At the center of billy woods’ flickering, phantasmagoric GOLLIWOG is a pair of eyes. It belongs to the titular doll, a 19th-century caricature of pitchy tufts, red lips, shiv-sharp teeth, and casual cruelty borne of (allegedly unwitting) minstrel origin and commodified by enterprising English toy makers to line the shelves and arms of young white Western tabula rasas. It was typically constructed with the glazed gaze of a hapless animal. On the cover of woods’ new LP, even from feet away that gaze penetrates and stays fixed on your own, a portable abyss whose pupils ravenously follow the ancient sins it spies through your windows.
woods, who by now has achieved enough visibility to be a serious contender for the greatest hip-hop artist alive, turns his golliwog into an albatross whose shapeshifting depends on whichever beast is feasting on his residual scraps of soul. (“Ragdoll playing dead,” he utters right at the outset, a bar of extraordinary density in an album crammed with them.) It is himself; it is whatever lays rotten inside him; it is the scars of his past, the lacerator and the hand commanding the knife; it is friends and family, lovers, all their doppelgängers, everyone and everywhere and it never, ever breaks its gaze, not one time.
Such psychodrama is nothing new to a Brooklynite whose decades-long career is defined by records steeped in anxious atmospherics, but rarely has that dread sounded so acute. GOLLIWOG’s myriad producers, many of whom are previous contributors to woods’ catalogue, color-grade the MC’s murky tableaus. Sometimes, they fabricate the entire set. On “STAR87,” Conductor Williams pairs tinny boom-bap with quivering violins, errant bass, and the unceasing ring of landlines. (“They wanna know where the bodies is hid,” woods’ narrator reveals eventually, as if it would ever help.) woods opens “Waterproof Mascara” with a portrait of a weeping mother before shifting subject but Preservation keeps that weeping in the foreground, looping incessantly like a dark splinter lodged in the heart. The crackle of a palpitating digital heartbeat thrums underneath al.divino’s introductory verse on “Maquiladoras” until the first gunshot is fired, after which a heartbreaking piano chord punctuates the demarcated timeline.
In lesser hands, GOLLIWOG might read too overwhelming or leaden to be enjoyable, but in the same vein as 2023’s patchwork Maps, woods makes plenty of room for crucial doses of levity. Modern existential nightmares receive an absurdity apropos to their context (“Uncanny valley AI hit him with the hesi screaming ‘Carrie,’” cracks woods on “Corinthians”); dream and nightmare logic allows for a surprise punchline (“I time-traveled and still picked Darko Miličić,” on “Cold Sweat”); the twisted, MF DOOM-honoring “Misery” is a lascivious, evocative outlier; dark comedy naturally abounds on a particularly gutting anecdote in “Lead Paint Test” (“Father put her out her misery on the kitchen floor / Mom said, ‘Be proud of her, she made it home’”). It’s woods being woods. Even when the subject is heavy, his pen can’t help but carve a devilish grin.
But make no mistake, the foreground of GOLLIWOG is its fusillade of institutional tragedies—and their presence as collateral of cannibalistic colonial hunger. Over and over again, billy woods presents brutal impressionistic portrayals of centuries of Black suffering and then leaves enough of a paper trail to let his audience connect the dots. It’s a matter of personal intrigue to him, whose bloodline is directly connected to that hunger. “Daddy longlegs stride your home like Cecil Rhodes,” he raps not long after he introduces the golliwog, referencing the mining magnate whose ambitions decimated his father’s Zimbabwe. In an interview with Pitchfork, woods described having, on his wall in college, the famous portrait of Rhodes standing across the expanse of Africa: an object of fascination and confrontation, its triumphant gaze staring straight into his.
Irreversible, unavoidable self-destruction at the foot of power is a tale as old as humankind, but rarely is it captured so poignantly, or as comprehensively, as on GOLLIWOG. Its final song, “Dislocated,” initially recalls “Maquiladoras” and Frantz Fanon’s musings on assimilation as “self-amputation,” but it also catches billy woods (and his Armand Hammer bandmate E L U C I D, who’s wonderful across the whole runtime) in the middle of accepting and lamenting his own missing pieces. It sounds like a taunt at first, of course. “I can’t be located,” he shouts defiantly, confidently. And then it’s not so certain: “You can’t come in here with me,” he says off the grid, nothing but dark forest and vacant spaces for miles. “You’ll see.” And even then those eyes stay fixed on his.
Rob Moura is a Seattle-based writer and musician. He’s also a barista, in case you need to know what the restroom code is.
