David Attenborough, weed and ‘American apartheid’: the awesome mind of rapper Billy Woods

‘Genius.com makes me very sad about the state of reading comprehension in the US,” frowns Billy Woods. 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. 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.”

Woods is used to being misunderstood. 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. 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”.

Woods revels in rap’s very form. Maps track Soft Landing reels off an audacious stream of rhyming namechecks: David Attenborough, American footballer Joe Burrow, writer William Burroughs and Keep It Thoro (a track by Mobb Deep’s Prodigy). Woods’ lyrics contain multitudes: Marlow, from 2019’s Terror Management, masterfully weaves references to works by Kurt Vonnegut, Franz Kafka and Joseph Conrad into an extended allusion to The Wire, while No Hard Feelings, from last year’s Aethiopes, uses the Challenger space shuttle disaster as an unsettling metaphor for the crack epidemic. “I wanted to be a writer since I can remember – either that or Che Guevara, starting an armed revolution somewhere,” he says.

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. By the time he was five, they’d relocated to Zimbabwe, where his father worked in the nation’s first government after winning independence. “It was my first experience of the malleability of identity, the politics of revolution, and drastic change,” he says.

After his father died, the family returned to the late-80s US. 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. 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’. 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. There wasn’t the power behind that racism that there is here. The ways American apartheid was enforced were more subtle and unspoken and indirect, but based on the powerlessness of being that minority. The power imbalance in everything made it totally different. People would do shit to you, and it was left up to you to figure out, ‘Was that racism?’”

Arriving in the late 80s, as the genre hit its first golden age, hip-hop’s revolutionary stance struck a chord within the young Woods. “Do the Right Thing had a tremendous impact on me, not least introducing me to Public Enemy,” he remembers. “Where hip-hop was at then was perfect for me – I loved words and poetry, and had grown up around revolutionary thought. And I was about to become a teenage boy, so with the rebelliousness and expressions of masculinity, all the bases were covered.”

It wasn’t until Woods relocated to Brooklyn that he began making his own music, as a swarming underground hip-hop scene took hold of late-90s New York. “I was going to shows, taking it all in,” Woods remembers. “The first time I heard Company Flow or the Juggaknots was mind-blowing, like, ‘Look at all the things hip-hop can be’.” His friend Vordul Mega – one half of Cannibal Ox, who recorded that scene’s most enduring masterpiece, 2001’s The Cold Vein – encouraged Woods’ aspirations. “I had this plan,” he says. “I was gonna do an album with Vordul, everyone would love it, and then I’d start my own label off the back of that. It’d be easy, I thought.”

When the Vordul album didn’t happen – he instead guested on Woods’ 2003 debut, Camouflage – Woods went ahead and started his label, Backwoodz Studioz, anyway. But shopping Camouflage to New York record stores proved “a cruel dose of reality. Others weren’t feeling my music the way I thought they would. [Legendary NYC store] Fat Beats took a couple copies out of pity, but told me I should try to sound like [then-ascendant underground MC] Immortal Technique.”

Woods paused his solo career to form a group, Super Chron Flight Brothers, with another MC, Priviledge. The going remained tough, he remembers, “but it wasn’t like lots of totally crushing failures, more just disappointments.” Indeed, as they readied 2010 LP Cape Verde, woods believed that “after 10 years’ work all the pieces were finally falling into place”. Instead, everything fell apart. Weeks before the album’s release, Priviledge “just disappeared. The business ground to a halt. An important personal relationship ended. A decade of incremental progress seemed to culminate in crushing defeat.

“It was like, ‘the plane’s crashed, you’re either gonna drown or you’re gonna swim. It’s on you’,” Woods adds. “To rescue myself, I was forced to swim.” He searched for lessons amid the wreckage, cutting out distributors and selling his work direct to his listeners. Beginning with 2012’s uncompromising History Will Absolve Me, Woods honed an idiosyncratic rhyming style with few equals in modern hip-hop; slowly, he came to be revered by peers and aficionados alike.

“He’s a singular talent,” says Kenny Segal, who produced 2019 breakthrough Hiding Places and the new album, Maps. “His flow sounds natural, like he’s not trying super-hard, and his hilarious one-liners draw you in. But then you see the bigger picture, and there are so many layers to it. Like MF Doom, when you dig beneath the surface you realise, ‘This is so deep I don’t know if I’ll ever reach the bottom.’”

Woods relishes the independence he worked so hard to preserve, and has never regretted rejecting Fat Beats’ advice to cop another rapper’s style. “I’m not subject to the whims of what’s popular or stylish, or prisoner to a moment in my own career that I have to keep trying to recreate,” he says. “I make music about the things I find inspiring.”

This independence allows Woods the freedom to follow inspiration where he finds it; the paths that he’s followed have led to his most complex and impressive work. The weighty, impressive Aethiopes, which he says “interrogates ideas of culture, empire and blackness and whiteness”, followed his ruminations on “my own personal connection to these things, as the American child of British subjects”. His other album of that year, Church, was inspired by his buying a batch of weed that he describes as “a classic strain I hadn’t seen in a long time, and became the launching point for an album about a certain time in my life, a certain era in New York, and blossomed out from that into concepts of faith and belief.”

Maps, meanwhile, was inspired by a glut of post-pandemic touring, and explores life on the road and the surreality of orbiting big-time rap celebrity, expertly balancing the existential with the quotidian (along with copious hunger-inducing references to food). “There’s a lot of nuance in the work,” Woods says. “The world as I’ve experienced it is full of dualities, and I’m trying to reflect that. With my work, I don’t have to be anything but myself, and as a result I can dig into this thing I’m doing, and it can grow with me.”

Finally enjoying his moment after 20 years of hard grind, Woods has no regrets over how his unpredictable, slow-burn career has panned out. “Knowing what it’s like to play a show and five people turn up will make you appreciative when 50 people turn up, and super-appreciative when 400 people turn up,” he says, “because, f’real, it could have been zero people showed up. I’ve seen it all, so I’m really able to appreciate things as they’re happening, and not take them for granted.” Juggling life as an artist and label mogul is, he admits, “more than enough to fill the day. But I’m not ready to sell the label yet.” He pauses, and then laughs. “Nor am I aware of anyone willing to buy it.”