete examples, like it’s something I heard throughout Golliwog, which for me makes it a particularly effective billy woods album.
billy woods: I dig that.
Something under-discussed about you is that you’re a very funny writer, and you’re particularly funny when rapping about rap’s ruling class. You’ve taken Dr. Dre to task a few times, I think about the Nas at Carnegie Hall line.
billy woods: Which is not a diss of Nas in any way! It was something that actually happened. Somebody was like, “I got tickets,” and I told her I didn’t really want to go. She was very annoyed. My thing was always like—there is a wry observation in there, but it really it’s a personal decision. Not that nobody should do it, play music with an orchestra. The girl who invited me, I was like…I can see why you’re—because sometimes when you don’t want to do something when people are like, “this is amazing, I have these tickets!” and you’re like “actually, I’m good,” then it’s like, do you think “I’m corny, do you think I’m a loser for that?” (Laughing). Because you’re really excited. Nah it’s just like, that is not the Nas show I want to go see at all. At all. I’m not mad, I think everyone who does want to see it should go. There’s nothing that says hip hop can’t be played with an orchestra. And there might even be rappers I would want to see with an orchestra, but that was not what I was looking for.
You rap a lot about gentrification, and I know this isn’t specifically gentrification, but watching the New York you knew kind of melt away. The twin line is “selling legal weed from a fake hole in the wall,” and now we have Carmelo Anthony selling legal weed.
billy woods: Oh yeah, well that was the feeling of like being in California somewhere and it’s like…it was before we had dispensaries here…and it was this fake, had the vibe of like a “hood drug spot,” but it was legal. And at that point, it’s weird. Like I remember one time, and this is not to say that this restaurant was…there was a restaurant called Madiba, in Brooklyn, Fort Greene. It was a South African restaurant and lots of African people would, young African people would like meet there and it was a good restaurant. They had pretty good drinks and it just had like a little cultural vibe at the moment. The thing that always weirded me out, and other southern African people, was that the design of it was like a shanty town, like beer hall club vibe? That was the design. That’s a little weird (laughter). A little weird. But wouldn’t be recognizable to an American. But if you’re from that area, then you get it, you know? And later on, somebody was like, “the owners are white South Africans.” That was fucking weird. But at the same time, it did manage to kind of be like a cool little place, because of the people who went there or whatever. I didn’t even go there that much. But I always feel weird about the commodification of poverty or something, you know?
You announced the record with a piece of criticism that your nine-year-old self received from your mother. How was this record, and your music, shaped by her very blunt criticism?
billy woods: (laughing) No, not really. Except in the sense of, my mother was always very—it’s funny, because a lot more people have asked me about this than I expected. It was a…pretty normal thing for my mother to offer pretty substantive critiques of my writing when I was a kid. And I think that, A, that’s just the person she is, and B, I think it’s different if you have a child who you think is really good at something. Like if you think your kid is not just like, oh, they’re decent at sports, but like, oh, this person is actually really great, at whatever, baseball or something. Then probably, if they ask “what do you think of this,” and you’re a former baseball player, or if LeBron is your dad and you’ve got some actual skills and you’re like, “hey, what did you think of my game tonight,” it’s not going to be the same thing as what Johnny’s dad might tell him because it’s just like “did you have fun?” But at a certain point it’s like, you’re beyond that, and if you’re taking this seriously then you need to work on your left hand, you know, you scored thirty points tonight because you’re playing eleven year olds and you’re better than everybody out there, but eventually you’ll be playing with other people who are good and people aren’t gonna let you just drive to your right and score every time. So, I think that’s the type of context in which it all happens.
You’re certainly not just driving to your right.
billy woods: Yeah, I think those things would be a challenge at the time sometimes, but then later on you’ll go and read something and be like…really the one I remember the most was some story I wrote, which was a horror story too, where you’re a little kid doing stuff like that and you just take something that you read that you thought was cool and a movie that you thought was cool and combine them into one sort of amalgamation of the story. And anyway, I had some story where there was like, the main character was a divorced ex-cop. And my mom was like, that’s very cliched. And I remember being annoyed and then later being like, “actually it is.” And that changed how you like look at things in the world after that, because then you notice, I remember the same thing about like, in the era that I came up, like seventies and kind of eighties TV, where there’s always like the police chief, who’s a Black guy, who’s like “you can’t do that to the people!” And there’s always a cop who’s like “fuck the rules! Too many fucking rules! That’s why the city’s falling apart. No one can actually kill the bad guy!” That’s like the plot of all of the seventies, eighties movies, is the cop who isn’t allowed to be vicious enough, which is why society is teetering on its edges.
Which, you know, also reflects the seventies and eighties in America in lots of ways. People’s fears and anxieties, real and imagined, or white society anyway. But also this idea that it’s also a more racially progressive era. So I feel like the boss a lot of times would be like a Black cop. Anyway, just things like that where you start to be like, oh, this is a cliche thing. This is just a thing people do. And then sometimes when writing as an artist, now that’s never left me, where sometimes you write something and you’re like, nah, I mean, that is the easier way to go, or it fits. But then you’re like, now I have to spend an extra hour sitting here trying to think of a way to get there without doing that.
That’s helpful, because that’s what I was trying to grasp at earlier with what I was calling your turns of phrase. You’re great at finding those cliches that society keeps returning to and serving them up decontextualized to show how absurd they are.
billy woods: And the things that we tell ourselves. The stories we tell ourselves about our own lives and the people around us.