Scattered across GOLLIWOG, the ominous new album by billy woods, are images of death in slow motion. On its opening song, he sees “morose villagers queue in the sun” for vaccines; later, a still-living fly stares out of the upturned pint glass in which he’s been imprisoned. A drone flies “real low/no rush/real slow.” A man prays to every god he can remember as the fuselage of his plane shakes; CIA handlers crowd around Frantz Fanon’s hospital bed. Doctors stare at X-ray transparencies and frown, just a little.
GOLLIWOG follows 2023’s Maps, which detailed woods’ travels as an increasingly in-demand musician. Here, he returns to a story he wrote as a child about an evil version of the titular doll. (He quips that his mother, a professor of literature, at the time called it “derivative.”) The series of parables and contained narratives are also dotted with evidence of time travel. The terror weaves across decades and across the globe, but the threads themselves loop back on themselves over and over again.
I spoke with woods over the phone shortly after he’d returned to his Brooklyn, New York, base from London. As always, he was juggling multiple projects: In addition to the GOLLIWOG press campaign, he was continuing to promote new releases—like PremRock’s Did You Enjoy Your Time Here…?—from his Backwoodz Studioz label, slowly getting to his next collaboration with Elucid as Armand Hammer, and finishing a long-delayed book.
You and I have talked before about how, with every new album, you give yourself different constraints.
In this one, I decided each song was going to be self-contained. I was thinking about when I was a kid, reading Ray Bradbury or other science fiction writers, or Stephen King’s horror collections, or watching Creepshow—which is not my favorite—or Cat’s Eye, which was. Things where these different stories are tied together by this thread. And so I really tried to make the stories self-contained but fit into the same universe. They resolve themselves internally, as opposed to something like Maps, where you’re just trying to create an atmosphere.
There was initially the idea that the doll would fit into more of the songs, sort of like the cat in Cat’s Eye. But some of the songs just didn’t make it. The golliwog itself only shows up in a couple places. I was going for an overall idea here, but it’s more like a book of short stories than a novel. Maps is more like a novel, or a travelogue, you’re going directly from one place to another.
Which gives this record an interesting relationship to something like Hiding Places, where you were playing in the world of fairy tales and folk tales. This is different, but you always write into your verses odd, amusing phrases or jargon you hear; here you weave in things that could come from a children’s story book.
Well, one interesting thing that I thought about after I finished the record was that you could go through and pick out songs like “Bedtime,” on Hiding Places, or “Christine,” on Aethiopes, or “Hangman,” on Maps, and those are songs that could have fit onto this record. I think that’s an element that often is there in my work, but this record it was all that, you know what I mean?
Did you work on this one mostly in New York, as opposed to Maps? And how long did it take you to write?
My initial thought was that I was going to work on this album pretty slowly, and I knew that I wanted to do something with multiple producers. I had a couple other things going on creatively, so I was going to take my time with it. Elucid and I were working on something. I had this book. I was like, ‘I’m just going to slow-walk this and try to work on one song a month,’ or something like that. That’s kind of how it started out. It was my first multiple-producer record in a long time, so I knew I wanted to cast a wider net for production, just because it would be fun.
With Maps, the main thing was that I was totally focused on that. It’s tough, because I was also touring and traveling, but I was recording a lot with Kenny [Segal] or while I was on the road: I would record there, or write when I would come home, whichever situations would lend themselves to that. [GOLLIWOG] was all at home. Elucid got pretty deep into REVELATOR and was like, ‘I need to focus on this and come back to the Armand Hammer record later.’ We had a couple songs done, but he was locked into REVELATOR. So I was like, ‘Well, I should do something. And I have this idea, so I’ll start doing that.’ I think one of the first songs I recorded was one that didn’t make REVELATOR, and then another, both on Messiah Musik beats. It was still kind of a slow-walk thing, but not as slow as it would have been under the original plan.
What’s your earliest memory of the golliwog itself?
Sometimes I just jot an idea down. The same thing happened with Aethiopes: I had that word written down for a while, just like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting, there’s something I could do there.’ At some point I was at home and I saw an old story that I had written when I was a child. My mom keeps them all, and is like, ‘You should redo this story from when you were 12!’
Have you ever done that?
No; in the book there is something I wrote when I was a teenager, but no. My mother is like: ‘These are good! I don’t know what you’re doing now’ [laughs]. But anyway, the thing with words is finding good words. Sometimes you just need to find a good word, a good phrase that sticks with you. We Buy Diabetic Test Strips—I was seeing it and I wrote it down, I just had it.
I’ve been revisiting the really early records, Camouflage and The Chalice, and, while there are definitely common threads, you’ve become much less conventional as a rapper. I think about the beginning of Maps’ “Baby Steps,” where you use these rhythms and cadences that sound like speech but get nimble and technical and fall into a pocket. You’re doing that more on GOLLIWOG, too.
It’s just about getting better, man. I’m always trying to improve, to push myself. I collaborate with some of the best artists in the genre: Elucid, obviously, Quelle [Chris], Cavalier, Curly Castro, PremRock, Open Mike Eagle. You’re trying to push yourself to get further. The flows, the styles are evolved and are doper to me than some of the old things, but old things have their own energies.
There’s also this collision on the album between that very chatty, conversational delivery and lines that feel very written, very literary: on “BLK XMAS,” which is delivered in this very off-the-cuff way, you, at one point, say, “A light drizzle drove me back inside the house.” There’s this sense of oral traditions bumping against written ones, a sense of history.
I’m happy to hear that. I’m always hoping that that’s in there. I think that that’s facts, you know? When I’m working and when I’m doing things I’m always like, ‘How can I move forward and push it to somewhere else?’ Also, when you’re doing a multiple-producer project where you can really be like, ‘OK, this is the thing that’s appealing to me today.’ As opposed to a single-producer project, where it’s like, ‘OK, this is what needs to get done.’ Which has its own benefits—I made a bunch of great records with a single producer. Sometimes having to force yourself to conform to what you got is good. There’s always new little things you pick up. Little skills. When you go back to do the next thing you’re like, oh, I can attack that this way, which I might not have done two years ago.