Billy Woods is finally having his moment

“It’s a free­dom in admit­ting it’s not going to get bet­ter / wash­ing your hands of peo­ple you’ve known for­ev­er,” the vet­er­an under­ground rap­per bil­ly woods bold­ly pro­claimed on 2022’s ​“Remorse­less,” cre­at­ing an instant mantra for thou­sands unsure of how to embrace life amid a bleak future filled with irre­versible cli­mate change and AI pre­tend­ing to be Big­gie Smalls (more on that later). 

The haunt­ing song con­tains a tran­scen­dent but prog­gy flute sam­ple that’s stretched out to imi­tate the howls of a lost lamb. Back even fur­ther on ​“The For­eign­er,” the Wash­ing­ton D.C.-born artist uncov­ered beams of light amid a mod­ern malaise, as he pon­dered whether anti­de­pres­sants were help­ing or hold­ing back his gen­er­a­tion (“Beat the odds or eat your meds”). On these two career high­lights, woods’ dizzy­ing raps seem to be fuelled by a strict diet of robus­ta cof­fee, high strength weed, and Cor­mac McCarthy novels. 

His gut­tur­al yet author­i­ta­tive vocal deliv­ery is like Albert Camus doing an audi­ence read­ing while Can­ni­bal Ox’s raw ​“Painkiller” instru­men­tal is looped infi­nite­ly in the back­ground. He purges metaphors in a tired yet enlight­ened drawl that con­sis­tent­ly uncov­ers hid­den rev­e­la­tions about the human con­di­tion and – whether as a solo artist or along­side E L U C I D in their dizzy­ing rap duo, Armand Ham­mer – the raps have a habit of stop­ping you dead in your tracks. ​“Writ­ing raps always sus­tained me,” woods tells Huck of his cre­ative process – his speak­ing voice notice­ably soft­er than the blunt tex­tures of his music. ​“It pro­vid­ed an out­let for emo­tions and ener­gy I didn’t oth­er­wise know how to deal with.”

Of the way the inter­net insti­gates ten­sions and unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions with­in the rap com­mu­ni­ty, he adds sep­a­rate­ly: ​“There’s so many dif­fer­ent bub­bles on the inter­net right now. There is def­i­nite­ly a whole aspect of peo­ple point­ing out ​‘ohh­hh, this rap­per died!’ or got into a gang, where fans sort of sit debat­ing it. It means that some rap­pers are led down this road of authen­tic­i­ty, where they feel like they have to go out and prove them­selves [in the street] to be seen as authen­tic. That stuff is real­ly poisonous.”

It’s an espe­cial­ly inter­est­ing moment to speak to woods, with pal­pa­ble lev­els of excite­ment build­ing around his art. Over the last year the New York Times has described him as ​“pro­lif­ic;” Pitch­fork have writ­ten a long read on the his­to­ry of his influ­en­tial, New York-based indie rap label Back­woodz; the crowds have quadru­pled at live shows; and the artist, who once felt like a com­plete main­stream out­sider, has now moved into Bill­board chart ter­ri­to­ry. It seems like he’s final­ly enjoy­ing some well earned spoils after decades of grind­ing on the under­ground cir­cuit (his debut, Cam­ou­flage, dropped all the way back in 2003) and slow­ly fos­ter­ing a com­mit­ted Back­woodz com­mu­ni­ty who are pre­pared to pay hun­dreds of dol­lars for the label’s vinyl.

His new album Maps, which was made col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly with crim­i­nal­ly under­rat­ed LA-based pro­duc­er Ken­ny Segal (a fol­low-up to the duo’s 2019 album Hid­ing Places), is anoth­er obvi­ous lev­el up. Much like a stolen dia­mond engage­ment ring, each of the new project’s post-boom bap beats (par­tic­u­lar­ly ​“Face­time”) glis­ten with a sad sort of ele­gance – Segal there­fore prompts woods to spit some of the most sober­ing raps of his career. 

On the brain-melt­ing ​“Year Zero” (also fea­tur­ing a pret­ty per­fect guest verse from Dan­ny Brown), woods weighs up how his tax­es poten­tial­ly pay off police bru­tal­i­ty set­tle­ments, while the more serene vibe of ​“As The Crow Flies” inspires the poignant reflec­tions of a dad notic­ing the phys­i­cal infal­li­bil­i­ty of his infant son while push­ing him on the kid­dy swing. Maps is per­fect­ly designed for a lis­ten on noise-can­celling cans dur­ing some soli­tary 3AM soul search­ing – ​“Live for­ev­er in head­phones and base­ments,” woods once telling­ly rapped of his appeal on ear­ly deep cut ​“Gourmet” – and it is deserved­ly among the best-reviewed albums of the year.

The son of an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor moth­er and a Marx­ist father, the lat­ter active in Zimbabwe’s War of Lib­er­a­tion, woods spent a lot of his child­hood in the African coun­try before mov­ing back to Amer­i­ca in the late-80s. Some of the great nov­els of the last 500 years were on offer with­in the family’s book shelves, but it was the trans­gres­sive yet polit­i­cal sto­ry­telling raps of artists like 2Pac, Black Sheep, Ice Cube, and Pub­lic Ene­my that arguably left the deep­er impres­sion on his for­ma­tive teenage mind. This rap dream pushed the bud­ding MC into the orbit of men­tor Vor­dul Mega of Harlem rap duo Can­ni­bal Ox, and lat­er on into the realms of pro­fes­sion­al rap­per with a cult fan­base dis­sect­ing his every word and pro­claim­ing him to be the best lyri­cist since MF DOOM. Not that he feels this pres­sure too much. ​“I don’t think about it,” he says, half-believ­ably. ​“That pres­sure nev­er occurred to me.” 

To cel­e­brate the release of Maps and a sum­mer filled with inter­na­tion­al fes­ti­val appear­ances, Huck caught up with Woods to talk about the real­i­ties of tour­ing as an inde­pen­dent artist, hid­ing dark­ness inside of lev­i­ty, the ethics of AI Big­gie songs, and how he’d ulti­mate­ly like to be remembered.

A new song like ​“As The Crow Flies” seems to be all about savour­ing life’s small joys. Maybe on pre­vi­ous bil­ly woods’ records a lot of the songs are like being stuck in the mid­dle of trou­bled waters, but I love that Maps sounds more relaxed and like some­one who made it across to the shore.

bil­ly woods: I don’t feel like I’ve made it to the shore just yet, to be hon­est [laughs]. I think in life you must always have this recog­ni­tion that you don’t have con­trol over every­thing that’s going to hap­pen. You could be think­ing every­thing is great and then you go to your next check up and they say they found a mass of can­cer in your body. The blood tests might have some fun­ny num­bers, so they need to take anoth­er look. You can’t con­trol the world, so appre­ci­at­ing the small moments is espe­cial­ly impor­tant. Con­cep­tu­al­ly, Maps def­i­nite­ly taps into that [real­i­sa­tion].

You’ve ref­er­enced Nat Turner’s slave rebel­lion in your raps before. In fact, he’s a fig­ure I see eulo­gised a lot on the inter­net late­ly. As racist police bru­tal­i­ty builds and builds in Amer­i­ca, do you think there’s ever a risk of anoth­er vio­lent insur­rec­tion from those who feel oppressed?

I don’t know, man. Like ​“Blue Smoke” says, ​“over time, sym­bols eclipse the things that they sym­bol­ise.” An insur­rec­tion? That’s a wild idea. But Nat Turn­er, like a lot of things, has maybe become more enthralling to peo­ple than the com­pli­cat­ed real­i­ty. We live in a coun­try with a deep his­to­ry of polit­i­cal vio­lence. Turner’s insur­rec­tion itself is an act of polit­i­cal vio­lence; an attempt to change the law of the land and to free enslaved peo­ple through force. I guess I would say we live in a soci­ety that’s atom­ised. Peo­ple are far apart and des­per­ate­ly on their own in their dif­fer­ent ways. It means they are look­ing for things to iden­ti­fy with. Some­times those things are caus­es that are hon­ourable and admirable and scary and bad, all at once.

I don’t think an insur­rec­tion is going to hap­pen in the US; armed [gov­ern­ment-backed] polit­i­cal vio­lence is more like­ly to be a tool. I mean, also: does it count as an insur­rec­tion if the peo­ple who are strik­ing back at police are right wing? In Amer­i­ca some­one is always going to be strik­ing back. We live in a coun­try that’s both author­i­tar­i­an and anti-author­i­tar­i­an; all at once. It’s a bizarre dou­ble edged sword and it works to both America’s ben­e­fit and its detri­ment. We are engrained from a young age to be dis­trust­ful of the state. I actu­al­ly use that for one of my argu­ments for need­ing to remain armed. Why would you build this huge admin­is­tra­tive state, with the most pow­er­ful mil­i­tary and police force, but at the same time have your peo­ple be in fear of them and make con­stant prepa­ra­tions to resist them? It’s a very strange thing, but human beings are strange.

There’s this pas­sage in McCarthy’s Blood Merid­i­an where he writes: ​“When the lamb is lost in the moun­tain he cries. Some­times the moth­er comes. Some­times the wolf.” I know it is one of your favourite nov­els and I feel like your songs so often explore a sim­i­lar ques­tion, but cen­tred around human­i­ty. With the pro­lif­er­a­tion of tech­nol­o­gy, does it feel like the wolf is now respond­ing to our cries more and more? 

If you look at any tech­nol­o­gy peo­ple have thought up… let’s say split­ting the atom: there are great things about that from an ener­gy per­spec­tive, but it’s also extin­guished mil­lions of lives and [with nuclear weapons] there is an exis­ten­tial threat hang­ing over our heads. For all things there will be an equal and oppo­site reaction.

Rather than explor­ing who responds to the cry, my ques­tion is why do we always need to go down the same road? If you are going to go down it, there will be neg­a­tive out­comes. You have to ask whether they jus­ti­fy the pos­i­tives. You can­not light up your apart­ment and a whole city and have elec­tric­i­ty and refrig­er­a­tion and all these things with­out pay­ing a cost. You can’t live in a tech free soci­ety with­out a cost, either: moth­ers are going to die in child­birth when they don’t need to, or peo­ple will die of cur­able diseases. 

At the end of all these things, we are going to die. So, it is per­haps more of a ques­tion of how we would like to live.

It’s nuts because every time I log onto YouTube there’s a new deep fake Big­gie song cre­at­ed by arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence mim­ic­k­ing his sound. Is this anoth­er way to steal a Black man’s voice and dis­tort it? Like, if you heard a deep fake bil­ly woods’ song, how would you feel?

It is depress­ing that any­one has any inter­est in that, but peo­ple do a lot of things that are depress­ing to me. How much ener­gy can I spend on things I have no con­trol over? If they did do [AI woods], I wouldn’t feel hon­oured or any­thing. It just isn’t very inter­est­ing to me. I guess for the peo­ple who lis­ten, the idea of detach­ing them­selves from human­i­ty appeals in some way. 

I don’t see any rea­son why we need an algo­rithm-cre­at­ed movie, either. But no doubt lots and lots of peo­ple would want to go see it at the cin­e­ma because it feels like an event, right? Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, just like with a lot of oth­er tech­nol­o­gy, has peo­ple com­plete­ly fas­ci­nat­ed with its very exis­tence, but that fas­ci­na­tion feels greater than push­ing the tech into actu­al­ly doing some­thing ethical. 

“Face Time” is my favourite song from Maps. I love the idea that ther­a­py over Zoom isn’t healthy… 

I was expand­ing upon the idea of main­tain­ing rela­tion­ships at a dis­tance. Your dai­ly life when you are out on the road and tour­ing is con­fus­ing. You look at home as real life, but is it your real life if you ain’t back there? Some­times there’s bad things at home you ain’t deal­ing with, all because you are tour­ing. Some­times being away tour­ing is hor­ri­bly iso­lat­ing and lone­ly. You feel like you are miss­ing out on [fam­i­ly] life, but oth­er times it is a rush and a get­away from things you can’t deal with. That song def­i­nite­ly explores this duality.

“Croc­o­dile Tears” is prob­a­bly the song that cement­ed me as a fan of your music. You rap this line, ​“32 bars on how to rob and kill your neigh­bours / Still got the nerve to ask God to save you.” Where did that come from, exactly?

That line specif­i­cal­ly was about rap­pers spend­ing a whole album brag­ging about ter­ror­is­ing the com­mu­ni­ty in which they live and then they will still be like: ​“Oh dear god, please save me.” That moral con­tra­dic­tion is how humans are and it amus­es me.

If it all stopped tomor­row, how do you want peo­ple to remem­ber bil­ly woods as an artist? Do you even think that far ahead? 

I hope to be con­sid­ered as one of the best of my era. I want peo­ple to go through my discog­ra­phy. I want them to say I was one of the best, and some­body who was orig­i­nal and not afraid to be themselves.

My sound can be quite bleak, sure, but there’s always these bright inter­rup­tions; I like to oper­ate in those jux­ta­po­si­tions. I guess some­times when peo­ple meet me, they are sur­prised that this pret­ty per­son­al rap­per is actu­al­ly fun­ny. But I nev­er made a record, even the dark­est album, where it wasn’t fun­ny in some way. I am a big fan of dark com­e­dy. Maybe that’s due to grow­ing up around so much British humour [on tele­vi­sion]. I like moments of dark­ness hid­den inside of lev­i­ty. That’s an inter­est­ing space. 

This inter­view has been con­densed for clarity.

Maps by Bil­ly Woods and Ken­ny Segal is out now on Back­woods Stu­dios and Fat Pos­sum Records.

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