Sometimes the answer to a thought-provoking question is found in the asking. Halfway though the latest Armand Hammer release Mercy, the seventh studio LP from the duo fronted by billy woods and ELUCID, the former rapper reminds listeners of that simple truth with a query that serves as the thesis for the album but also for the ages.
"'What's the role of a poet in times like these?'" he raps on "Dogeared" over the high-pitched drone of an Alchemist beat, relaying the details of a friendly grilling, perhaps from a potential suitor, over drinks. What follows next is a master class in the art of storytelling as woods proceeds to deliver a vignette in one verse, bending time as only he can with a stream-of-consciousness flow full of sensory observations and free association, while narrating listeners through a day in a week in a year marked, in large part, by our political outrage and acquiescence.
"I never answered / but it stuck with me all week," he rhymes. No detail too minute or mundane to spare, he finds himself lost in thought while "riding the bus / fixing something to eat / putting the kids to sleep / walking the streets at night / burning a tree." By the verse's end, the lingering question has followed him through multiple subway stops, walking over puddles while his kid splashes in galoshes, foregoing the book by his bedside to scroll his phone, and back outside his building doing "chin-ups on scaffolding." But when his inquisitive suitor rolls up on him again, seeking his final answer, he readily admits to her, "'I'm still grappling.' "
Grappling with life's questions is something woods does better than just about anybody. It's present in every lyric, filled with imagery that captures the horrors and humor of the human condition. In woods' recounting, history is ever-present, the future borne of our past fallibility. And no ideology is above critique, especially if it bears the fingerprints of greed and destruction.
Given the opportunity to talk to him twice this year — first on the eve of his solo album release, Golliwog, and again the week before Armand Hammer dropped Mercy — I wanted to come as close to deciphering the intentions of an artist who wields his facility with the English language and gift for nonlinear storytelling like a casual superpower.
Despite the lengths he's gone to shroud his gov't name and identity throughout his 20-plus year career, he's surprisingly generous and transparent when it comes to revealing the contextual details of his life — in records and on the record. Calling him an open book might sound cliché, if he weren't literally working on a memoir centered on his life before rap. In fact, a close reading of billy woods the artist must start with his origin story. As subjects of colonialism, his parents were both born under the rule of the British empire — his mother, now a retired English professor, from the British West Indies and his father in Southern Rhodesia before gaining its independence as Zimbabwe. "Then I was born here," he says, reflecting on a post-colonial inheritance of displacement. "And all of the things that go into that support an understanding of the idea that there is no going back and there is no true self to rediscover."
Having a retired English professor as a mother also expanded his worldview and his love of language. Even as a kid, with an exhaustive reading list ranging from Judy Blume to James Baldwin, he wrote stories. When he penned his own childhood take on the racist golliwog caricature that was still a popular remnant of Zimbabwe's colonial past, his mother called it derivative. But he faced a harsher kind of criticism when they moved back to the U.S. after the death of his politically exiled father. "I was kind of shocked and surprised at how Black people would make fun of me for being from Africa," he says, recalling the bullying he also faced for being well-read and his attempts to dumb himself down in order to fit in. "It's like, 'Oh, you're reading a book? Oh, you answered the teacher's questions in class?' Imagine actually thinking I need to act stupider than I am in order to be authentically Black. And I was already a smart kid, so the fact that I could program myself into that type of mentality is frightening. 'Man, that's white boy shit.' Oh, now I'm not gonna read comics? Like, what? You're not gaining nothing. At all. The number one thing is to do yourself, be yourself, be your own person."
A conversation with woods can be as winding a ride as his lyrical excursions, full of unexpected detours and deep exploration. As he drove home with ELUCID after the video shoot for their song "Laraaji," during our second talk, he became momentarily distracted while cruising through his old neighborhood in Brooklyn. "The weird thing about New York is things will be a lot different and then still the same in certain ways," he said in the middle of responding to a question about the terrors inherent with living while Black. (ELUCID, whose abstract stylings have grown razor-sharp, offers a more direct answer: "When haven't we lived in urgent times as Black folks in this country? It's always been yellow, orange, red alert.") In a world where wisdom comes in short supply, even woods' meanderings can seem prophetic to faithful listeners. During our conversation, which spans the virtues of literature, fascism's vices and his mother's early career advice, he concedes to not having all the answers. But he's fearless when it comes to asking the right questions.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Rodney Carmichael: What else were you reading as a kid? Because your storytelling approach is very non-linear. It's not the most common narrative structure, especially in the Western world, and even in rap to a large degree.
billy woods: Well, my mother is an English professor. She would give us things to read above or beyond what was considered age-appropriate. So I read kid things and then I also would read other books that my mom would recommend. Or she'd be like, 'If you read this, ''ll give you five dollars.'
I remember a whole phase where I read the Westerns that sort of inspired the Clint Eastwood Man With No Name series: Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, stuff like that. I was a big fan of Ray Bradbury's collections of little weird science fiction stories. Another thing that helped was the way my mother taught us to read. We read really fast. That helps when you're a kid, because you don't get bored. I also read stuff like Lord of the Flies when I was really young. That was a book that had a big impact on me. Animal Farm, 1984. When I was, maybe, 11, I read Richard Wright — Native Son and Black Boy — those were really big for me. And then when we moved back here, I remember that's when my mother gave me Sonny's Blues.
But like little kid times, it was everything that I could get. Beverly Cleary, the ones where the mouse was driving a car. What was his name, like, Ralph or something? And then later, my sister's copy of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. I didn't really even understand it fully. Sometimes I'd just take books off my parents' shelves and try to read them, especially if there was anything that seemed vaguely sexual on the cover or whatever. One time I ended up reading a book of, like, a feminist critique of films. But it was because it had that picture of Marilyn Monroe naked where she's kneeling and bending backwards on the cover.
That was one thing about my mom. If you were watching something with a sex scene, then it'd be like, 'You shouldn't be watching this.' But if you were reading a book, nobody would do anything. It could be like the wildest s*** in the book. And Stephen King books were wild. There was all types of crazy sex in them. And nobody would do anything. My mother would never lower herself to read a Stephen King book. So she had no idea what was in them.
Your mom introducing you to all this heavy reading at a young age makes me curious what she thought when you became a rapper. And what she thinks of your rapping now. I mean, you're like this literary rap giant now.
Well, I'm gonna tell you something that will probably seem really strange to you. My mother — I don't think — has ever listened to one of my songs.
Get out, I don't believe you.
I don't think so. I can ask her. I would text her right now, but she lives in the past. She doesn't have a cell phone. My mother always was like, 'You're a good writer; you should do something creative.' But my mother always instilled in me the idea that — and for this, I do have a lot of gratitude towards her — if you want to make great art you shouldn't assume that you're going to be financially successful or able to support yourself.
Good and true advice. Because when I was a kid, her favorite thing to say was, Edgar Allan Poe died in a gutter. There's no guarantee that people will even like your work while you're alive. So I never really had that assumption. She encouraged me to be a writer and to do art, but she always was like, you should have a plan financially to take care of yourself so that you can make the art you want and not end up destitute.
Wait, So you're saying she doesn't know how successful you are? And by successful, I mean...
Oh no, she does know. I just don't think she has actually listened to a song. And I've made no effort to make her do that. Because I don't think that my mom really has the wherewithal to understand it in that way. The flip side of that is that there's several times I've called my mother and been like, 'I'm writing this thing, what do you think about this?' Or, 'What's a good way to say this?' Treating it like a piece of poetry. And then she'll tell me or we'll discuss an idea or whatever. So those things happen, for sure. But I don't know if my mother has ever, like, listened to a song.
Rap's not her thing.
Yeah, I don't even know if she could tell how to absorb it to where it would do any good. My mother is very proud of me. And she never disrespected rap; that's another thing I'll say. I don't think she took it that seriously. But she knew that I took it seriously. So she didn't disrespect me doing it. But her thing was always that you need to be thinking about the future. You need to be thinking about how you're going to provide for yourself.
But she's still like your best critic though, even though she's never listened to anything?
I mean, as far as somebody who I would go to for help with anything to do with the English language. We do share ideas. I just can't imagine my mother actually listening to a rap. It would be hard for her to even hear the lyrics.
Her other thing was that I should be writing a book — books, plural — and that she really wants me to publish a book before she dies.
I think you are a novelist, though. I mean, I think it's safe to say your albums are very novelistic. Very literary.
I appreciate that. It does not count to her. Even when I got a deal to write a memoir, she's like, 'Well, I think you should write a novel.' She's not hating, but if you were like, 'woods is one of the great poets of his time,' she'd be like, 'Poetry is something you read.'
Is gaining more widespread recognition something that appeals to you?
I think a lot of the music I've made and that [ELUCID and I've] made together [as Armand Hammer] is important, dope, special. It's a deep catalog of good work. So I'm certainly happy to have more people feel that way and more people appreciate it. But it's not the reason I get out of bed in the morning.
I do want to pay my bills and I want people around me and people that I'm collaborating with to be able to get what they want out of it. But I understand what it takes both to have that success and also just also to create work that really touches people, that's meaningful, that cuts through the noise, that has a lasting impact on your time, your culture and just other human beings. And that's something that I always dreamed about doing. The fact that that has happened is super meaningful to me.
I think I'm one of those fans of yours that probably tends to project a lot of meaning onto your music.
Whenever I complain about something like that, my mother is quick to point out the idea that meaning is not only derived from the author's intent. Now, of course, not everyone agrees with that, but my mother would be quick to say that the writer cannot monopolize the meaning of a piece of work.
So are you prepared for the wild misinterpretations? Especially in a year and a time like this, when the politics that people in this country are living through are so hyperbolic.
Well, first of all, I don't think that this moment is hyperbolic. I think that America has elected an existential threat to itself and, to some extent, perhaps the rest of the world. I did not know that that was going to happen. So I can't say I wrote [his solo album, Golliwog] knowing that it would be.
I'm not looking to always say the same thing. I also hate people who just reflexively are trying to be different. I've made songs about migration and being an immigrant in this country because I think it's important and because I'm also an African. I want to talk about the things that I think are important and insightful and interesting. Another thing that happens is I will write about things in Africa, the developing world, and maybe some people have been newly introduced to post-colonial critique and things that I kind of grew up with. So sometimes I'm trying to build out further and 'colonialism was bad' is not the end point of where my thoughts are. That's like if the end point of talking about Black American lives is 'slavery was bad and damaging.' Valid. Cool. But one would hope that there's analysis beyond that. There's more to do, there's more to say, there's more to think.
The rulers and thieves who rule lots of countries in Africa are happy to see their young people flee the countries and don't really care what happens to them. And this is not to remove the West's responsibility for some of the conditions and crises that caused this migration or whitewash their responses to it. Lots of people are talking about that. I want to talk about the fact that you see your citizens going and ending up enslaved in Libya and drowning in the ocean and all of these things. And what are you doing? Nothing. Because honestly, for you, it's probably good. The more people leave, the less you have to worry about riots and student uprisings and people saying what's happening to all the oil money that you guys are pulling out of the ground in Nigeria, or, you know, all of the other things that are happening. The elites in these countries, they're rich. Their kids are going to school in the Gulf states and Europe and America. And they're chilling. And to me, it's monstrous. Now obviously they don't have control of the global economy and a lot of the problems that plague these countries can't nearly be solved by their leaders alone because they're part of an entire global structure that predated them and will probably outlast them. But when I see that you don't actually care, that tells me everything that I need to know.
Do you consider yourself to be an afro-pessimist?
Short answer would be no. Longer answer would be I think that's one of a range of ideas that I swim through and around. But I don't feel like I could just be like "yes."
There are some notions about Afro-pessimism that resonate with me. Maybe it's just a reflection of the times. It feels like a lot of the tactics that worked in the past just can't be rehashed. Like there's something bigger that needs to be acknowledged about the condition of Black folks in this world and what we're up against.
One of the things I've learned in this world is there are two types of change. There's slow change — often in fits and starts — and then there's radical change. And they both come with their own underlying issues. A swift and radical change always brings with it the possibility of chaos. It's funny because now we are living through a revolution in this exact moment — just a revolution of white supremacist fascists. And they're doing it fast. In some ways, there's a comfort in that because they might actually break the whole thing before they get there. But you don't know which way it's going to break, though.
Is there something about your experience as a child of a former political exile that shaped your outlook or maybe made you less optimistic about the Black future?
Those experiences affected me greatly. I think that the tenuousness of identity [exposes] the dangers inherent in attempting to use history, imagined or real, as a conduit, in and of itself, to the future or to formation of the self. Zimbabwe was only under the control of white people for what is a small amount of time by comparison to the rest of Africa or the colonized world. One hundred years. But in that time, the nature of everything was changed. And that's one of the things that I see that [President] Trump does to white Americans. The idea that there is some imagined pure past that you can reach back to and be the people that you were — which you probably never were to begin with — is one of the most alluring fantasies for people, period.
[It's] one of the great means of manipulation that is available to everyone from online swindlers to despots. And people want to hear the story. So even in Zimbabwe, for example, after that 100 years there came times where there were appeals to traditional ways of life. And I always look askance at something like that. Because what are you really saying?
Nobody stops to ask, what America are we trying to recreate? Because of course it would be foolish. Instead, you can imagine your own internal idea of when America was great. It doesn't have to all sync up. And all you ever have to do is get rid of some group of people. That's the other thing they'll always tell you. I don't care who it is. It could be the Marxists telling the Russian peasants: "Once we get rid of the landlords and the czar, then it's going to be great." There's always a group of people you've got to get rid of before everything can be right. And then after that it'll be figured out. But it never works out that way, does it?
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