i'm not really... like a music journalist actually. not that anyone was saying i was. i think this is the child playing in their dads truck (like i used to do in my dads) version of music journalism. i am uninterested in a lot of ways in making a point here. having a point means you could have a wrong point. it means assuming a certain weight of moral vision. of having the right framework. i have been dubious of frame works lately. in part brought about by a certain quietism. and the feeling that so much is grasping at straws. i am probably just angry. anger has been the shadow force in me for a while. and i just never knew. angry at myself. angry at feeling useless and out of step and boiling in my own ignorance. so who am i to say anything about anyone. to make a point. but i still like to write. and i still love billy wood's music. so why not say just anything. no points. no trying in anything else other than to illuminate an artist whose work has changed my life. i have a laptop and a feeling.
woods is a rapper from new york by way of d.c and zimbabwe. he got his start in the new york underground with the likes of rap legends vordul mega and others (frankly that's my one example sorry, he's had a long career in underground rap). I came to him around the time of his 2018 album hiding places, produced by the equally amazing kenny segal. it helped propel me through a philosophy paper i was working on (an addendum to a previous paper on hegelian recognition theory and the relationship between cis and trans people). without that record i probably wouldn't have finished the danm thing, let alone had so much fun.
wait, lets talk about frameworks for a second. i like a particular kind of rap, and this isn't to be all 'well he's not like the other rappers' about it. that's racist bullshit that white geek rap fans have been pulling forever and just reasserts the exceptional negro troupe. so stop it. anyhow i digress and also say that woods is like other rappers, he raps. rap is a lineage, an artistic tradition. again, digressing. what i mean is my idea of what fun is my own distinct version of what fun is. woods is what i think of when i think of fun hip hop. i like dark and sad music truly and he is dark and sad hip hop. i get a genuine thrill when i hear him rap 'grew up around where dogs was racist/ fathers pulled firing pins out of guns gave 'em to us to play with'. that shit kills. like hot damn. he raps like a house fire, not just in image but in feeling. he raps like a burning police precinct. a flickering intensity that lets you know these are only the tips of some particularly nasty icebergs. settle in. get ready. cuz we ain't stopping just yet. we've got a lot of very corrupt and vile systems to get rid of. rodney carmichael, npr staff writer on hip hop, in 2019 said woods was the 'poet laureate of our afro-dystopia.' the most concise and effective explanation for what woods does and why its amazing.
the density and command with which woods rhyme is what i think earns him the laureate title. he orates these fragments and snippets he masterfully strings together into his own kind of punchline structure (his line "shorty can't eat no book, what i told ta-nehesi coats" is just one of the most fantastic things i've ever heard. take that award winning and generally beloved cultural critic mr coats)... like i said i don't have or want a point... i just have a lap top and a feeling and i could just start quoting lyrics and going 'see he's a genius' but that would get very very boring. so i'll say, he's a more abstract wu tang to me. he isn't rapping about trans people getting killed or abut how uncomfortable it is to live the fallacy of social gender all the goddamn time. but in the terror and the novelty of life which he raps about, i do find a sense of comfort and a sense of cinematic entertainer, much the way i do with wu-tang clan lyrics, hearing this man rap about the violent and apathetic characters which inhabit his songs. plus he wrote one of the greatest songs ever written; red dust.
shout out to my future neck tattoo.
and i got out without making a point.
No comments:
Post a Comment