billy woods: GOLLIWOG Album Review – Warungku Terkini

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.