Latest news with #Golliwog
Toronto Star
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Toronto Star
‘Star Wars' goes symphonic and the return of a cosy mystery: what the Star's Culture team is loving right now
TV: 'Poker Face' Maybe it's because I'm old enough to remember watching 'Columbo' with my parents, but I welcome the return of 'Poker Face,' Rian Johnson's delightful — dare I say cosy? — comedy-mystery series (Citytv+, CBC Gem). With her weathered-cherub voice and ginger Troll mane, Natasha Lyonne remains a hoot as Charlie Cale, the human lie detector, and the twisty episodes so far satisfy. Season 2's opener features an Emmy-worthy turn by Cynthia Erivo as multiple siblings who think they're entitled to an inheritance from their horrible mother. The show promises even more high-profile guest stars. I can't wait. —Doug Brod Comedy: Katherine Ryan As Canadians are wont to do, comedian Katherine Ryan made her name by leaving her home country. The 41-year-old Sarnia native honed her standup act in England and appeared in TV series there, both as a host and an actor, before creating her London-set, semi-autobiographical Netflix comedy 'The Duchess.' Now Ryan, who expertly taps her life with her Canadian husband and three British-born kids for laughs, is back in Toronto for two shows at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre (190 Princes' Blvd.) on Saturday. Limited tickets were still available at press time. —Debra Yeo Concert: 'Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back in Concert' Hearing John Williams's iconic score for 'Star Wars' performed live by a full symphony orchestra is an otherworldly experience — and a must for any fan of the film saga. From next Thursday to Sunday, Toronto audiences will have that opportunity when the Toronto Symphony Orchestra presents four screenings of 'The Empire Strikes Back' (the series' fifth — and best — episode) in concert at Roy Thomson Hall (60 Simcoe St.). Australian composer and conductor Nicholas Buc will lead the TSO in his debut with the orchestra. —Joshua Chong ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW Album: billy woods, 'Golliwog' In 2023, billy woods established himself as one of underground hip hop's most compelling storytellers with 'Maps,' a remarkably original (and occasionally hilarious) concept album that offered a glimpse into the chaotic misadventures of a middle-aged rapper on tour. On his new album, 'Golliwog,' woods takes a left turn into horrorcore, weaving dense lyricism into a sinister tapestry of sound — woozy string samples, staggering beats, occasional screams of terror — assembled by an all-star roster of producers. ' The English language is violence, I hotwired it / I got a hold of the master's tools and got dialed in,' woods raps on opener 'Jumpscare,' setting the stage for a brilliant and bleak journey into the heart of darkness, and an exploration of the revolutionary, post-colonial school of thought that might offer an escape route. —Richie Assaly On 'Golliwog,' rapper billy woods dips into horrorcore. Alexander Richter
New York Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Billy Woods Is Scary Good at Rapping
When Billy Woods was a child, he was afraid of lots of things. Born in Washington, D.C., but raised in Zimbabwe, where his father was a member of Robert Mugabe's revolutionary government, the boy who would grow into one of his generation's beloved underground rappers was frightened by a storage room under the stairs in his family's house. At night, he imagined that something was beneath his bed, and if his closet door was ajar, that was cause for alarm too. He was scared of apartheid South Africa, which bordered Zimbabwe to the south, and the soldiers he encountered at roadblocks. Sometimes he was scared of his parents. 'I didn't grow up around reasonable people,' he said in a recent interview, a charged understatement about a childhood tumbled by history. Woods typically plans his solo projects around a particular conceit or theme, and 'Golliwog,' his 12th, which was released last week, is a collection of horror stories. Some are darkly comic, others decidedly less so. They draw on his youthful experiences and contemporary geopolitical terrors, as well as more mundane adult concerns, like romance and renting in modern-day New York, where he has lived on and off since 1995. 'Golliwog' arrives at a peak in his decades-long career as an independent artist, carrying on a local tradition of proudly trend-resistant, verbally inventive hip-hop that includes acts like MF Doom, the Juggaknots and Company Flow. All of Woods's solo music is available through Backwoodz Studios, the label he founded in 2002, which also releases the work of like-minded artists including his frequent collaborator, Elucid; together the pair record as Armand Hammer. 'Something that my mother always was stressing was that if you wanted to do art, you couldn't expect to pay your bills with it,' Woods said. He is in his late 40s now, the father of two children, and noted that 'for most of my adult life I have been hustling to make ends meet.' He refuses to own a car, and up until 2018, lived with roommates to save money. Woods certainly works hard. At a dinner in late April in Brooklyn, he was running on little sleep, and later dashed off to an album release party for an act on his roster. Dressed simply in jeans and a flannel shirt, he cut a low profile and spoke in a measured tone; he is serious about what he does, and draws on deep wells of history when making his points. The restaurant advertised its daiquiris, but Woods let the server know he wasn't impressed with the rum options; details rarely escape his notice, but he paints in broad strokes, too. 'I love how impressionistic his lyrics are,' El-P, the Run the Jewels and Company Flow rapper and producer, wrote in an email. 'There's an abstraction and an imprinting of imagery that I love and connect to as a writer.' With his rumbling, stentorian voice, Woods locates unusual pockets inside of beats and deploys a dense, pictorial songwriting style that Earl Sweatshirt compared to Public Enemy's Chuck D, both in volume and his relationship to rhythm. 'Worst dude to try and do any sort of espionage work,' Earl said of Woods. 'He doesn't whisper.' But when it comes to true analogs, 'We're not talking about rappers, bro,' Earl said. 'We're talking about great American authors, bro.' Earl said he hears echoes of his own father, the South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, in Woods's songwriting: 'My pops said, 'The most important thing in poetry writing is being serious about playing with words.' Woods is there. He operates there.' Or as Woods puts it on the new record, 'The English language is violence, I hot-wired it / I got ahold of the master's tools and got dialed in.' When Woods's daiquiri behavior came up, Earl wasn't surprised. 'It's so annoying,' he said, teasingly. 'I've watched him come across a pretentious bartender and just break them down so quickly that now they're running things by him, like he runs the restaurant.' Woods started releasing solo LPs in 2003. Billy Woods, which he styles in lowercase letters, is not his real name; he avoids showing his face in photographs. Protective of his privacy, he takes pains to keep his artistic persona distinct from certain details of his biography. But he is well known to rap fans who perform close readings of his regular releases and collaborations with artists as varied as Boldy James, Noname and Pink Siifu. 'Golliwog' is packed with vivid details: a 'dog-eared Timberland boot' sitting on a stoop, a kiss from a polyamorous femme fatale burning for 'all eight stops on the A-C-E,' a 'wild-eyed rocking horse, mouth carved into a frown' idling on the street. The tracks are varied and unorthodox, if not outright challenging. The producer Preservation's beat for one of the album's centerpieces, 'Waterproof Mascara,' is little more than a bass line, wordless singing and a looped, trembling sob. Woods begins his verse describing a traumatic family scene: 'Watched my mother cry from the top of the stairs, scared / When it came through the walls, I covered my ears / Half-hoping You-Know-Who would die, then he did.' Woods lost his father when he was 11, and his family memories are complicated. 'I grew up in a house with a lot of dualities, good and bad in all of the people,' he said. 'I grew up with corporal punishment, which on a very basic level, the purpose of it is for children to comply or learn through fear.' Still, 'there was a lot of love in my childhood,' he said. Books figured prominently. From his mother, a writer and academic from Jamaica, it was Shakespeare, James Baldwin, the Brontës, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Bram Stoker. His father read Marx, Mao, the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney. His older sister shared Stephen King books with him — not a writer his parents would have appreciated — and Woods enjoyed the adult content (including sex scenes) they contained. He's currently working on a book of his own, a memoir that will not include his life as an artist. And unlike his music, it will not be independently released; he is working with a publishing house. 'As of right now, there isn't one thing written about rapping,' he said. Growing up in a household where intense political discussion was the norm — against the violent backdrop of colonialism, liberation and, later, dictatorship — has given Woods a unique vantage on the world. The horror stories on his new album often deal with the products of history: old regimes, old wars, old racist caricatures that won't stay buried. Historic fears take on new forms in the 21st century. 'As soon as they start to say 'These people don't get due process,' eventually it comes knocking at your door,' he said. As a Black American, he added, 'I've always felt that I and my children are vulnerable.' He fears reading itself is at risk, too, and that the consequences could be dire. 'Upon a precipice we sit, in my opinion,' he said of the political moment, and later linked his concerns to the decreasing primacy of consuming books: 'A world where people don't, or haven't, read is terrifying.' And yet he knows a number of talented artists who 'have a powerful grasp of language' despite a disinterest in reading. 'Maybe we'll be all right,' he said. 'Who knows?' He paused. 'Probably not.'
The Guardian
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Billy Woods: Golliwog review – one of the most engrossing, unnerving records you'll hear this year
Golliwog has the ambience of a horror movie: dissonant strings, like nails on a chalkboard, form the basis of the track Star87; agonised screams are sampled throughout; every so often, an ominous drone will fill a song to the point of overwhelm. On that level alone, New York underground icon Billy Woods' latest album would be a feat of sound design, and one of the year's most engrossing, unnerving records. Of course, this being a Billy Woods record, that's just scratching the surface. Golliwog's horror aesthetics are a counterpoint to its tales of real, everyday nightmares. Through samples, guest verses and his own lyrics, Woods unearths innumerable images of inhumanity: stories of CIA torture methods, '12 billion USD hovering over the Gaza strip', a class of professional 'zombies' willing to turn a blind eye to the working class that makes luxury possible. It's heavier, if only slightly, than Woods' usual output. He still finds time for moments of beauty amid the bleakness – the gorgeous saxophone that ends Maquiladoras; the fuzzy synth sample on Pitchforks & Halos; the beat on Make No Mistake that feels almost adjacent to dance music – but Golliwog is dominated by inherited trauma and state-sanctioned terror, and Woods assesses it all with horrible clarity. You could call it a haunted house of an album, but that would be optimistic – you'd be hard-pressed to believe Woods sees a clear way out.
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Billy Woods' New Album Explores What We Fear and Why
On a late spring afternoon (that doesn't feel like April), Prospect Heights' Leland Eating and Drinking House is pretty empty. Four people are sitting at tables in the upscale cafe, chatting over a playlist of early '00s hits from artists like Ashanti. Eventually, Billy Woods arrives wearing a Black jacket, black shirt, and jeans. He says he's feeling under the weather after several European show dates. Crosscontinental tours are becoming common fare for Woods, the Brooklyn-based rapper boasting one of rap's elite pens. He's been rapping since the '00s, but caught a stride with early '10s albums like, becoming a darling of underground rap heads and steadily elevating his penmanship on recent projects like Church (with Messiah Musik), Maps (with Kenny Segal), Aethiopes (fully produced by Preservation), as well as his duo with partner-in-rhyme ELUCID, which releases under the name Armand Hammer. The two collaborated on 2021's Haram with The Alchemist and We Sell Diabetic Test Strips in 2023. More from Rolling Stone The Best of SXSW Day Two: Billy Woods, Jack's Mannequin, Man/Woman/Chainsaw, and More billy woods' 'Maps' is the Kind of Album That's Designed to Get You Lost Billy Woods' 'Sauvage' Evokes the Unease of Living in 2022 New York Now he's set to release Golliwog, his first solo project in five years. Over a sandwich and chips, Woods tells me about the new project that he's meticulously crafted over the last several years. Initially, the plan was to work on a new Armand Hammer project, but ELUCID was working on his album Revelator, freeing Woods up to pursue his first solo project since 2019's Terror Management. He utilized his ever-growing network to procure beats, prioritizing production that gave off the vibe of a horror movie score. Sometimes, like with the Conductor Williams-produced 'Star87,' he found something in a beat pack that fit his preference. Other times, like on 'All These Worlds Are Yours,' he says he worked with producer DJ Haram to turn an 'ethereal' Shabaka Hutchings beat that reminded him of a rainforest into 'nanobots just flying in and eating this rainforest up.' Other Golliwog production credits include the Alchemist, Kenny Segal, EL-P, Preservation, Messiah Musik, Sadhugold, Ant of Atmosphere, and Steel Tipped Dove. 'I knew it was my first multiple producer product in a long time,' he says. 'I knew that I had more connections than ever before. So, I tried to cast a wide net.' He made 22 songs for the 18-track album, eschewing his normal 'tunnel vision' writing process to take his time and write an average of just one or two songs per month. 'This is the first record [in a while] where it was up to me how fast I was going to move,' he says. Several artists feature on the project, including Backwoodz mates ELUCID, Cavalier, as well as Mascara, Despot, and Yolanda Watson. Golliwog reexplores a story he wrote as a child about an evil Golliwog. Woods says he's always been fascinated by horror story collections, citing Mariana Enríquez's Things We Lost in the Fire and Stephen King's Cat's Eye — the latter threads together short stories with a cat who finds themselves in every story. In his new work, Woods casts the racist, rag-doll-like caricature known as a Golliwog as the connecting overseer of the project. Though dark, searing production permeates the album, he says there's no overarching theme or thesis, with each song unfurling a unique terror. 'Misery,' the project's first single, depicts a toxic infatuation with a married woman, which takes a vampiric swerve at the end: 'Ragged holes in my throat, but I love to see those lips shiny with blood,' Woods rhymes. 'BLK ZMBY' sounds like a pessimistic depiction of African people from slaveship to a tool of capitalism. On 'Born Alone,' over doleful piano, Woods portrays the precarity of life in the streets, where he wears clean socks just in case calamity strikes — we don't often consider our fashion choices as commentary on impending death. On 'Cold Sweat,' he plunges us into a nightmare where the 'hallway was barely lit, air thick with dread / it's a room full of record execs on the other end and you dancin' on the desk.' Throughout Golliwog, horror is at the beholder's behest. Some people find vampires horrific, while others have trepidation about young Black artists dancing for boardrooms of white record executives. Songs like 'All These Worlds Are Yours' utilize pitched-down voices for ghoulish effect, but laid-bare bars like, 'today I watched a man die in a hole from the comfort of my home / the drone flew real low, no rush, real slow' from 'All These Worlds Are Yours' jar a listener despite his intentionally flat delivery. Woods says moments like that demonstrate his straightforwardness as a songwriter, which belies the popular conception that he's an 'abstract' lyricist. 'I think it can be an easy take at times,' he says. 'It's just funny that that will be a thing that people hang their hats on. Because some of the stuff is very straightforward. And I also do a lot of storytelling in my music as compared to lots of [rappers] — even those who I like — who haven't done a linear story in their music in five or 10 years.' He references the story he tells on 'BLK XMAS' with Bruiser Wolf, where neighbors get evicted and residents parse through their left-behind belongings; there's no layered double-meaning, just a story including the lamentation, 'How you gon' put folks out a week before Christmas — and they got kids? Them people sick in the head, it's sickenin'.' He rhymes about headless dolls in a pile of junk; in this horror story, the toys aren't supernatural, they're a sobering glimpse of a treacherous rental market. On Golliwog, systems often play the boogieman. 'I think a lot of horror is social commentary [on] what people are scared of,' Woods says. He gives an example of Rosemary's Baby, which is about 'an evil cult manipulating this woman to have their baby,' but also speaks to a woman being stripped of her humanity in a misogynistic society. He also references Toni Morrison's Beloved. Reductively, it's about a haunted house, but more aptly, it's a portrait of slavery. 'I think that when something is well written enough or hits enough different points of social commentary, people try to move it out of that [horror] space and it becomes a thriller or whatever, which is fine,' Woods resolves. 'But all of these [works of art] ultimately are about the same sorts of things.' And though Golliwog's sonic universe is a fantastic netherworld, Woods occasionally makes a real-life cameo to address some things. On 'Make No Mistake,' he sarcastically raps, 'When they say it's off beat, that's how I know I got them on skates,' referencing a common criticism of his unconventional delivery, which often prioritizes inflection and emphasis over earworm melodies. He jokes that the criticism reminds him of coming to America from Zimbabwe in 1989 and being told he was 'trying to be white' for raising his hand in school. Woods sees both close-minded kids and rap detractors as potential peer pressure he knows better than to feed into. 'Having already dealt with those ideas when I was a little kid, I don't pay them any mind now,' he says. 'Now [my] fan base has grown in a bigger position and people want to be like, 'You just talking. It's offbeat…' I'm not concerned. I've been doing this a long time. If you don't like it, you don't like it.' But to Woods' satisfaction, many enjoy the music that he and his Backwoodz studios peers have created over the years. He says he's 'so happy and proud' of what the label has become. 'Sometimes I think about it, I'm like, 'Damn, okay.' At this point, [we're] one of the indie rap labels that you could be like, 'Yeah, they do interesting shit, man.' Not even rap. We put out an experimental jazz record last year,' he says, referencing the band ØKSE's eponymous debut. He also notes that the label, which began in 2003, had success last year despite no release from the 'tentpoles' like himself, ELUCID, or Armand Hammer. Projects like Cavalier's two albums, and ShrapKnel (the duo of Curly Castro and PremRock) kept the flag waving for Backwoodz as a home for talented indie acts, genre be damned. And, along with being an artist and label head, Woods is delving into book writing with a memoir that he says has been 'challenging.' The book will chronicle his parents, as well as his winding journey from childhood into young adulthood. 'My parents being where they were from and who they were from,' he explains. 'And then ending up moving to Zimbabwe right after the revolution, [the] first 10 years of Zimbabwean independence and then living there for that time and coming back and forth to New York in the eighties and Jamaica, and then coming back here and being rudely thrust into life in the nineties DC area. Yeah, all of that's interesting enough, but more interesting really than anything to do with rapping.' He says he's 'pretty close' to turning in the book. In the meantime, he's set to drop Golliwog, a project that uses horror to put up a funhouse mirror to society. The album is laden with social commentary, but Woods isn't overestimating its potential impact. While noting the figurative 'beginning of the Fourth Reich' in America he says, 'I would not have this hubris to say what I can do about' the state of the world 'on an artistic level,' though he values art for connecting 'as human beings across time and space and experiences.' He adds, 'When I read Dostoevsky, I live in a world that he couldn't have imagined and he lived in a world which I have never seen, but I can connect to their ideas that can connect to my experience, and enrichen my understanding of the human condition and of myself and of the world.' That's exactly what many would say about Woods' work. Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
