But it didn’t have any real effect on my self-esteem, because our country had a black president, our house was bigger than theirs, my dad had a better job than his … I didn’t feel like a second-class citizen in Zimbabwe, because I wasn’t. White Rhodesians had been openly racist to me in a way I rarely experienced in the US – I remember being with some white friends, going back to their house to get a soda and them warning me their father didn’t like ‘ kaffirs’. Woods describes the experience as “a culture shock”, as he navigated “how American racism worked, the ways in which being a despised minority weighed on you psychologically. “It was my first experience of the malleability of identity, the politics of revolution, and drastic change,” he says.Īfter his father died, the family returned to the late-80s US. By the time he was five, they’d relocated to Zimbabwe, where his father worked in the nation’s first government after winning independence.
The apple didn’t fall far from the tree: his Jamaican feminist intellectual mother and Zimbabwean revolutionary father met in grad school in the US, where Woods was born. His new album Maps is his finest and most accessible yet, and today, he’s the most feted underground rapper in the US – Earl Sweatshirt described him as “ the rawest ever” and said he hoped to be “ like billy woods when I grow up”. A recording artist for two decades now, he spent the first half of his maverick career languishing in obscurity (and still obscures his face in photos), but remained true to his voice and built a following that appreciates his kaleidoscopic rhymes and bruising worldview. But, he sighs via phone from his New York apartment, “sometimes I want to tell them: ‘This song is about a date I went on, not the devastating toll of capitalism and racism.’ They come in with preconceived ideas and the belief that a song can only mean one thing, which is the strangest way to approach my music.”
Given his often oblique wordplay and prolific output – nine albums in the last decade alone, plus more with his groups Super Chron Flight Brothers, the Reavers and Armand Hammer – the veteran rapper’s work must drive heavy traffic to the song lyrics database, whose users attempt to decode arcane wordplay and volunteer their own song interpretations. ‘G makes me very sad about the state of reading comprehension in the US,” frowns Billy Woods.
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