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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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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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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