Rapper billy woods is a leading figure in contemporary underground hip-hop. He spoke to Jacobin about the inspiration for his music and his left-wing politics.
NYC-based rapper billy woods is a cornerstone figure in contemporary underground hip-hop. Over the past decade, his albums consistently land on year-end best lists — with his last record, Maps, featured in Pitchfork’s “Best Albums of the 2020s So Far.”
Born in the United States to an exiled Zimbabwean Marxist intellectual and a Jamaican literature professor, billy spent part of his childhood in Zimbabwe in the immediate aftermath of the Rhodesian Bush War, otherwise known as the Zimbabwe War of Independence. Having witnessed the first decade after independence — initially filled with hopes but ultimately culminating in Robert Mugabe’s brutal dictatorship — he is brutally honest both in his personal reflections and political observations. His music uniquely conveys feelings of insecurity, dissatisfaction, and dissociation in an age where all revolutionary politics seems to have failed.
Armen Aramyan sat down with billy woods following Armand Hammer’s performance at the Le Guess Who? festival in Utrecht.
Armen Aramyan
I want to start with your album Maps, produced by Kenny Segal. You’ve mentioned that it’s about your experience of returning to touring after the pandemic. It seems to mark a special period of your life. Can you tell me how the idea of this album emerged?
billy woods
I always try to have a new methodology for the record that I’m working on and try to keep the right experience for each project fresh, different, challenging, and unique to that project. So I started it and I said,…
Auteur: billy woods
