Billy Woods on the Lyrics That Changed His Life
The semi-anonymous indie rap legend and Backwoodz Studioz co-founder pays homage to songs by Nas, MF Doom, Fela Kuti, and more.
Words Matter is an interview series where songwriters whose work means a lot to us talk about the lyrics that mean a lot to them—the ones that helped shape their style, made them jealous, or left them awestruck.
A family is evicted from their apartment just before Christmas as their neighbors pick through their valuables strewn on the sidewalk. An American fighter drone silently monitors the Gaza strip, its mere presence sending shivers through an entire region. A man wakes from a dream of performing music for white executives into another dream of former podcast host Math Hoffa interrogating him on whether or not he’s ever worn a dress. These are a few of the horrors depicted across Billy Woods’s latest album Golliwog, a collection of rap vignettes varying from tense to intimate to silly. Woods has always been an exacting writer and technician, capable of shifting between first and third-person storytelling without losing the unique flow and acerbic humor that’s endeared him to two generations of indie rap heads. But Golliwog is among the most haunted and visceral albums of his career, afropessimism retrofitted to nursery rhyme.
He’s as magnetic an interview subject as he is on the mic. When I video call him on a Tuesday afternoon, he has his camera turned off (unless you catch him at a show, Woods obscures his face in interviews, videos, and press photos) but sounds like he’s in good spirits. His baritone carries through my headphone speakers, animating everything from his laugh to the brief pauses he takes as he considers his favorite OutKast albums or the specific kind of lasagna recipe he saw in the New York Times. He asks me nearly as many questions as I ask him, each of us unspooling our respective listening and watching histories—ATLiens is his favorite OutKast album, and he remembers being bowled over by the twist ending of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy when it dropped in 2003.
One of Woods’s greatest talents as a writer is the way he balances the scholarly with the streetwise. He’s gained a reputation as a doomsayer and a dense lyricist, whether solo or with the maverick Queens-born rapper-producer Elucid in the duo Armand Hammer. If you listen closely, you can hear the money stashed under mattresses and bread broken with shady characters as loudly as the Sylvia Plath and Toni Morrison allusions. Here are some of the artists, lyrics, and songs—from MF Doom’s Viktor Vaughn alias to unsung group The Juggaknots—that have inspired Wood’s spellbinding brand of hip-hop.
