by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
In today’s mainstream hip-hop culture, rap bars read like brand press releases and bank account balance statements. What you drive, what you wear on your neck and wrist, how many blue hundos you have for the club – boast rap has become big business. Capital over coke. Amex black cards, yachts, Maybachs. One would be forgiven for mistaking many of today’s best-selling rappers for well-spoken brand ambassadors.
If ever there were an outlier to capitalism’s hostile takeover of hip-hop, it’s the work of experimental rapper billy woods. As one half of New York rap duo Armand Hammer, and a prolific solo artist – he released two brutally phenomenal albums in 2019 alone, Hiding Places and Terror Management – woods has built a body of work that combines labyrinthian lyrics with sui generis production. Aethiopes is his latest, a collaboration with producer Preservation that pulls no punches. It’s the best album of the year so far.
woods is the second child of a Jamaican intellectual and a would-be Marxist revolutionary who, as a child, bounced around from Africa to the West Indies before finally settling in D.C. However, it was in New York’s underground hip-hop scene where billy woods – which itself is a pseudonym; woods being so notoriously private, he doesn’t even allow his face to be photographed – came into his own. As part of Super Chron Flight Brothers, plus his subsequent solo debut History Will Absolve Me and by founding of Backwoodz Studioz, the home of boundary-pushing, genre-bending hip-hop, woods emerged as a generational talent not easily classified.
woods’ abilities seem innate. Dexterous, satirical, biting, vicious – he delivers flow after flow of dense and deeply affecting lyrics. Listening to the raps on Aethiopes reminds me of trying to dissect Giles Deleuze in college: the writing provides visceral metaphors that, once uncovered, reveal a murkiness at their core, a kind of bait-and-switch where the closer you look, the more the meaning is obscured.
woods knows this is a feature of language, not a bug. If there were a one-to-one correlation between the word and the thing it represented, life would be dull, one-dimensional, and artless. On Aethiopes – which is an antiquated European word for Africans left over from the slave trade – woods maximalizes language’s plasticity, exploring otherness and the dissonance between idea and place, to punishing effect.
At every turn, woods high-concept raps are matched by the production of Preservation, whose obscure samples are taken from as disparate of an array of sources as Hong Kong record stores to Italian westerns to improvisational noise-jazz. To say you’ve never heard an album that sounds like Aethiopes is not hyperbole. Thanks to Preservation, Aethiopes is singular.
Neither woods nor Pres normally do press, so hat-tip to Raphael Helfand of the FADER for conducting a fascinating conversation that’s well worth the time of anyone curious how this one of kind album was made and the deep concepts it dissects. Production-wise, the big takeaway is that Pres is the type of producer who takes his time and is under no restrictions by woods. He considers how each sample relates to the album’s concept as a whole. He's methodical without being predictable. In fact, it’s the ingenuity and playfulness of his production which allows woods to traverse the darker, more unconformable spaces of the record.
It’s a dizzying combination. There’s a moment near the end of “Harlaam” that feels like falling into a K-hole. Album opener “Asylum” sounds like woods is rapping in the Deadwood saloon. “No Hard Feelings,” which is possibly woods’ hardest hitting song lyrically on the album, doesn’t even have drums, instead mired in a maze of flutes and horns. When the detuned bells of “Wharves” break out, it’s a relief, but only just barely.
From concept to recording, woods calls Aethiopes “one of more symbiotic, feedback-loop processes of making an album that I probably ever had.” He’s right. Their collaboration is symbiotic in a way that feels ordained; it’s impossible to imagine this album produced in any other way. The music is compelling and relentlessly experimental, but it’s also highly listenable with a variety of great features. The ghost-in-chains ramble of “Sauvage” shows off satisfying bars by Boldy James and Gabe Nandez, who sounds like he’s wheezing directly into your ear. Breeze Brewin gives a breathless performance on “Heavy Water” and ELUCID’s turn on “NYNEX” is jittery and explosive.
Throughout all the madness of Pres’ production – you really have no idea what’s coming next; it’s like being lost in some great all-time record collection, discovered amongst the infinite shelves of Borges’ Library of Babel – woods’ voice anchors the album. “Christine” is a perfect example. With unrivaled storytelling prowess, woods guides us through a childhood memory of dark streets and dead bodies. It’s like a short film set to Preservation’s noir production. The chorus is one of the album’s most satisfying payoffs, an instantly recognizable reference that I won’t spoil here.
For an album that asks for such a concerted effort on the part of the listener, Aethiopes consistently delivers these types of easter eggs. Yet, even though you’re aware when listening that Aethiopes is something startlingly ambitious, the album never alienates. Like woods himself, Aethiopes is egalitarian, rewarding both close listens and casual listens alike. It’s one of the album’s many attributes that prove being the outlier is woods’ greatest asset of all.