NO LISTS #1: billy woods - Aethiopes

The play within the play was G. Dep as Macbeth

December means the year-end list - the attempt at (re-)constructing the canon, at signifying your identity through your personal taste, at essentializing a year down to what art was released within it. Ranking art is a fool’s errand. Still, there’s something instinctively sensible about the impulse one feels at the year’s end to return to its finest achievements. Albums get two moments now: the release and the year-end recap. Only the review cycle affords an album the space it deserves, only the nonsensical ranking season benefits from the time necessary to sit with a piece of art. Monumental records, when they come around, deserve more than a pithy write-up and an arbitrary ranking. We gathering in remembrance.

---

And in my chalet, every possible amenity! Not to mention, the occasional night visitor…

On May 21, 1991, Mengistu Haile Mariam fled Ethiopia and sought asylum in Harare, Zimbabwe. On “Asylum,” billy woods’ narrator thinks he’s moved in next door. You can’t see the exiled strongman - woods doesn't, we don’t, nobody does. He announces himself through the things that begin to change: the automatic gate, the repainted brick walls, the cameras dotting the perimeter like crows perched upon chimney pipes. The “razor wire, like a slinky.” The bodyguard spitting khat, the secretary with his snifter of whiskey. We see him in profile - “rumor is parcel bomb took his right eye and pinky.” Young woods spies - first from below, then from the sky - and wonders what he’s thinking. You meet your new neighbor through that weight in your chest.

“Asylum,” as both a standalone song and album-opener, is nearly perfectly constructed. I’ve heard it be called cinematic, which is true to the extent that it captures the essential voyuerism of the filmgoer. You watch a boy spy upon his neighbor until you are up in the avocado tree with him. Hiding, watching, listening. But Preservation’s meticulously suffocating instrumental climbs to meet woods at the chorus, and you’re the man locked up in his own house. Fortify your surroundings if it will ease your mind, but your haven is only safe as long as they want you around. “Asylum” is the only way an album of this scope could begin: Aethiopes is a crumbling mansion, a tenuous exile that billy woods has spent a lifetime peering into.

Some things only make sense in their time

There’s hardly a question as to whether any working rapper has had a more prolific and profound run as billy woods’ over the past few years. The question, rather, is whether any living American writer can hold their weight against woods. Through his solo work, his partnership with E L U C I D as Armand Hammer, and BRASS, his brilliant 2020 collaboration with experimental rapper and poet Moor Mother, billy woods has constructed a body of writing more incisive, networked, encoded, prescient, and felt than that of any creator in his time. Which, of course, proves writing about his work difficult. You can’t “review” woods in a manner that does him any justice, although capable writers like Paul Thompson have come as close as identifiably possible. The excellent Caltrops Press has identified another methodology, treating woods and his extraordinary collaborators through encompassing skeleton keys, catechisms, and manuals.

woods’ ouvre demands writing that is referential, critical, and celebratory in large part because the text speaks so clearly for itself. I have tried and failed to write about his records many times before, closing out drafts in exasperation after they’ve revealed themselves as nothing more than compilations of his inimitable lyrics. billy woods’ music has an essential, ineffable quality not unlike Walter Benjamin’s theory of translatability. “Translatability,” Benjamin wrote, “is an essential quality of certain works, which is not to say that it is essential that they be translated; it means rather that a specific significance inherent in the original manifests itself in its translatability.” woods’ lyrics, to borrow Benjamin’s framework, approach a higher, more exalted language.

These, on Aethiopes and elsewhere, are synaptic raps - snapping from high to low, dotting from source to receptor. On “Remorseless,” woods claims to “treat African proverbs like Vegas flyers,” an artistic thesis statement if ever there were one. His work renders the profane mundane, overlaying existential horror with the pithy slogans that we use, consciously or not, to impose a tenuous logic on the world around us. He says shit like “the transcripts read like Cam’ron skits.” These raps re-groove the contours of your brain, not so much changing the world around you as offering eyes through which you might see it for how it is. This is not free association - anybody can free associate - but flattening the ridges of the American (and, on Aethiopes, the diasporic experience) onto a canvas.

I watched the planet from orbit, remorseless

To say that Aethiopes towers as the achievement thus far in woods’ catalogue is not to discount the records that came before it - or, for that matter, the excellent Church that followed. If anything, it’s the weight of the work leading to Aethiopes that imbues it with so much potency. One of the defining experiences of listening to woods is feeling a world being built around you, art-as-scaffolding to both unsteady and then renovate your moorings. woods’ work is rife with homages, nods, and histories, but it is also deeply self-referential. Refrains are repeated, characters re-emerge, flits of storytelling amalgamate into a broader text. His storytelling recalls John Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy, in which you meet scammers, drunks, expats, socialists, sellouts, and bums, all passing through just to imprint a faint sort of mimeograph in your mind before disappearing completely into meaningless holding patterns, destined to collide with others. It is the friction of these collisions that generates the texture of each respective portrait.

It’s against this background that Aethiopes feels titanic. On the record, woods is able to probe deeper into both the collective consciousness and his own mind in no small part due to the ground he’s laid elsewhere. It’s no coincidence, then, that the stories are more sobering, potent, and engulfing than before. Nor does it feel accidental that so many of the record’s most compelling narratives are set in woods’ (or his fictionalized narrator’s) youth, a sort of return to the primal scene that started all of this. Beyond the felt childhood curiosity of “Asylum,” we have woods in the backseat of his parents’ car in “Christine.” There’s no point boiling it to a line:

Black car on a backstreet, little me asleep on the backseat

Lulled by street lamps and the blackness in between

My parents’ argument picking up speed, in and out bad dreams

That’s what they said when she saw him dead in the road

Now I know it was the shadow of them black wings

Unmarked followed us for ten blocks, — said if they try to make the stop, I’m fleeing

Brake lights bright red, lit his face like a demon

We took a left, they went straight, we all laughed but I seen it . . .

There’s a sort of cosmic, proto-Lynchian horror here - once again, Preservation’s spine-tingling production is instructive. And yet elsewhere on the record you can already hear a young woods make sense of the absurdity - and gratuitous suffering - around him by imposing a sort of irreverent logic through which events flow. On “Sauvage”

Dre shot his uncle for beating his mom, beat the case, started eleventh grade like nothing was wrong

A few classmates made the news, police pursuits

Reg flew off the dirtbike like a carton of eggs

Came back stuttering with a limp and a dent in his head

Beautiful dreams he said he had when he was dead

Twice on the table

On the bright side, they only gave him house arrest once they seen he disabled - good lawyer!

Aethiopes, then, is as much origin story as natural conclusion. It dances like drill rappers from stomach-turning to slapstick, from mining the depths of this cursed earth to skimming off and eviscerating the scum at its upper crust. Above all else, it is a triumph. If you come to it seeking refuge, you may not find yourself leaving.