The arc of the golliwog almost comically aligns with billy woods’ fascination with world history. The racist British caricature was invented in the late 1800s by an American cartoonist working in London, who based it on an old minstrel doll. She co-wrote a dozen children’s books using the figure, which became a hit among English kids and a popular toy. But when she failed to trademark the golliwog, enterprising Brits turned it into a global icon and multiple racial slurs. These days, original versions of the dolls are collectibles that can sell for thousands of dollars. The woods zingers practically write themselves.
But GOLLIWOG, the Brooklyn rapper’s first solo-billed album since Terror Management in 2019, isn’t the Backwoodz Bamboozled. It’s a visionary horrorcore record about the infinite ways people feel and respond to fear. Melding jazz, noise, and ambient, woods uses dread for groggy trips through time and space. The record’s vision of horrorcore, a subgenre enamored with transgressive sex and violence, is psychedelic and dissociative. The new mode intensifies the power of woods’ oration, which has grown more stentorian and dynamic. As he catalogs terrors mundane and extreme, these off-keel songs sway like shadows from a campfire.
Old collaborators like Steel Tipped Dove, the Alchemist, Messiah Musik, and Kenny Segal man the boards, but woods gravitates toward their haziest and loopiest beats. Melodies smother more than they smoothen. Drums patter and fizzle as often as they strike. And there’s rarely drama to the frequent beat switches; the arrangements dissolve rather than combust like those on the similarly atmospheric BRASS. Although many of the songs are built around jagged samples, rhythm is often generated by the interplay between woods’ winding flows and the various layers of instruments and vocal loops. As in a horror flick, the mood is deliberately unsteady.
woods has long included bits of fables and fantasies in his music, and GOLLIWOG pushes further into the surreal. The album’s frequent mentions of dreams and fantastical creatures make his imagistic writing even more evocative. “Waterproof Mascara,” set to creeping bass strums and a vocal sample that sounds like a weeping ghost, percolates with unease. “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 would die/Then he did (Surprise!)/Careful what you wish for, you might just get that shit/Moms showed us where she kept the passports hid,” woods raps, repurposing the chorus of 2019’s “Houthi” for the last couplet. He delivers each line with a quiet but building disbelief, as if the narrator too is unsure what is transpiring. The ambiguity of the story, which could be about a haunting or domestic violence, ups the tension.
The songwriting is delightfully twisty and textured. “STAR87” is feverish, its looped ringtone and whirring drone heightening the paranoia of the narrator. But when the ghost of a presumably betrayed friend knocks on the door, the character has no regrets: “Had to do ’em greasy like cold spare ribs in the sallow glow of an open fridge,” woods says matter-of-factly. Over the sax blasts of “Misery,” woods plays a vampire’s willing victim, his delivery enthused despite the “ragged holes” in his neck. woods has little interest in shock; he’s more interested in angst, delusion, and devotion—feelings that unfold slowly and warp the psyche.
To that end, these songs move more languidly than those on the punchy Maps, which brought places and scenes to life with snappy one-liners. But woods’ cadences and wording are captivating as ever. He perfectly captures the hallucinogenic feel of modern life on “Golgotha”: “Everything buffering, reality lag and jump/Sometimes barely recognize the people I love.” He spends the morose “Maquiladoras” unspooling his thoughts on the foundational anticolonial book Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon. “He had the wrong answer to the right fucking question/Amputation how you survive,” woods says in response to a passage comparing being colonized to losing a limb.
But woods doesn’t romanticize this survival, describing these dismemberments in exquisitely macabre detail: “Some took it on the arm, caught in a trap/Some came of their own accord, a piece already cut and neatly wrapped/In butcher paper/Had to cut ’em off, I ain’t have no option/They the type to come back with the choppers chopping.” woods’ winding flows and enjambed writing become even craftier when his storytelling is longform. Instead of stressing the first notes or the downbeat, he pauses at the start of bars and softens his words on last syllables—moves that sharpen his transitions and imagery. His rapping is deceptively conversational and loose.
His newest trick is repetition. He’ll take a word or image and wring emotion from it with each utterance. “Niggas tried to yap me/I left town, I’m not tough/I came back when niggas got locked up/I know them niggas, niggas is dumb,” he says on “A Doll Fulla Pins,” the recurring word smugger each time. On “Cold Sweat,” he repeats “wake up in a cold sweat” as he cycles through darkly funny dreams of dancing on a desk for record execs like Bobby Shmurda and having kids with an “old old old old old ex.” But those scenes are the prelude to him actually waking up in his apartment and effectively haunting his landlord, who desperately wants him to move out so the building can be flipped. The repetition enables the twist.
Song-length rap stories can sound overly schematic compared to the spontaneity of punched-in and freestyled verses, but woods’ extended yarns never sacrifice style. Even though he prioritizes immersion over jokes and flexes, there’s still plenty of both tucked into these narratives, from woods and guests like Despot and Bruiser Wolf. “Doctor read the X-rays while you read the doctor’s face,” woods raps on “Born Alone,” finding black humor in the existential suspense of a check-up. “My people fled to the mountains, but it’s nowhere the white man won’t go,” he deadpans on opener “Jumpscare.” True.
He takes the idea further on “Corinthians,” mocking space-obsessed billionaires with a drawling “Them crackers won’t make it to Mars.” woods understands that delivery and content are inextricable, and has learned to play to the ear as much as the intellect. Even if you’ve never read Fanon, been called a wog, or seen Dune and It, you can feel the charge and weight of his words. For woods, the phantom weight that clings to language and locations is history. “Way I see it, it ain’t no past tense,” he asserts on the same track, accepting the omnipresence of things unseen.
GOLLIWOG masterfully uses that spooky proximity for self-reflection and thrills. Like the late MF DOOM, who he interpolates twice here, woods is perfectly intelligible despite his layered lyrics and elusive public profile. He is a blunt writer as much as a tacit one, and he finds a vessel for both approaches in horrorcore. “Sometimes you gotta pop in ’em and remind ’em,” he taunts at one point, tweaking the “Not Like Us” lyric. He’s speaking as a ghost and as himself, one of the best rappers alive.
