When Tolkien said that not all who wander are lost, he meant Billy Woods specifically. Over the course of two decades of whimsical, wordy music, wandering has influenced much of the rapper’s best lyrics. His superb new album with Kenny Segal, Maps, elicits insight from fleeting moments. Not just idle time between one place and another, even if that is taken into account; It’s also the lessons learned from travelling, wandering about a strange place in search of something, the things the road reveals about home, and the things one discovers about oneself in unfamiliar territory. For the forest, every fleeting experience, every stopover has something to offer.
Thinking back to the years he spent growing up in Zimbabwe after the revolution, Woods had no problem seeing his father’s birthplace as a second home, even as he felt and witnessed exclusion and craved American comforts. “There wasn’t much interpersonal violence, but there was state violence. There was no pizza. I spent my Christmas in New York and dreamed of eating a cream cheese bagel the rest of the year, or something.” “A slice of pepperoni pizza,” he told No Bells in 2018. “Broadly speaking, everywhere I’ve been has had good and bad.” This is how he assesses every room he enters, and this is how he writes: with clear, open eyes. He later recalls another great writer, Cormac McCarthy, and the idea of chosen paths – he questions “a different reality than the reality that is” and whether the existence of such a reality even matters. Hiking encourages such reflections, about routes taken and ignored, alternative journeys that reveal different versions of ourselves living different lives, even if the other simply eats a cream cheese bagel every day. But Woods also understands that moving forward on the path you have chosen is of paramount importance.
/ Courtesy of the artist
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Courtesy of the artist
Movement and displacement are recurring themes in the rapper’s music, but his haunting verses make it clear he’s actively observing and learning. In this sense: The forest seems to have reached an important threshold. Since he’s been a professional rapper since 2002, he’s ready to share all the wisdom he’s learned along the way in language more listeners can understand. Maps is his clearest and most engaging music. The bars are sharper. The beats are more stimulating. It’s not unlike Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. or “Call Me When You Get Lost” by Tyler, the Creator – a dynamic, audience-focused follow-up to an ambitious concept album that maintains established levels of technical excellence. Segal, who has helped Woods with the obfuscation in the past, is helping him process it here with production that is cracking and buzzing and less muted and greyscale. There weren’t many easy entry points into the forest catalogue, but if ever there was a place to start paying attention, here it is, catching you on your way to a more hospitable place.
The album feels like the accumulated wisdom of four decades of travel, two of which we’ve spent doodling haunting raps. His rhymes on maps carry the frankness of a weary pilgrim. “I’m old, I walk into the booth like a cocoon / Rapper’s charges getting too big, drifting out of orbit, rogue moons / I’m the only one in the room laughing, n****s unamused / I crack.” a “Smile at what you say, it’s the truth,” he raps on “Hangman.” His raps have the edginess that comes with long journeys—at one point he mentions a 10-hour layover in Chicago; A few songs later he turns up in Bratislava and Utrecht – but these verses are just as much about the in-between moments when he settled or settled down. With Woods, the text is always dense and highly referential, drawing on headlines, pop culture and political science, as befits the son of professors and a refugee.
But his work, even in its most cryptic form, is not impenetrable, especially when he shares what he sees. Woods unfolds a sophisticated, sly lyricism that is both scholarly and nonchalant. Few rappers have more to say. His verses reach to the edge, setting scenes aside. Almost everything he’s done since 2018 has had an ingenuity that underlies him. But this is a real master class, even for one of the greatest rap writers of all time. In each verse of “The Layover” he builds a single rhyme scheme, with each line building on the last. “Black Death, stiff pale faces / Handkerchief soaked in perfume / Posthumous YouTube views / Lion at the bottom of a fountain looking up at a blue circle,” he raps. The pun there is as intense as it is amusing. Of course, the focus is on the analogue, which draws a parallel from voyeurism around the brutality of the police to snooty spectators during the Black Plague – the tension in such juxtapositions of modernity and medieval times, the inner intention (Black Death), the imagery at Game and the irony of repeating history. In a verse that probably ends with a nod to a Sanskrit fable, it’s the perfect balance of the recognizable and the mysterious; just one of many that opens up to the listener.
All created in collaboration with LA-based producer Kenny Segal, the songs on “Maps” come across as crisp and clear without sacrificing the sophistication or mystery at the core of the Woods sound. That’s not to say this is any closer to the center of pop – he has no interest in such things – but this is about as transparent as a face-hiding rapper gets. There’s clearly a difference between personal and sociable, and his storytelling isn’t just for sharing, it’s for education. For all of Woods’ epic pedagogy, the storms of enthusiasm are almost endless. “Every time things are going well or you have to laugh / you have to remember that god is a hater.” Put this on a t-shirt. “It could be a nuclear winter with an earthquake / The worst people will haul out the debris” belongs on a throw pillow. He can come off as a cynic, and maybe he is, but the humor breaks the tension and his knowledge instills a shrug of calm and consistency.
Some of that calm is evoked by the forest’s trusty travel companion: marijuana. He sits in the bathroom at the Courtyard by Marriott, blowing air through the vents or rolling down a backyard in Amsterdam and whiles away the time. Most rappers will tell you that weed is essential to any journey, but Woods takes it a step further and views it as a gateway to a place beyond the unknown, or a self-sufficient comfort zone in any city. He raps about it like a little message he created himself. “Rapper Weed” feels like a chronicle of the pharmacy ecosystem and the characters that move within it. His thoughts and intentions are as clear as if his senses were tuned to level eleven. On “Houdini,” grass is the cushion on his day off, guiding him through a sensory experience that conjures up perceptible images (“The nose is pine-sol and turpentine / But the taste reminds me of Jamaican oranges that look like limes”) and folkloric visions (“Went into the forest in fear / Couldn’t see it coming but I could hear it / Something rumbled nearby”). It invites strangeness and calm, stimulates curiosity and appetite.
There’s a nod to the late itinerant chef, author, and documentary filmmaker Anthony Bourdain that feels particularly apt (“Parts Unknown, at home when the road’s not asphalted… No Reservations, walkin like Bourdain”). Bourdain knew more than a thing or two about the street and also, as Woods put it, “to live the dream and dream of another life.” In his book The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones, Bourdain wrote: “Travel is transformative. As you move through this life and this world, you change things a little bit, you leave a mark, no matter how small.” And in turn, life – and travel – leaves a mark on you.” Although he’s not that Being an optimist that Bourdain was, Woods also knows that the marks are piling up and that together they are beginning to tell a story. And he understands the power of a good bite. Food plays a key role in how the rapper experiences and remembers the character of a place. It is detailed and detailed. Taste and smell are key elements of memory, and he uses delicious meals as a means of noting the marks left, as Bourdain did. In their own way, these songs have the feel of big hole-in-the-wall spots – off the beaten track but life-affirming, a haven from gentrifiers.
Woods and Segal’s previous full-length collaboration, 2019’s Hiding Places album, touted the merits of the cover’s full of gruff Segal beats, which allowed Woods’ unbalanced flows to slip in and out of the crevices. The production was disorienting and slightly spooky, reminiscent of the creaking, abandoned house on the album cover—damp halls and rusted plumbing. It wasn’t James Wan’s horrors; It was the terrors of The Last Black Man in San Francisco – less spooky, more infrastructural, suggesting not a ghostly presence but the squatters within. The beats on Woods’ 2022 Preservation album Aethiopes were similarly unsettling, sometimes shaky in construction or sounding more like somber ambient music. While many of the songs on Maps carry the dystopian verve of Cold Vein-era El-P beats, this album is also more colorful and vibrant than the rapper’s other recent releases. Some songs are jazzy. The single “FaceTime” isn’t far from being something for Griselda. Most Billy Woods albums don’t have singles, they just drop out, which implies at least some desire to reach more people this time around. If it’s not a move toward accessibility, then at least it’s a move away from turbulence.
The album ends with a short, harrowing, beautiful closing verse from Woods that closes “As the Crow Flies.” After a more meditative opening verse from his Armand Hammer partner Elucid, Woods takes a minute to engage in a solitary moment on the playground with his son. While pushing the child on the swing, he has a series of revelations: anything could happen to the boy at any time; It’s a miracle that he shows greater awareness every day. And Woods has no guarantee of seeing him grow up for a second. At eight lines, delivered in 20 seconds, the verse itself seems to reflect the “blink and you’ll miss it” nature of parenthood, but everything about it is so in place that it’s undoubtedly more about embracing joy than resignation – about the power even in the most ephemeral moments. It is his simplest verse, but also his softest and most moving. In it, the paths are not paled in comparison to the search for an apartment.
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