Mahmoud Darwish, tr. by A.M. El Messeri, from The Palestinian Wedding: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Resistance Poetry; "A Lover from Palestine"
AN ITINERARY FOR NON-PLACES: billy woods & Kenny Segal's Maps
We on a world tour with Muhammad, my man;
going each and every place with the mic in their hand.
—Trugoy the Dove, ATCQ's "Award Tour" (1993)
Perhaps you will persuade him to relate something of his past. Perhaps there is one among you who can induce him to bring out his old travel-diaries; who knows?
—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Journey of My Other Self (1930)
Now when I was a little chap, I had a passion for maps.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)
Maps won’t work here.
—Aesop Rock, “Rabies” (2016)
1.
You arrive with certain expectations. You arrive with Edward Said quotes queued up in your mind, knowing “what on a map was a blank space was inhabited by natives.” As such, you equip yourself with “map and compass, gat and cutlass” (“U-Boats”), keen to trouble Orientalist notions. Don’t get it twisted as you mark twain: there are flare-ups. On “Hangman,” we hear of “Hindu kush, a Sikh surrounded by Thuggers,” a modernist nod to August Schoefft’s early-19th century painting. We hear of “flying carpets out this motherfucker.” It’s a whole-new, brave-new world. “The room smelled like Marrakech,” woods reports on “FaceTime,” and George Orwell’s “Marrakech” (1939) happens over the mind’s transom. Orwell depicts colonial subjects who, in the imperial imagination, are nothing more than “undifferentiated brown stuff”—each figure what Said calls “an atom in a vast collectivity.” So, yes, you can skirt “on the edge of Magellan maps” (“Wonderful World”), or take a cue from Mike Ladd and rip to shreds Universalis Cosmographia by Sebastian Münster, that lying bastard, but—like Dylan on “My Back Pages”—woods is riding “on flaming roads using ideas as [his] maps.” We’ll meet on edges soon, he says—probably the “lists of names, pages and pages” he’s hoarding on “Soft Landing”—but the impulse here should amount to more than freeing political dissidents from cages. On Aethiopes, woods clocked nautical miles, but now he’s on a world tour redeeming his frequent flyers. You’ll find nothing quite as unrepentant as cannibal tours here, though there are horrors and hors d'oeuvres aplenty. These Orientalist postulates are somewheres, but Maps is concerned with nowheres.
2. SUBS & COMPONENTS
Yeah, I’m leaving tomorrow, but I got time today. woods begins “Kenwood Speakers” by speaking his words of departure like John Denver, only he spares us the sentiment. “Leaving on a jet plane—” Denver sings, “don’t know when I'll be back again. / I hate to go.” woods is at worst eager and at best aloof about his own leaving. V. S. Naipaul’s Ralph Singh from The Mimic Men, meanwhile, goes further, stating bluntly: “I am not coming back.”
Maps—like Dante’s Inferno, like Plato’s cave—is where all people come to know themselves. The album is billy woods’ itinerarium mentis—his journey of the mind—a [hero’s] journey into the center of the [real] earth. One-dimensional MCs can’t handle that. The undertaking requires steadfast digging into the so[u/i]l of one’s self. Another turn of the screw, gyring deeper, despite how much the torture/[tour]ture might hurt. We feel the pangs right along with him, do we not?
Guess who’s coming to dinner on “Kenwood Speakers”? Some born sinner, the opposite of a winner—but not a sardine in his line of sight. Only Deleuze and Guattari lines of flight—escape routes to deterritorialize your whole plane of immanence. The night before woods departs on a pilgrim’s progress, his body and being go surface-to-air—Habyarimana on an economy flight. Or John Denver even, who was watching time and space cross his path as his Rutan Long-EZ plane nose-dived into Monterey Bay. Knock the plane out of the sky and woods sparks his own personal gentrifier genocide.
This is where your humble essayist springs a gentrification quote on dat azz. Say, David Harvey quoting Lenin quoting Cecil Rhodes—that would be apropos. Some “Accumulation by Dispossession” shit; some spatio-temporal fixes shit. But bleary-eyed theorizing would diminish what woods does with his terse, yet totalizing, imagistic lines. I’m gonna sit this one out and leave it to the gentrifiers themselves to tell it. (Catch me like “Lenin lying in state” [“Warmachines”]; or, as we hear on “NYC Tapwater”: “I lie down like V.I. Lenin.”)
3.
The title “Kenwood Speakers,” of course, is a portmanteau of their names [Kenny Segal + billy woods]—the blending of sound and style of [e]strange[d] bedfellows: woods as an observant Ishmael to Kenny Segal’s affable Queequeg. woods listens to Kenny Segal’s beats like Ishmael opens up to Queequeg’s tattoos—his cannibal body [of work] a “book of nomad inscription,” according to Pierre Joris. The “port” of this portmanteau is a haven, a hush harbor. “The port would fain give succor,” Melville writes, “...in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities.” Portmanteau as leather luggage, too—filled with Kenny’s circuit-bent Omnichord, his pedals, his SP-404, his “weird little children’s toys turned into live beat-machine things” (in woods’ words). woods calls him “nuts,” but so too was Glenn Branca. Forget jazzmatazz, Kenny’s brand of jazzmaskronk incorporates No Wavy horns and angular guitar strokes put to the orbital sander. Bring the sinuosity. Tonal plexus, to perfection. Counterpane production steez: combining elements unmethodically in sun and shade; beats stuffed with corncobs or broken crockery. Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian. Bones litter the beach, gnawed.
4. A MINIMALIST HOMEBOY WHO KNOWS HIS BEATS
The opening clicks on “Kenwood Speakers” are the clicking of a gas stove before the burner crowns with blue flame (...blue flame like the oven, woods says on “Rapper Weed”). And we can trace the sonic sum of his drum thump and drum pattern to LL Cool J’s “I Can’t Live Without My Radio,” another ode to electroacoustic transducers. The Rubin-produced banger gets audiophiliacs amped—woofers wallop and tweeters twitch. Move forward in time to “Fantastic Damage,” where El-P introduces a boom-bap that veers cement-crush. He leaves “ruthless rounds of radio dust” in his wake—“cranial mush.” Bigger, deffer, fitter, happier, more productive.
In the liner notes for Radio (1985), Nelson George calls LL a “talkologist,” which we can apply to woods, too. “After-market speakers in the Saturn,” he raps, and his whip is his own personal universe, evidently. He’s a brother from another Lonely Planet. Fodor’s on the dashboard; Baedeker in the backpack. From Plainfield to Compton: Swing down, sweet chariot, stop, and let him ride dirty in a lemon (hell yeah): “Beater but they can’t catch it.” The engine clunks and clatters just as the beat breaks down after the first verse—a beat transition/deconstruction not heard since DJ Shadow’s work on “Latyrx.” Kenny Segal’s music is all Chords and Discords, like the Letters to the Editor section of DownBeat magazine. Noizy Meditations like that L.O.N.S. joint T.I.M.E. (“cover my tracks with backronyms”). Fair to say Kenny Segal could pull a broad sword from a hoarded synthesizer, word to Aes Rizzle.
5.
LL’s radio appeared to ward off gentrifiers by design, destabilizing the ground beneath their feet: “My JVC vibrates the concrete.” He was “terrorizing [his] neighbors with the heavy bass.” True to Duke Bootee and Melle Mel, the impoverished city is like a jungle sometimes—“the rats is madness”—and the superpredators sport Brooks Brothers suits. woods is watching the blue-eyed soulless ones encroach, the “blue-eyed White Walkers in King’s Landing.” They march on the miry Slough of Despond. He’s not trying to leave the neighborhood empty-handed, so he infiltrates. He finagles and ingratiates himself into a “dinner party with the neighbors, / Their apartment’s renovated”—no longer a “crumbling mansion.” He eats their food ravenously, wolfishly. With each morsel, he’s seeking the beloved community, or so they’d like to believe.
As they dine, woods “turn[s] the music up incrementally,” and you’ve got to imagine it’s some PMRC fare—Ice-T’s “You Played Yourself” or the like. Something equal parts catch-wreck and (w)reckoning. Or maybe the song is “Kenwood Speakers” itself. And it’s a sort of Jordan Davis reversal at work. woods as Lord Baelish with the “mischievous lies.” He’s Claudius with a cup of poison. The whole ear of gentrified Bed-Stuy serpent-stung, rankly (and thankfully) abused. woods goes full Ying Yang Twins and “whisper[s] in the host’s ear all night,” hexing him, slow-releasing Paraquat into his supple mind as he sups. (That’s what’s up.) We’ve seen him in this capacity before, like when he whispered to his own dull knife-sheared shadow on “houthi.” The hushed hemlock woods administers to the “host’s ear” collapses into what woods “hear[s]” later—that “they found [the host] in the morning [with the] hose run from the exhaust pipe.” A well-thumbed copy of White Fragility left behind on his nightstand. woods reveals himself to be Samwell Tarly with the black dragonglass dagger. “Wreathed in gas—I’m a carburetor,” woods raps, contrasting his smoky satisfaction with the carbon monoxide car killing. He sees the Wicket Gate blurry in the distance—and it bears a helluva resemblance to an airport gate.
6. SPACE IS THE NON-PLACE
Much has been hastily made of the narrative structure of Maps—eager listeners figuring wussdaplan and blueprint to the realms ’n realities that the album presents. But order—beginnings [departures] and endings [arrivals]—isn’t important; movement is. Better find out, before your time’s out, what the flux? Think Inspectah Deck’s “alive on arrival”; disregard Puff Daddy’s “mess around be D.O.A., be on your way” (but heed his fugacious “ain’t enough time here”). Non-narrative acceptance will allow us to revel in what Nathaniel Mackey calls “the rickety, imperfect fit between word and world.”
And as we navigate that imperfect fit, dwell in the non-. Dwell in the non-, in the non-, in the non-. “An airport is nowhere,” W. S. Merwin writes, “which is not something / generally noticed.” Merwin’s poem (“Neither Here Nor There”) typifies ideas explored in Marc Augé’s Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (1992). Augé analyzes the meaning of transient spaces in our fast-paced, globalized society. He sets places (rooted, concrete, community-rich locations—where “saplings bend” but don’t break) against spaces (abstract locations of the mind—“I live in my mind,” as woods said on “Asylum”). We spend an immoderate amount of time in a multiplication of “non-places,” which Augé sees as “installations needed for the accelerated circulation of passengers and goods”—airports, hotels, interchanges, high-speed roads. This is the world woods knows all too well on Maps. Whether he’s taking a “$300 Uber to a show” role-playing as Future in a Maybach, smoking a spliff that “could probably jump your car battery,” exploring “Johannesburg in a Ford Explorer,” or manifesting “Jimmy Wopo draped over his steering wheel,” woods inhabits the image of the non-place. Makes sense for someone who claims to be “from where every car foreign and [they] drive ’em on empty,” dwelling in disconnectedness. Your head is throbbing and I ain’t said shit yet—the next movement is by air.
7.
woods takes in the view from his plane window. “Space,” Augé writes, “stems in effect from a double movement: the traveller’s movement, of course, but also a parallel movement of the landscapes which he catches only in partial glimpses.” On “Soft Landing,” woods sees with new sight: “From up here the lakes is puddles, / The land unfold brown and green—it’s a quiet puzzle.” woods pieces the partial glimpses together into something cohesive and captivating—“a series of ‘snapshots’ piled hurriedly into his memory and, literally, recomposed in the account he gives of them,” in Augé’s words.
“But the book is written before being read,” Augé adds, and let’s exchange “book” with album and “read” with heard. “[I]t passes through different places before becoming one itself: like the journey, the narrative that describes it traverses a number of places.” For woods, these places include a pop-in with Aesop Rock in Portland, Oregon, a visit to the Alchemist’s lab in Los Angeles, and a late-night stop at Steel Tipped Dove’s apartment in Brooklyn. He takes up residence at Kenny Segal’s L.A. home and traipses around Japan, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Germany. Augé:
This plurality of places, the demands it makes on the powers of observation and description (the impossibility of seeing everything or saying everything), and the resulting feeling of “disorientation”...cause a break or discontinuity between the spectator-traveller and the space of the landscape he is contemplating or rushing through. This prevents him from perceiving it as a place, from being fully present in it, even though he may try to fill the gap with comprehensive and detailed information out of guidebooks.
woods has discussed the “mental and physical spaces that type of travel and touring put[s] [him] in.” His documentation of his movement through non-places is the least he can do to keep from entropying: “I was writing in hotels, and Airbnbs, and airports, and sometimes at home.” For us though, his audience, woods is no longer hiding places; he’s exposing places.
8. LIKE, “I JUST FLEW INTO THE CITY—WHAT’S UP WITH YOU?”
We hear “hero’s journey” and immediately inch toward Ithaca and Homeric hexameter, but Gilgamesh should be our guidepost, not that man-of-many-ways Odysseus. Our guidepost is woods’ “Gilgamesh”—a relationship song of stunted growth and stasis. “Got a call out the blue,” he starts, but with Maps, the call is to us and it’s a clarion call. The name Gilgamesh rings out, and it sounds like “rattling medals.” On Maps, it sounds like a “chain banged [on] glass ceilings,” an echo of Prodigy’s piece banging on glass tables. We heard the vibrations on “houthi”—that “change on plexiglass” jingle. I’m impressed by the resonance. The message doesn’t “sound weak coming out the speakers” like it did on “Gilgamesh.” The marginal upgrade is Kenwood speakers—no puttering set of Polks.
woods is arguing for a new paradigm—he didn’t need his paradigm to shift like the rest of us did. He read the daily briefings and was familiar with what-goes-around-comes-around logic. He wasn’t caught lacking on 9/11—we were. He’d been rapping along with Biggie (Blow up like the World Trade…). He coveted his promo copy of The Coup’s Party Music with Boots holding the detonator on the cover. He was looking at the city like jihadis in the cockpit. When it comes to artistic representations, like my homie D.O.C., no one has done 9/11 better than billy woods. Noreaga adopted the personage of Manuel Noriega; Intelligent Hoodlum was reborn as Tragedy Khadafi; woods takes on the mantle of Osama bin Laden—green army field jacket over white robe.
On “Gilgamesh,” he’s “left thinking like Osama in Khartoum” when his ex splits, “gone at first light, connecting flight—she made the plane.” Vindictiveness aside, woods should know her airport visit alone will be a hellish experience. Punishment enough. Subjected to TSA screens and pat downs while touring the globe, find woods “excessively mean-mugging” as the metal detector wand grazes his testicles. “Airports and aircraft, big stores and railway stations have always been a favoured target for attacks,” writes Augé, “doubtless for reasons of efficiency…. But another reason might be that…those pursuing new socializations and localizations can see non-places only as a negation of their ideal.” woods’ 9/11 bars may startle us, but they disabuse us of our bliss.
9.
GO flat out at top speed across curve of earth is the only way.
—Pierre Joris, A Nomad Poetics (2003)
The earth is a sphere.
—“Houdini”
All this perpetual movement, this implacable globetrotting, these abrupt shifts in location—it makes for a nomad poetics, as poet Pierre Joris puts it. woods is a “NOET,” where “NO stands for play [and] ET stands for et cetera, the always ongoing process, the no closure.” Joris describes how polylingualism is a nomadic trait that is capable of “moving through languages, cultures, terrains, times without stopping.” So woods drags us from witnessing Yemeni traders off the coast of Mozambique (“The Doldrums”) to Dien Bien Phu (“Baby Steps”) in less than twelve months. He slips into Jamaican patois and amuses us with his limited Spanish (Muchos problemas if you don’t have it for the plug…). In “The Schooner Flight,” Derek Walcott says, “either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.” woods would remix: I’m nobodies and nations.
“[I]f it is all flux, all nomad wandering” for the NOET, “when & how to write,” Joris asks. “How not to stop & yet do the poem?” The nomadic poem—like the songs that make up Maps—is a “poasis, a poem-oasis, i.e., a stop in the moving along.” In Sufi poetry, this is known as the mawqif, which Joris defines as “the pause, the stop-over, the rest, the stay of the wanderer between two moments of movement.” The layover, in woods’ words. A moment of “movement-in-rest, of movement on another plane or plateau, between today’s & tomorrow’s lines of flight.” Recording “Rapper Weed” in Kenny Segal’s studio in L.A., for example.
Nomad poetics encompass a political component. Joris isn’t blind to the realities of “a historical era where cheap air flight has made at least the White World into summer travelers, sun-seekers, tourist-nomads, i.e., fake nomads, or really not nomads at all, while a large part of poor Third World people are constrained to turn themselves into forced labor exilees or at best transhumance-ing workers, transients that have been ‘transported’ as the term was used in the slave trade.”
The triangulation of “sugar, molasses, rum”—it’s a strangulation. There’s trouble with travel. Travel as forced relocation. Travel as travails, as toil—or, worse—as tripaliare (Vulgar Latin for “torture”). From your book I took a page, bell hooks—who writes in Black Looks (1992) of being accosted, detained, and interrogated by white officials while in an Italian airport, and another time being strip searched at an airport in France, suspected of ties to terrorism in both cases. “[T]o travel is to encounter the terrorizing force of white supremacy,” she writes. Augé writes about how “the user of the non-place is always required to prove his innocence,” but for bell hooks, a Black woman, “there is no comfort that makes the terrorism disappear.” Who is Augé to judge how she terror manages?
“Goin’ places that I’ve never been, / Seein’ things that I may never see again,” Willie Nelson sings, impatient for a return to the road. His is a romanticized perspective; with feelings of dissociation, woods offers a no-man-ticized one, more akin to Atmosphere’s “Travel” from 2000: “We travel like the blood that surrounds your brain”—pressure builds and aneurysms flutter under cranial walls. The itinerary looks blurry, the ink faded from sun, folds, and creases. “The engagements are booked through the end of the world,” croons They Might Be Giants’ John Linnell, “so we’ll meet at the end of the tour.” [Open Mike Eagle nods approvingly.]
10. HEAVY AIRPLAY ALL DAY WITH A NINA SIMONE CHORUS
On “Soft Landing,” Kenny Segal introduces guitar to drums and they converse in a dissonant cadence. In the words of Cecil Taylor, they consist of “regular and irregular measurements, of coexisting bodies of sound.” woods takes flight and the sound of the plane lifting off the tarmac is a welcome relief, like blasts from Michael Nyman’s Decay Music (1976). “Birds flying high,” woods sorta-sings, and he follows their migratory patterns. Just get him the fuck outta dodge. He’s a budding ornithologist with his head in the loud clouds. We hear him mention “birds-of-paradise in the menagerie” and “midnight ravens” alike. The exotic and the demonic—he studies them all, binoculars to his peepers.
“Before we take off, I call Mom and say, I love you,” woods raps. He’s taken a note from Quelle Chris who advised, “Call your folks while they still livin’.” woods’ mother antipodal to his ex who he texts upon landing with a significantly less felicitous message—one feminine figure signals ascent; the other, descent. The in-betweenness of the experience—limbic and liminal all at once, exemplified by woods with his “head in the loud clouds [and] both feet on the fucking pavement.” woods invariably finds himself in the in-betweenness, the purgatorio of his life’s purpose: be it from “Rolling Loud to Shakespeare in the Park” or his own nature documentary “narrated by an Attenborough [but] over the instrumental to ‘Keep It Thoro.’”
“You believe in [the airport],” Merwin writes:
while you are there
because you are there
and sometimes you may even feel happy
to be that far on your way
to somewhere
You know how I feel? woods feels the altitude sickness, his ears popping. But once that subsides, he feels suspended in time and space. Sun in the sky. Breeze driftin’ on. Only gotta fear a flock of geese in the aircraft engines, what with no savior Sully to guide the passengers to safety. At long last, he feels free from the fetters of his life down below. He’s [re]set for a soft landing.
11.
Look out, honey, ’cause I’m using technology,
Ain’t got time to make no apology.
—The Stooges, “Search and Destroy”
There’s a duality on Maps: two selves—one who longs to travel; the other who longs to return home. Calypso after the show, but FaceTime calls with the kids at the breakadawn. On “FaceTime,” though, home is the last place. Home is where the heart gave out. What woods takes with him on the flight are the repercussions, the health complications. Quarrels crammed in the carry-on. Relationship woes on the wing:
You flyin’ easyJet—Bratislava, Utrecht,
Something felt off before I even left,
So when I saw the missed calls, I knew what was next.
Didn’t have to open the text.
woods delineates a communication breakdown. He initially tries to distance himself by using the second-person, but moments later he’s allowed himself to be drawn back in. He notes the “missed calls” and uses every shred of self-discipline to not “open the text.” The patterns, he reminds himself, are nothing new. He may be unnerved by “flyin’ easyJet,” but the awareness that “something felt off before [he] even left” feels good—a familiarity. The consonance of “felt off before I even left” provides him the lift he needs. No matter the angle he looks at it [“felt” or “left,” anagrammatically satisfying—he can sit with his feelings or leave them all behind], he’s floating above the rubble of the relationship.
Not for lack of trying. They did “couples therapy on Zoom, [but] it’s a train wreck.” The Celestial Railroad derails and they burn off the vinyl chloride toxic spillage. The evacuation zone is 30 kilometers wide. woods is a sucker—falls for it every time. Okay, okay, okay: not every time. He’s become adept at having his “evil eye ward off hex, though—FaceTime declined.” He goes full Last Tango in Paris on the enchantress, displacing his frustrations on a crowd of innocent civilians: “Butter wouldn’t melt, I gave ’em margarine.” Echoes of Tony Soprano after Carmela informs him that’s she’s filing for divorce: “The only reason you have anything is ’cause of my fucking sweat, and you knew every step of the way exactly how it works. But you walk around that fucking mansion in your $500 shoes and your diamond rings, and you act like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth.” If we’re talking socialization mediated by screens, this is some real prestige drama—really real, son.
Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul.
With so much drama in the relationship, woods retreats further. He loses himself at a gig. Afterwards, he writes at his desk in a hotel room in Tucson as he hears “dubstep drift in the window.” Partiers, “some half, some overdressed,” make their way through the halls, “checkin’ they phones” as the “bass shake[s] the walls.” woods is removed from it all: “I’m smoking alone in a cardigan, thinking of home.” In non-places, Augé insists, you can find yourself “alone, but one of many.” Once more unto the breach, he goes “back down to the bar again” only to witness an “afterparty packed like Parliament,” and who can really say whether it’s the funkiness of George Clinton or Margaret Thatcher, but the masses are pressed “ass cheeks and cheekbones”—baby got bacchanalia. woods, for his part, is “looking like the help or someone who just wandered in.” He’s an outsider amongst the “animal pelts,” “chunky rings, clunky shoes, [and] lots of ink.” Out of place, out of sight, out of mind, out-of-body experience. He’s Poe’s eagle-eyed protagonist in “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), “observing the promiscuous company in the room.” He marks the “dense and continuous tides of population,” “their aggregate relations,” and he “regard[s] with minute interest the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gate, visage, and expression of countenance.” Despite all of that distraction, by the end of the song woods has only moved the pen six inches. “Really,” he says, regaining our trust, her trust, “I’m just waiting for my phone to ping”—emphasis on waiting. “I’m thinking ’bout you when I’m supposed to be thinking ’bout other things.”
12.
A stay in L.A., L.A., big city of dreams, but everything in L.A. is overpriced. Avaricious sonsabitches “bloated with gout, / Sores weeping, doubled-over, chest heaving from chasing clout,” shelling out “six Gs an ounce.” woods went from genuflecting at the weed price to oof. He’s a savvy consumer, but Los Angeles, as Mike Davis writes in City of Quartz (1990), is “a stand-in for capitalism in general.” He continues: “The ultimate world-historical significance—and oddity—of Los Angeles is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism. The same place, as Brecht noted, symbolized both heaven and hell. Correspondingly, it is the essential destination on the itinerary of any late twentieth-century intellectual, who must eventually come to take a peep and render some opinion on whether ‘Los Angeles Brings It All Together’ (official slogan) or is, rather, the nightmare at the terminus of American history (as depicted in noir).” woods excavates the future in Los Angeles, such as Davis’s subtitle goes, where the “Nike store on Fairfax” is absent of inventory, where one’s commodified state of being includes “monogrammed tube[s],” “crushed velvet,” and other offscourings of “colorful packaging.” None of which is of much interest to billy woods, a man who has “learn[ed] to toss the dregs.” This place, he knows, is a cemetery. He rests his riveted gaze on the “whole entourage on the couch buried in they phones.” You heard right: buried in they phones—their absence-presence of screen staring, their doom-scrolling a Tibetan Book of the Dead written in real time, a bardo of blue light. Mike Davis is quick to remind us: “Pío Pico, the last governor of Mexican California and once the richest man in [Los Angeles], was buried in a pauper’s grave.” “When it’s my time,” woods raps, “no need to pass the hat.” No GoFundMe campaign necessary to cover the costs of a champagne crepe-lined casket. “Just throw me in when the fire good and crackling,” he implores. My my, hey hey—it’s better to burn out than to fade away. Send him up in smoke just the same as so much of his precious time on earth. “Bury me in a borrowed suit,” woods advised his mortician on Earl Sweatshirt’s “Tabula Rasa.”
13.
Jet-lag is the cousin of Death. On “Bad Dreams Are Only Dreams,” woods grows weary as his transient life becomes a trance-ient life. “I can’t quite grab the new me,” he raps, brainfogged as he passes through time zones like skipping stones. His “old self [is] dozing in an aisle seat” on an Emirates flight. Forget about his girl back home, now he’s divorced from himself. Augé:
When an international flight crosses Saudi Arabia, the hostess announces that during the overflight the drinking of alcohol will be forbidden in the aircraft. This signifies the intrusion of territory into space. Land = society = nation = culture = religion: the equation of anthropological place, fleetingly inscribed in space. Returning after an hour or so to the nonplace of space, escaping from the totalitarian constraints of place, will be just like a return to something resembling freedom.
woods has split the self, drawn-and-quartered it. He’s his own chain gang. On the side of the road where his “brain [is] exposed to the elements.” If we “lift [his] skull-top off delicate,” we see it’s “wider than the Sky,” as Emily Dickinson similized it. Worst of all, it’s infected by devils who’ve no regard for the fragile “bone china chafing dish” that holds the brain. “Absent-minded,” woods raps—he’s absent of his mind. And that might be an error, as criminal-minded might more accurately reflect his present status of “break[ing] time like bricks.” “Thoughts is cinder blocks,” but all I can see is woods breaking rocks in the hot sun. When he soundclashes, he fights the law. In his cell watching Shogun Assassin for the umpteenth time, but he’s also come into possession of a VHS copy of Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973). Flyin’ easyJet: Hong Kong to Paris. How different is monotonous prison labor from the toil of travel? Luggage heft; cramped legs; numb ass. woods needs rest and recovery, but “alarm clocks break spells.” He’s living in his own private Gitmo. Enhanced interrogation has him walking the witch. TSA sleep-deprives him to extract intel, to elicit a confession. His Self is reduced to geologic bits. He’s “crashed out,” Flight 93 style, as he becomes a plane making impact with the ground in Shanksville, PA and disintegrates. “Search for my own black box in the hills,” he raps, wanting to recover his own voice, his own data. Just as he said on “Red Dust,” “it’d be wise” to retrieve it. But what he finds amongst the strewn debris is a “black Rubik’s cube,” impenetrably scrambled.
This nightmare scenario has woods like the rappers he described on Armand Hammer’s “Aubergine”: “Tired, / Inertia the only thing keep ’em moving, / Glassy-eyed.” woods is a survivor of the crash, of sorts—his “parachute twisted and snarled.” You can’t put a price on a good night’s sleep, even if it’s a “king’s ransom.” But woods is “half ’sleep with the halo, dead on his feet,” so maybe it’s too little, too late. He wanders zombified, inactive, unconscious. He’s trying to get right for today; he’s “not swimming in tomorrows” like on “Babylon by Bus.” His death grip on reality is only as firm as his grip on surreality, as we heard from his appearance on Infinite Disease’s “Anomalady”:
After a while, you don't remember the crowds or venues,
just the hotel rooms.
¿Tu tienes WiFi?
It's just me in a stocking cap, watching TV
The city dead out the window, still not even sleepy
Sleep deprivation, the days keep leaking
Life on the screen, light the dark like a beacon
woods the amnesiac—he “don’t remember the crowds or venues.” If only he could repress the meaningless hotel rooms instead. Alive ain’t always living in non-places (just ask Quelle Chris), especially when it’s mediated by technology: WiFi passwords, TV, his phone. Somehow he survives; it’s the city that’s dead.
14. FBI AGENTS NARROW THEY EYES
When you turn the knob on “Blue Smoke,” you trick yourself into believing you’re rehearsing with Ornette. We feel inner circle. We feel privy. But Max Roach might also be in the audience, like he was at the Five Spot in 1959, waiting for Ornette to step offstage so he could duff him up, which he did. The FBI had a dossier on Roach, just as they did for so many other Black cultural icons. COINTELPRO with the hyper-acuity. ELUCID forewarned: Fifty people at a rap show—one’s an informant. Police came to billy woods’ show on Known Unknowns, an album which has moments that jive with the claustrophonic and paranoisey sounds of Hiding Places. To avoid any confusion, I’ll pass the mic to media god Marshall McLuhan:
We now have the means to keep everybody under surveillance…. This has become one of the main occupations of mankind—just watching other people and keeping a record of their goings-on. Invading privacy—in fact, just ignoring it. Everybody has become porous…. When you’re on the telephone, or on radio, or on TV, you don’t have a physical body. You’re just an image on the air…. You’re a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you. And this, I think, has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It has deprived people, really, of their private identity.
On “NYC Tapwater,” woods takes a stab-your-brain-with-your-nose-bone attempt at mentoring the youngins: “No need for stop-and-frisk, it’s cameras everywhere, / They got your IG feed, / Come scoop kids after they do the deed.” Mass surveillance should have you shook. woods spies the “big-ass satellite dish pointed at the sky,” on “Blue Smoke.” woods fucks with the frequencies frequently, sabotaging the alphabet boys with “so much tape hiss.” These aren’t just some plainclothes cops with iPads in Missoula, Montana. These are FBI agents that “narrow they eyes, / Frustrated, asking to be reassigned” because woods is giving them nada. “Been on this n-word for months,” they concede, “I think it’s all just rhymes.” Yep, rhymes like dimes. Talk about a most strange game, but woods knows he “shouldn’t be surprised.” Know that you’ll be scrutinized. He threatens that he better not “catch you unsupervised”—from the Latin super [“over”] + videre [“to see”], which = overseer. You know that sound—it’s the sound of da police. Same as you heard at the conclusion of “Police Came to My Show.” KRS-One offered a likkle truth and implored you to open up your eye. An exercise, from the Teacher:
Take the word overseer, like a sample,
Repeat it very quickly in a crew, for example:
Overseer, overseer, overseer, overseer—
Office, officer, officer, officer.
No wonder woods guards himself with galvanized steel security fencing. In a non-place like an airport, writes Augé, “the passenger accedes to his anonymity only when he has given proof of his identity.” Mom showed him where she keeps the passport hidden, and he retrieves it when necessary. Similar rules apply to others. “Anyone wanna be in my life gotta sign several waivers,” he raps strictly on “Babylon by Bus.”
15.
I traveled among unknown men.
—William Wordsworth (1799)
I asked, “Is the mask for the killer or the crowd?"
—Armand Hammer’s “Sadderday”
What is known and unknown (in a Rumsfeldian sense); what is seen and unseen (in a Lord Quasian sense)? You can obfuscate the message. You can adjust the pitch of your voice. Augé explains how the “spatial overabundance [of non-places] works like a decoy.” Hiding places are everywhere, but they’re especially easy to access while on tour. A person “entering the space of non-place is relieved of his usual determinants,” writes Augé. “He becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of passenger…. Subjected to a gentle form of possession, to which he surrenders himself.” The rep grows bigger, ELUCID raps on “As The Crow Flies,” but not so big and unwieldy that woods can’t shuffle through a non-place without being recognized by adoring fans. He settles into what Augé refers to as “the passive joys of identity-loss.”
“Just picture me sittin’ with a pen in a cloud of smoke,” woods says on “Baby Steps.” He asks us to envision him in a rather peculiar scenario, one in which he’s taking notes on a performance while concealing his own presence (despite seeking “to determine if [your live set’s] a hoax”). The performer is a “glowed up” Weird Sister, “looking like she covered in gold dust.” woods deduces she “must not have re-upped her Lexapro,” but her glamorous appearance plays against woods’ own guardedness. You don’t just let anyone in. woods is privileged, though, as the performer “pulled [him] aside [and] explained she was just doing a bit.” One is inclined to consider whether this is all a projection on a screen. Or, put differently: Is this performative or praxis? Either way, woods was like, Oh. And not since his ex-wife’s reaction to learning “where [he] stashed it” has a response hit so heavy (“She paused, then she said, OK”). woods’ whole life feels stashed—brown-bagged or cardboard-boxed. A secret sharer, he’s not.
It’s' places no one knows who you are,
It’s faces we never wore.
—“Agriculture”
Would woods be able to distinguish a DOOMposter from the real thing—a cheap, bumbling replica from the genuine article? “Over time,” woods raps, “symbols eclipse the things they symbolize.” The mask becomes not a means to maintain privacy but a phenomenon itself—a mass-marketed one, at that. Just ask the MF DOOM estate. DOOM masks created and sold by both authorized and unauthorized retailers proliferate. Etsy shops stay busy predicting their posthumous profit margins [see: DEATHFAME]. MF DOOM likened his “imposters” to characters. “[W]ho I choose to put as the character is up to me,” he said. “When you come to a DOOM show…[you’ve] come to hear the show and come to hear the music. To see me? Y’all don’t even know who I am! Technology makes it possible for me to still do music and not have to be any particular place…. [I]f you’re coming to a DOOM show, don’t expect to see me, expect to hear me or hear the music that I present.” It sounds like DOOM is eternally wandering one of Augé’s non-places as one of McLuhan’s “discarnate beings.”
woods has been Camouflaging himself since at least 2003. Like Poe, he is the man of the crowd, and “[i]t will be in vain to follow: for I shall learn no more of him.” On “Soundcheck,” he asks the venue to “kill the lights,” just as he does every show, murdering the audience’s hope of eye contact, of facial recognition. Even if they manage the right angle and a “Nikon flash,” woods’ “face is the mask.” As he walks through the uncanny valleys of the shadows, you “develop the photograph but [find] something just wasn’t right.” President Kongi did not like to be photographed, and you heard Pac screamin’, spittin’ at the paparazzi. At the merch table, woods places his hand in front of his face for fan photo ops [or are they photo opps?]—a strange paradox of acquiescence [woods stops resisting the photo request, in cop parlance] and a gesture of refusal. “It’s GWAR when I’m off-stage,” he tells us on “The Layover.” The mask evolves over time. DOOM went from pantyhose, to a silver-sprayed Darth Maul mask, to a faceplate from a Gladiator helmet (the latter two prototypes thanks to the ingenuity of KEO). Oderus Urungus went from a papier-mâché helmet to a latex-horned extreme.
The proximal distance between woods’ and his audience inches ever close—close, that is, but not too close. No Next-level poke coming through-ness. A double portion of protection for him and his psychic health. He doesn’t want to make it hard for himself. “My shell, mechanical,” he quotes a trusted source in a world full of leakers, snitches, and finks. But for all the attention (achtung baby!) paid to woods’ face/non-face, more eyes should be devoted to retina-scanning his verse. woods’ “love language [is] an obscure dialect,” but his delivery veils his technical prowess. woods raps with a cup-runneth-over flow where words spill over the edge of the bar, past the four, combined with conversational cadence and syntax.
Examine the second verse of “FaceTime.” woods’ sound devices and internal rhyming are in service to his theme, providing hand-holding to the listener as they walk the patterns together. The verse begins simple enough with a nursery rhyme sequence (“oboes…clarinet”; “rainbows…wept”) but almost immediately complexifies when the garbled /r/ begins to dominate with “Marrakech.” The alliterative /d/ [“dubstep drift in the window—I sit at my desk”] drags us to the “party outside,” away from our sanctuary of solitude. And the contraction of “Playboi Carti” leads to even more intense and immediate “partyin’” in the halls. woods brings us into the noise alongside him, even if we didn’t receive a formal invitation. The tumult of the scene is communicated through woods’ irregular pattern of internal and end-rhyme. “Phones,” “alone,” “home,” “cone,” and “blown” angle through the crowd, bumping and grinding against the dominate /r/ of “cardigan,” “origin,” “bar again,” “Parliament,” “parted,” “margarine,” “wandered in,” and “order” (or disorder, if I may). The sonorant pairing of “halls” &“walls” (destabilized by bass shakes); the triad of “melt,” “help,” & “pelts”; the trading of “chunky” & “clunky”; the bevy of /nk/ & /ng/ words (rings, ink, drink, ping, thinking, things, sink)—nothing saves us from the discomfiting experience described in the verse. We are subject to the final /r/ pairing of “tread water.” We’re exhausted by that point, and we drown.
Which way ought we go from here? Doesn’t much matter which way we go.
16. ODE ON INDOLENCE
“Soundcheck” is a reclamation of dignity. woods repeats his negative declaration (“I will not be at soundcheck”) four times throughout his verse, emphatically. Not since Bartleby have we heard such a vehement refusal. “I would prefer not to,” the scrivener says. woods’ refusal would make Paul Lafargue proud. It’s an unusual illusion that makes an MC believe he must puppet perform a phantom set for an audience of one, all in the name of amplification. It’s not that complicated. Organized Konfusion dealt with this shit in ’97. On “Soundman,” they summed it up nicely: If it ain’t loud enough, we tell the soundman turn that shit up, up, up. Tek and Steele embraced a more threatening approach. Exit the soundclash and enter the venue for a moment. Boom bye bye to a sound bwoy head. (Wiretap sound like Buju Banton, don’t it?) They demand a Sound [Man] Bureill.
woods craves his pre-show isolation: “I will not be in the green room if it’s too lit.” Are we talking incandescence or excitement? Either way, he wants none of it. Dah shinin’ of a spotlight in his face is not his style. His autonomy is the only item on his rider: “I reserve the right.” And that means no irksome obligations like soundcheck or backstage dawdling. He prefers to take in the town, a “local greasy spoon or Szechuan establishment,” maybe the Courtyard Marriott bathroom where he can “[blow] marijuana through the vents.” God-level expertise when it comes to that habit. We know from “No Hard Feelings” how he “towel[s] the door.”
He “might watch the sun set over your city from a parapet or a park bench.” woods considers the lilies and how they grow—they toil not, so why should he? We’ve seen him sitting there. We might’ve mistaken him for one of those Park Bench People that Freestyle Fellowship clued us into in 1993. “I see an old man sittin’ on a park bench,” Myka 9 sang, someone “lookin’ in the skies.” Might’ve been woods. “You’re thinkin’ ’bout your kids,” Myka said, “...’bout your girl, / You’re thinkin’ of all the things you did, / You see the children play.” woods wishes he was pushing his own baby on the swing, but he’s got to wait for that.
Time’s not lost completely. He will not be at soundcheck, but he will be timely for the show. You won’t find him “wakin’ up on a park bench a bum” (“The Doldrums”). “Headlamps splash squatter tents on my way to the venue,” woods raps, “—they wave me in.” Who exactly? The squatters or the show promoter? Who would he be more comfortable with? “I’m smiling like I’m not,” he says from the stage, spurning the coon caricature so many Black performers have thrust upon them by the public. woods won’t dance a jig, won’t step and fetch it. Not even when it’s time to get paid. “After the curtains, I sit for a while before I go get the check,” he explains. He turns merch tables on the promoter; makes him wait. Work slowdown. The pay is small, so take your time and buck them all, as the Wobblies used to say. Every live show forget the lyric, huh?—probably intentional. Don’t give them what they want. Withhold your labor. Set your terms.
17. THE CONQUEST OF BREAD
…For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
—Wendell Berry
If woods can’t escape the commotion of the show, he’ll wander even farther off. On “Agriculture,” he moves beyond space and time. If “Paraquat” argued “Anno Domini, it’s no before, it’s only after,” then “Agriculture” reassesses and finds there’s only before. “Nothing in the thought bubble,” woods mentioned on “Soft Landing,” which leads us to this meditation, this reverie of the before. Before what—the Fall? Christ? Facial recognition software? Tour? “Before history [History…], I made fire in the cave,” he raps on “The Layover.” A time before connotes premodern, Arcadian. “Agriculture” strings together a sequence of befores, each more lyrical than the prior (“lyrical” not in a Biggie “lyrical lyricist flowin’ lyrics out my larynx” sense, but in a Coleridge & Wordsworth way). woods wakes “before the sunrise,” even before nature awakens fully, “before sparrow cry from thistle.” He notes “the kettle boil before it whistle,” holding space in the quiet intensity. The personified night “fight before it die” and, consequently, the “sky bleed purple,” battered and bruised. woods leads us to a place (in stark contrast to a non-place) that knows him from “before [his] hands been dirty” with corruption—a place “before [he] could grasp time,” somewhere embryonic. He welcomes us to his Walden, to an unspoiled place “without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies.” Here, the time is “before we had new names”—names like william woods, like F. Porter, like Madziwanyika. A time “before we was new in our own eyes”—before the mirror stage or interpellation.
To get there, woods has to travel to “parts unknown.” He’s only “at home when the road’s not paved.” He only asks for a “little piece of yard” where a “couple goats graze.” Sustainable living. Living that sustains. With a name like backwoodz, why wouldn’t the escape route point to the wilds? He retreats into the peace of wild things, as Wendell Berry calls it. There, woods can focus on [re]productivity. John McPhee, who has always had to balance teaching and writing, refers to his perennial phases as “crop rotations.” In the rural setting depicted on “Agriculture,” there are places enough for woods to push his plow. He retreats not out of complacency but out of a restorative need. He’s an ol’ dirty bastard, “squatting in the soil with a fistful.” CAN YOU DIG IT?! He channels Cyrus. He channels Kaczynski (and writes as much as him, too). “Agriculture” has a subtitle: Industrial Society and Its Future. “[T]echnology exacerbates the effects of crowding because it puts increased disruptive powers in people’s hands,” Kaczynski writes, staring at the whole entourage on the couch buried in they phones.
woods “used to plot on the come-up, plot on [his] brothers,” but now he lends care to his garden plot and “get[s] the tomatoes cropping sideways.” His idyll, exhilarating. He’s “stooped in the coop, gathering eggs” for breakfast, and, later, he “traded some to the neighbor for fresh bread.” The song seems mixed with Kropotkin on the console, a mutuality and self-sufficiency at work. He’d had this vision since forever. On Armand Hammer’s “Resin,” woods remixes the Jack and the Beanstalk fairytale. He plucks “one seed” from “out the pound”—transfixed by its “shiny and round” appearance, its seemingly enchanted qualities—and imagines a day where he’d “move away [and] put it in the ground.” “Ten years later,” though, the seed is “still in [his] drawer, rattling around—angrily.” (At least he didn’t end up with his bones ground to meal to make a giant’s bread, heh.)
“Agriculture” appears to be an illusion, a phantasy, at most a reprieve—a weekend upstate or a vacation in the old country. “I say I’m at peace, but it’s still that same dread,” woods laments, admitting his living off the fatta the lan’ is a temporary arrangement, a refueling on a road trip. “It’s hard to live when before you was dead,” and he finds the afterlife a troubling funk. But he’s in the now, he’s in the now, he’s in the now (as ELUCID is wont to say), and he sees “land on either side of the car.” That won’t suffice when he’s back in the city. He’s better off just getting blunted on reality.
18.
I was high all day, I escaped, goes the refrain on “Houdini.” From the spliff that woods lifts and inhales, he’s able to exhale the yellow smoke of buddha through righteous steps. No mask necessary; this is the vanishing act. To be ghost, to be Ghost.[1] The final “I escaped” of the refrain vanishes into the ether. Houdini was more an escape artist than a smoke and mirrors magician, of course. Others “working with mirrors,” but woods “disappears—[he] was never there.” Kenny Segal contrives a ¾ time signature so that woods can remove himself, waltzing past the typical regulations of time. “Day off,” he says at the top, though Armand Hammer’s “No Days Off” offered up the “sorcerer’s apprentice” gig. Doesn’t seem so appealing at the moment.
The green thumbing that had the tomatoes cropping sideways on “Agriculture” transforms OG into “fresh papaya” or another strain which has a taste that reminds woods of “Jamaican oranges that look like limes.” Where I’m from, you don’t see fireflies, he says. The pastoral escape again—he’s grounding himself (in both the ecotherapy sense and bringing that plane back down to terra firma). woods barefoot soaking up the Earth’s electrons [You don’t have to believe it]. But the tranquility turns quick as he “walk[s] into the forest filled with fear” and “hears something lumbering near.” But it’s just his mind playing tricks on him. It was all a dream—he “woke up sudden in armchair” (a money-green leather armchair, maybe). “Yo, you good to drive?”—and we’re buckling up, back to movement again.
19.
The wait is over, the wait is over, biddy-bye-bye [to the rhythm of BDP’s “The Bridge Is Over,” please]. woods and ShrapKnel scheme to lively up themselves like Marley and the Wailers on “Babylon by Bus,” but they’re touring ingloriously. “Cold open, slow to focus, cameras pan to a freeway,” PremRock directs. His cinematic pacing on par with Pasolini. The wait prevails—stasis. woods “sat on his gate for hours, pissing in a bottle.” Reminds him of the spider hole, probably, when “the job was to sit there all day and press ‘refresh’.”
On “Waiting Around,” he not only waits but wanders. For all his depersonalization on tour, woods counters the feeling by personifying the night again. She’s “young,” of course—full of opportunity—and he “watch[es] her move, spinning like vinyl jumping out the groove.” Graceful but with a smidgen of volatility. He personifies night, just as he does time, to keep him company. Later, he finds human companionship in the form of an actual woman. She’s an expatriate with “perfect teeth,” “5’3” [and] thick as congee porridge.” They smoke “outside in the darkness of the eve,” but she rejects his advances—even his offer to hop in his Horse & Carriage. woods sees defeat through the eyes and mind of Killa Cam. She kisses his cheek and bids him adieu. The ice melts but the champagne still cold. No hard feelings, right?
woods wanders Amsterdam like he’s done many times before. “I miss having nothing to lose,” he says, like back when he was twenty-two and ain’t had nothing but “twenty-two hundred in [his] shoe.” He feels like Jay-Z on “22 Two’s”: I been around this block too many times. Too true, Shawn Cart[ograph]er. woods reads the city with a stoner squint, a subtle wink, with whimsy. He cuts-up corners and avenues like Burroughs riding the Nova Express and disregards the grid like Max Heath. Or, put another way, woods embraces his instinctive travels and paths of rhythm. His verses break the grid too, what with their end-stops and enjambments that jar and jerk the listener as woods weaves through heavy foot traffic. He’s a herbaliser urban planner, dropping “a science of relations and ambiences,” what the Situationists called psychogeography. (Sorry ahead of time for not sparing you the Hallmark Guy Debord.) Each foreign city, for woods, is a Psycho Realm.
History has known men like woods, flâneurs flitting through throngs. “The crowd is his domain,” Baudelaire explained in “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), just “as the air is that of the birds.” Birds flyin’ high—you know how I feel. “For the perfect flâneur,” Baudelaire writes,
for the passionate observer, it is an immense joy to take up one’s dwelling among the multitude, amidst undulation, movement, the fugitive, the infinite. To be absent from home and yet feel oneself everywhere at home; to view the world, to be at the heart of the world, and yet hidden from the world, such are some of the last pleasures of those independent spirits, passionate and impartial, that language can only inadequately define.
But for woods (who told us he was a dandy on “King Tubby”), language does seem to adequately define what he sees and feels, right down to the “cobblestoned streets” beneath his feet. Time seems to pass exponentially—those cobblestones are Old Testament old, from the Annals of the Former World. woods, we know, vacillates between dwelling at “the heart of the world” and remaining “hidden from [it].” Through woods’ songs—especially on Maps—he functions as “a mirror…a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness which, with its every movement, conveys the multiplicity of life.” woods presents himself narratively as a first-person “I,” but he is an “I” that is “insatiable in his appetite for the ‘not-I.’” I is another. I is an Other.
Debord and his Situationist posse (the Lettrist International Clik, for the people), encouraged citizens to embrace the dérive, to take a bizarre ride II the pharcyde, to “drop their relations…and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” I jet propel at a rate that complicate their mental state, Bootie Brown rapped, but woods complicates his own mental state with his sauntering. The dérive can last any amount of time—minutes between meetings with distributors, Zoom podcast interviews, and press junkets. Pit stops between downtown bars and uptown bars. Middle-of-nowhere gas stations. You notice everything on the dérive—it’s an entropy of experience, but the gravitational pull of the flâneur pulls it all back together. woods looks to avail himself of these “Situations” (as the Situationists intended)—like the Native Tongues sought to create “Scenarios”—moments where he can shuffle off the alienation and spectacles of his Daily Operations.
20.
Rilke surveys the city in The Journey of My Other Self (1930) and catalogs what he sees—a parallel to woods’ journey to his other self: his performing self in juxtaposition to his personal self. Rilke walks along Rue Toullier in Paris, pondering: “People come here, then, to live? I should rather have thought they came here to die.” He sniffs an “odour [that] began to rise from the street…a smell of iodoform, the grease of pommes frites, and fear.” He might be smelling woods’ dinner: “ginger root, mussels, and pomme frites.” The “jaundiced moon” above woods matches the “greenish complexion” of a baby “in a perambulator standing on the pavement” not far from Rilke. “How much such a little moon can do!” Rilke cries. “There are days when everything about us is lucent and ethereal, scarcely outlined in the luminous atmosphere and yet distinct.” The moon seems to spotlight everything the world has to offer. “The nearest objects take on the tone of distance, are remote and merely displayed from afar, not given to us,” Rilke writes. And woods responds by grasping for “poems just out of reach.” Nothing is insignificant or superfluous.
“The fatal thing about these acted poems,” though, Rilke writes:
was that they continually added to and extended themselves, growing to tens of thousands of verses, so that ultimately the time in them was the actual time; somewhat as if one were to make a globe on the scale of the earth. The concave stage, beneath which was hell and above which the level of Paradise was represented by a balcony of unrailed scaffolding fixed to a pillar, only helped to weaken the illusion. For this century had indeed made both heaven and hell terrestrial.
billy woods paces that “concave stage.” His oeuvre has grown “to tens of thousands of verses” that provide us with his vision of the world. He passes a “Congolese concierge” who has fallen “fast asleep” as he returns to his “big, lonely suite.” “From the tiny balcony,” woods raps with an air of confession, “I watched my planes leave.” He’s scorned, forlorn—like Marilyn Buck’s poem “Waiting” (1989), woods “sit[s] wrapped / wrapped in a cool / breeze of assumed indifference.”
21.
Vivez sans temps mort.
Aesop Rock’s anxiety kept him from touring early in his career, and he’s been cool to the idea ever since. “Not a piece of me is drawn to the theater,” he admits on “Waiting Around,” preferring the cloistered process of “recording songs in [his] bedroom.” He forgoes any “alternate venue” for his art. Ultimately, he “wasn’t comfortable ever” on stage—he just “can’t fuck with the premise” of formally presenting such inward-looking works (his “sons and [his] daughters”) to the outside world, face-first and face-forward.
woods knows, as well, that touring isn’t always a spiritually or financially profitable business. Remember what he told us on “checkpoints”: “Best tour advice I ever got: You’re better off beatin’ your dick.” Not just a tip on avoiding dalliances—a call to curtail impulse and instead self-stimulate on Seaman’s furniture—but a [cock-]hard truth about the economic cost of blundering across the country. Like Prodigy, woods’ll tour the album but only for more sales. He’s willing to do that now, but it was less enticing when he was playing to a crowd of two plainclothes cops.
That said, woods—unlike Aesop—finds value in the journey itself, in spite of merch sales and gas budget deficits. “We have a world of pleasure to win,” Raoul Vaneigm proclaimed in The Revolution of Everyday Life, “and nothing to lose but boredom.” The travel necessitated by touring disrupts your quotidian existence, your humdrum homelife, but the disruption that is the road life can grow tiresome just the same. “Nothing moving,” Vaneigm writes, “only dead time passing.” woods finds Time “holed up somewhere it didn’t have to move.” Touring cuts both ways—you’ll be bored stiff like the Timeless EP, or your experience will prove timeless like Bored Stiff in ’97. When he’s in Amsterdam, he watches In Bruges (or is he in Bruges—the compass stays confused) because he’s got “time to kill”—so that’s a time-kill, not a time-thrill. Sometimes the day gently passes; sometimes time is flattened. Which is which? You gon’ feel it in the rhythm and the pattern, or the “Pattern and Rhythm,” the penultimate chapter in E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. woods' “room had a view,” dummy.
22.
Nothing but dumb luck when you’re unstuck in time. On “The Layover,” we learn woods “already knew the options was lose/lose, / Baby, that’s nothing new.” Fucking forget “the sun set in the desert, red glow, redness in the West” for a second. Look to No Country For Old Men, instead. Anton Chigurh pulls a coin from his pocket (no “safe full of Euros” for him). Carla Jean Moss calls heads but the coin flips and lands tails. Carla Jean is helpless, vexed. “Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing,” Chigurh tells her. “Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased…. A person’s path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.” This the type of shit that’ll make Baby Jessica jump in the well again. We’re all “looking up at a circle of blue.” We’re all alone in the spider hole, but I suppose that’s the best part.
Like Armand Hammer’s “Topsy” from the WHT LBL album, “The Layover” includes a paratactic chorus that functions more as an appendix to the song. Full of alliterative phrases (light/lantern; shovel/spade; O’Shea/ofays/obey; posse/Parkway), metonymic references (Deion Sanders; O’Shea Jackson), musical/literary allusions (LL Cool J; Dorian Gray), and downright eerie similarities (“giant panda”/“giant obey”; “Gray”/”grave”; “other way”/“Parkway”)—if these choruses are hooks they’re shepherd’s crooks intended to snare ideas from one’s consciousness. That, or snaring us out of the spider hole, the well, our bad luck.
23.
woods stabilizes himself with his pen; centers himself with his pad. “More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors,” Elizabeth Bishop says in her poem “The Map” (1946). In a letter, Bishop said, “I always like to feel exactly where I am geographically all the time, on the map.” She roots[/routes] herself against the threat of non-places. woods gets his mind right with “aromatherapy in the stu’ with lavender diffused in the booth” (“Rapper Weed”). Poe’s protagonist from “The Man of the Crowd” knew how to soothe the burn of a world in flames: “I derived positive pleasure even from many of the legitimate sources of pain. I felt a calm but inquisitive interest in every thing.” woods’ sure-footedness stems from his understanding of “the true nature of this world, in its staggering beauty and its infinite horrors,” as he put it in an interview late last year. He’s able to articulate that which is ineffable, likely because he “take[s] care of these words—Munchausen by proxy” (“Babylon by Bus”). Whispering sweet-nothings to his “ailing” children—manipulating them to serve his vision. For the MC whose “love language is an obscure dialect,” Pierre Joris reminds us “all languages are foreign.” We’re all living in a chaos-world, so “why should one have to write in the mummy/daddy language, why should that oedipal choice be the only possible or legitimate one?” woods works conscientiously, but he also guesses as he goes, filling in the blanks: “Paper and pencil—I wrote the verse like hangman.” Inspiration flits and stutter-steps on a hunt: It was always just a question of when. The duppy stalks, blowing “an ill wind in the trees.” woods is “running routes, trees, and patterns”—juking jumbees and stiff-arming the grimmest of reapers. They’re always pursuing, no matter where you move. “Time and the land are one” John Ashbery writes. In Bonnie Costello’s Shifting Ground (2003), she describes how Ashbery explores the “relationship of mind to environment and the play between temporal and spatial awareness.” He achieves this through disappearing paths and slippery topography, shifts in scale and perspective, and subversions of narrative sequence. As concerns woods: check, check, check, and [mic] check. His writing goes hither and yon.
24. EVERYBODY COOKING
Came home, like, “There’s no recipes left!"
—“checkpoints”
By now, we know woods’ passion for grilling is akin to Nabakov’s lepidoptery—a hobby that enriches his art. The empirical aspects of cooking mingle with his transformative vision. Or, as woods boasts, You know I’m working the fire. As far as lyrics go, what woods spits leaves us salivating. He leaves us hungrier than Common in ’97 (he was a self-proclaimed “verbal vegetarian” anyway, limiting his menu). On Maps, woods’ travels are charged with food, from fine dining to stops “at a Costco in the Midwest with a pocketful of small bills folded like tacos.” Even his currency is cuisine.
woods rips recipe raps to counter the empty calories offered at airports. Merwin explained that “you sit there in the smell / of what passes for food.” Instead, feel the comfort of a home-cooked meal. On “Kenwood Speakers,” woods is Cold Lampin’ with [the] Flavor of his host’s “skate wing, brown butter, and capers, / Sprigs of thyme, heavy pours of natural wine.” On “Gilgamesh,” he served up the class: “Stiff drinks, / …garnish the parsley.” His epicure bars extend to “Soft Landing,” where there’s “conch fritters crispin’ in the kitchen,” and on “Blue Smoke,” where the culinary poetics peak with an elaborate spread: “The pork belly was brined, braised, then deep-fried, / Fresh mint, Thai basil, pickled watermelon rind, / Julienned scallions and other alliums, gave the pepper mill one grind.” In Amsterdam, he indulges in a feast fit for President Kongi: “Grassy gin winning over sweet vermouth, / Framboise, ginger root, / Mussels and pomme frites, confit leeks.”
Meals upon meals upon meals. woods is out to lunch like Dolphy—he slows time and slow cooks. Unless he’s suspending his gastronomics for a detour through the dark side of the all-American meal. The velocity of tour life sometimes necessitates fast food: “The burgers was In-N-Out.” Budgeting time and consumption is a perilous path. Cee-Lo Green on “Soul Food” issued a Surgeon General’s Warning: “Fast food got me sick, / Them crackers think they slick.” Catch woods at an all-night diner with Cage and Camu at the counter—a chopped-and-screwed Nighthawks painted by Edward [Hip-]Hopper who, in his own words, “unconsciously...paint[ed] the loneliness of a large city.” No one reminded him that bad dreams are only dreams. Mark Fisher saw the scene for what it was: a [def] “juxtaposition of the café with the cosmos.”
Your time is your own, only when it’s not. Joy James speaks of “time theft,” the “loss of leisure to recover from fatigue and violence.” Not stolen moments but moments stolen from you. You stare at the time zone clocks on the wall of the airport and mumble woods’ lyrics from “Babylon by Bus”: I knew the time was borrowed. Borrowed or stolen? woods communes with DOOM/doom. “Living off borrowed time, the clock tick faster,” expanding and contracting like accordion bellows. It’s as if every hot minute after History Will Absolve Me is borrowed. Before history, he made fire in the cave. Dante’s descent into hell follows a clockwise spiral [the Flavor Flav clock still—(still!)—spins centrifugal]
25. FROM THIS WORLD TO THAT WHICH IS TO COME
This is the end, as it’s always been. We spend time and money, money and time. The currency is mortality, or tempmortality. Method Man might “bust shots at Big Ben like we got time to kill,” but we’re in Bruges, and Ken drops warning coins from the belfry before leaping to his death, splat in the market square. That’s the Protect Ya Neck jump-off, for those wondering. Coldcocked by the clocktower.
We’re there but not there. Masked and unmasked. Time out of joint and intimately passing a joint in the cypher. Playing for crowds and playing with your kids. Aesop might refuse to tour, sticking to his quasi-reclusive career turn, or he may someday perform on his own terms. His own terminology in the terms of service, in the airport terminal. Terminus means the end. “I’m trying to live in the moment like death row,” woods raps on “FaceTime.” That’s the death row of last meals and last words, the Live from Death Row of Mumia Abu-Jamal; however, it’s also the Death Row of Suge Knight, of a record label that had its moment and then didn’t, done in by deserters, failed distribution deals, and bankruptcy.[2]
Who better to invoke than the Notorious B.I.G. to prove the point of tempmortality? woods has drawn from the well of Big Poppa’s precarity punchlines before. Where Big insisted rappers shouldn’t be mad because “UPS is hiring,” woods responds with a post-’08 collapse sentiment: “My advice: don’t stop rhymin’—UPS not hiring.” Just common sense for a recessionary gap. Death curves at every turn, so never take shit for granted. woods could be freelancing, writing rap reviews for a pittance. That being said, he’s “Ready to die, it’s no biggie” (“FaceTime”). He’s already “lived a couple lives” so he’s prepared to “go ahead and slide” into that good night. Somebody’s gotta die—if he goes, he goes. Insouciance is the order of the day. Walking with a panther, he tallies his “nine lives” and wonders like those devilish Yakubs “how many [he] already used.” B.I.G. appears everywhere on Maps, suggesting to woods that “maybe suicidal thoughts [is] the everyday struggle.” “Gimme the loot,” woods raps on “Baby Steps,” determined to get his—“it’s a museum.” Repatriate artifacts? Don’t soften the language. Gimme mine, ELUCID screams.
woods has been around the world and ay ya ya, he’s been playa-hated (“Don’t forget: God’s a hater”). Mo Money Moor Problems—a wider audience translates to a wider world. But he can brag and meditate on mortality both. “Big jar when they donate my brain,” he says, and the organ transplant moves at a hash jar tempo. Bourdainian flourishes of “spicy chili oil—let that bad boy marinate” (Bad Boy, huh?). Sometimes we track time through the dates on “posthumous YouTube views”; other times we can only rely on “the lonely big tree like a sundial.” To the…tick-tock, ya don’t stop. To the…tick-tock, ya don’t quit.
“In all candor,” woods raps on the chorus of “The Layover,” “I got one foot in your grave.” He glosses over racist connotations and instead weaponizes farm tools: “I still call a shovel a spade.” Shades of the gravediggaz in Hamlet’s courtyard. woods has wielded the weapon before, on “Gilgamesh”: “Merrily dug his own grave, whistling as he shoveled.” Tarafah, the nomad-poet & free Bedouin, satirized the king and thus “dug his grave with his tongue.” To bring back Orwell’s “Marrakech,” if only for a moment: “They arise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil.”
Survival rate fluctuates like the market. Even Bourdain chose the rope in Hotel Chambard in Kaysersberg. “I don’t go to sleep—I tread water ’til I sink,” woods reveals on “FaceTime.” The waves never let up, but you got to keep ya head up, keep your head above water. Like Trugoy rapped, We’re all in tune with doom.
26. A HEAD NӒDDA’S JOURNEY
Hing, hang, hung—see what the hangman done.
—“Sadderday”
Chokehold slowly closed the airway.
—“Dettol”
On “Hangman,” thoughts are hijacked by grisly Afro-Gothic visions. The head nodding of the listener turns to oxygen deprivation. Cold dead grip on the larynx. The neck compresses closer to unconsciousness, another stifled breath closer to death. To cease that “heart beat in [the] jugular.” woods raps as if he’s being hanged, and he makes a spectacle of it. The wheeze of the long /e/ sounds within the lines (“Matisse”; “teeth”; “deep”; “beat”; “peaks”; “Sikh”; “sheet”; “sleep”) and the choke of the short /u/ sounds within the end-rhymes (“colors”; “lovers”; “jugular”; “rugged”; “thuggers”; “fucker”)—we’re listening to the hangman’s tune. The tightening of the iron fist on the throat, garroted; the Iron Galaxy expanding but feeling like shrinking the way it pulls taut. The rope creaks as it tightens.
As woods loses consciousness, he “hovers outside [him]self.” My shell, mechanical—he survives as he cites a familiar phrase and slips into a new rhyme pattern. He gargles back to life with hardcore consonance (the /g/ and /c/ takeover) and predominant l-sounds (“manageable”; “tangible”; “manacles”) to smooth the earlier ruggedness, but it’s still a bumpy ride. “People paralyzed by the lies they tell theyself,” but not him. He’s still moving and knows the “count right,” though he reaches for tangibility as a spirit roams beyond his grasp. Gotta stay on it, as “any day could be the day they frog-march you in manacles.”
The rhymes and rhyme schemes of the first verse attack, but the long /oo/ digraph pattern sustained through the second verse stabilizes (“undo”; “Rubik’s”; “cube”; “cartoons”; “booth”; “cocoon”; “moons”; “room”; “unamused”; “truth”; “stu’”; “fumes”; “shrooms”; “proof”; “vroom”; “womb”; “spoons”). The sequence produces a mesmerizing drone. Somewhere between Ginsberg’s OM or AUM (“AU opens the gates of heaven. The humming M closes the gates of hell. AUM is a long sigh; 5 minutes intense total concentration initiates cosmic vibrations”) and the monoliths & dimensions of Sunn O))). woods sings a Song of Experience that outmaneuvers protégés with wit and wisdom. He becomes the haunting presence of the chorus, the ominous and malevolent duppy. He’s gonna “keep it real with you”—that old platitude, yes, but really—the past can’t be undone, it’s a “black Rubik’s cube.” He knows; he’s been in the “booth like cocoon[/Cocoon],” a butterfly transforming into a shabazz palace, a butterfly pimped. Youngbloods can’t relate to a film allusion from before they were twinkles in their mothers’ uteri. woods somersaults “in a dead womb.” If woods records in a Silkk casing, Augé knows why: “In one form or another, ranging from the misery of refugee camps to the cosseted luxury of five-star hotels, some experience of non-place…is today an essential component of all social existence. Hency the very particular and ultimately paradoxical character of…the fashion for ‘cocooning’, retreating into the self.”
“Dig two graves…one for them, one for you,” woods drones on. We’re leveled by Kenny Segal’s menacing foghorn blast. It’s a motif heard throughout The Microphones’ The Glow Pt. 2 (released 9/11/01) with Phil Elverum crediting the first season of Twin Peaks for the idea. (Incidentally, you can hear it at the beginning of The Microphones’ “Map.”) Segal’s foghorn (in reality, a pitched-down trombone) shows up inconsistently throughout “Hangman,” heightening our trepidation, racking our nerves.
Size it up. On “Hangman,” woods admits that “payback always inexact, but [he] be squinting over measuring spoons” like T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock busy “measur[ing] out [his] life with coffee spoons.” The dreaded hangman and his moribund quantifications bleed and reverberate like King Tubby’s fingers on the Fisher Dynamic Space Expander. One look all it take to take they measurements.
27. THE EXECUTIONER’S FACE IS ALWAYS WELL HIDDEN
woods’ brand of [afro-]pessimism leaves Frank B. Wilderson III in a state of bewilderment. Though we’re left with few illusions on Maps (“People don’t want the truth; they want me to tell ’em grandma went to heaven” would be one such example), nothing matches the protracted decline he sets forth on “Year Zero.” “I quit lookin’ for solutions,” woods opens, signaling the twilight of the gods. If he can’t summon the strength, where does that leave us? It’s underground hip-hop, gentleman. The gods will not save you. woods manages to tell us how it is without falling into despair (note the chuckling at the end of “Rapper Weed”), but his ruthless critique often leaves us laughless. I feel mirth at his gift of gab, but I’m indignant when I page through the briefings he throws down on my desk.
woods acts in accordance with Franco Berardi’s prompting, opting to employ a “dyst-irony” [dystopian irony], “the language of autonomy.” The pervasive /n/ phoneme within the verse (“lookin’”; “solutions”; “end hunchbacked in front”; “minds”; “Edison”; “weapon”; etc.)—the motherfucking alveolar nasal produced as woods raps through gritted teeth—slides homophonically into “end,” a succession of ’em, as though he’s John the Revelator humming end end end end end. Feels like a “tumor pressing on [our] brain.” Eschatological-hop for the ’2-3. Things look bad, real bad. Stupid people rule the land, we buy a pistol and learn how to use it, and our “taxes pay police brutality settlements.” There’s “quicksand [in] every direction, so go ahead and step on in.” That sinking feeling is unavoidable. “There is no bad luck in the world but white folks,” Baby Suggs says in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and so we crouch down in front of 124 Bluestone Road with our finger on the trigger.
Technology won’t save us either. Tesla and Edison’s “great minds” fall short (their ilk might actually be the “worstest of men”). “Apes stood and walked into the future” only to “end hunchbacked in front the computer.” March of regress. Sooner or later they red-pill and rabbit-hole themselves into the comments section of extremist YouTube channels. Shitposters leaving links to their live-stream on 8chan. “Sooner or later it’s gon’ be two unrelated active shooters”—aspiring genocidaires—“same place, same time.” In Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (2015), Berardi argues that active shooters possess “the psychopathology of human beings exposed to electronic hyper-simulation during their formative years, the special fragility of the first generation to grow up in the virtual age.” These killers “learn more vocabulary from a machine than from their mothers”—in [m]other words, “the dissociation of language learning from the bodily affective experience.” (woods isn’t one of them; he’s sure to “call Mom and say, I love you.”) These killers don’t know people, having only lived a “virtualization of the experience of the other.”
It’s not just the extremists, though. At even the “first sign of trouble, motherfuckers shimmy right out that human skin.” This world is never home, will never be home. Everything “home” is gone, homie. Time to tabula rasa that shit, wholesale. Everything for sale except for…nah, ev-ery-thing. “Kids,” woods says—and he’s addressing not only his young audience but other whippersnapper rappers and his own children, too—“you and your friends gon’ have to start again, / It’s nothing you can do with us—we’re fucked.” He repeats how fucked we are, for choral emphasis. We “poison everything we touch.” The wild jungle out the speaker “withered and died.” That bitter cassava on the tongue. The poisonwood bible that we thumb. Burn it down with us inside. Burn it to the ground. Make sure we don’t survive. “So what can be done when nothing can be done?” Berardi asks,
I think that ironic autonomy is the answer…. Politicians call on us to take part in their political concerns, economists call on us to be responsible, to work more, to go shopping, to stimulate the market. Priests call on us to have faith. If you follow these inveiglements to participate, to be responsible—you are trapped. Do not take part in the game, do not expect any solution from politics, do not be attached to things, do not hope.
If the gods are fucking you, you find a way to fuck them back.
28.
I do hate to be chucked in the dark aboard a strange ship. I wonder where they keep their fresh water.
—Joseph Conrad, The Rescue (1920)
“Everything is landscape,” Ashbery declares in The Double Dream of Spring. Go ahead and think rustic, but he includes “...the great urban centers… / …at the center of which / We live our lives, made up of a great quantity of isolated instants.” “I miss this place,” woods longingly raps on “NYC Tapwater,” only to undercut the thought, “—’til I’m back.” “Long face to match,” he says, just as he looked on ELUCID’s “Nostrand”: “Every day I walk past people begging to live, / Every day I walk past the living dead.” The quotidian is calamitous. And now even his “cats are strays.” He surveys the rest of the scene, from the inconsiderate bus driver, to the “new panhandler outside the store,” to the “young boy going through each bag of grabba like it’s raw silk cloth.” Time passes and doesn’t. Kenny Segal’s sloomy beat speaks volumes. Nothing ever happens ’til it do. Find woods in the doldrums. Baby, he’s got the bends. Where does he go from here? He’s been alone on an aeroplane, falling asleep against the windowpane. His blood thickens—he needs to be rejuvenated, needs an infusion, needs his drip feed on, needs a beat. He diagnoses himself: You lack the minerals and vitamins. He prescribes himself “one sip of New York City tapwater.”
A few weeks later, he sees the old panhandler “outside Kennedy Fried, grinding his jaw.” Ironically, “he ain’t recognize [woods] at all,” which we assume would please our camera-shy guy, but he seems to yearn for the recognition from this necropolitan wanderer, at least in this instance. He’s jet-lagged again, not quite grabbing the new version of himself. “Slipp[ing] in the bar at last call” probably won’t help the dissociation. The words are coming out all weird.
“I’m home, but my mind be wandering off.” So, what does he do in the second verse?—he hides in plain sight, of course. “Sometimes I don’t tell anyone I’m back around,” he confesses—he “just lay low.” woods the misanthrope. After all, it’s “the cat [that] miss [him] the most—purring loud on [his] lap.” Home is where the hard plastics are, so woods contemplates with his “fingers steepled, / wondering if [he] really need all this stuff.” Nobody ever really did it for the love, he claimed on “The Doldrums.” So when O.C. raps he’d “rather be broke and have a whole lot of respect,” woods is dubious. He hides. “Through the peephole,” creeping, dropping eaves, he “see[s] new people going up and down the stairs.” He’s a kindred spirit to Aesop Rock on his fire escape with the 6B panorama: A universe of brick buildings slightly off-balance. woods sees “new buildings just appear” out of nowhere.
He sequesters himself in his apartment, but eventually ventures out again. He gives us a tour, keeping a body count, as Ice-T yowls, THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD! He spots celebrities, clothing boutiques, and corporate weed everywhere. On “Gilgamesh,” he saw the “whole neighborhood on stage,” even as he navigated a “two-block radius, at best.” His territory, small as it is in scale, is invaded. He gets dewy-eyed about “that ’08 Sour Diesel,” but not before “Death in a top hat dance[s] a jig in the street.” Antonius Block doing the wop, popping and locking down the block.
Gilgamesh returns to Uruk fearful “[h]is people would not share / The sorrow that he knew,” and he was right—they didn’t. “He looked at the walls, / Awed at the heights / His people had achieved / And for a moment—just a moment— / All that lay behind him / Passed from view.” On “Gilgamesh,” woods finds it “increasingly clear these walls is fucking closing in.” He’s back at the dinner table in that renovated apartment of his gentrifying neighbors. “Last year I pretended to care, / Right now, can’t spare the oxygen,” he raps, exasperated. But he can spare the exhaust fumes. He puts his “feet up on the Ottoman Empire” for some rest and respite and reveries of his own imperial conquests.
“NYC Tapwater,” like “Kenwood Speakers” earlier, is Delivered Under the Similitude of a Dream [dreams is dangerous]. The City of Destruction you flee might not be Celestial but it’s sufficient enough. Home is never how you left it yet also is. Aphorisms fail us. You can’t go home again—sure. We follow woods on the “last car on the last train” on the Last Exit to Brooklyn. Home again, home again, jiggety-jig. “To market, to market, to buy a fat pig.” (The pork belly was brined, braised, then deep-fried…) In her 1965 poem “Questions of Travel,” Elizabeth Bishop writes:
Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
People pin religious hope on travel, but—as Bishop once said elsewhere—the first person you meet when you get off the plane is yourself. Emerson said much the same, even discouraging travel (“The soul is no traveler; the wise man stays at home”). Everything you need is within you, he argued—you create the hallowed place, and then the place helps create you. In “Self-Reliance,” he considers traveling to Naples to become “intoxicated with beauty, and lose [his] sadness,” but he ultimately thinks better of searching for cheap flights on Expedia. “I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples,” he writes, “and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.” It all reeks of jet fuel.[3]
29. NOSTOS
...in the world of supermodernity people are always, and never, at home.
—Augé
ELUCID opens “As The Crow Flies” straddling two simultaneous realities: home and away, near and far, physically present and mentally absent. He’s always, actively elsewhere. “I’m just cleaning up my kitchen,” he raps, as if to convince us of his domestic bliss, of the virtue of routine. “Emptying the fridge, bleaching counters, sweeping corners, / I be in my drawers aligning my silverware in order,” he says—his list of chores, implausibly, a flex. Soon, though, he’ll be “tripping through coordinates.” Tripping is operative—some altitude-induced delirium as he’s “10k and rising.” Surrealism is his point-of-view, recall (“Flummox”). His “baggage on the carousel loop” is the symbol on which to meditate. He’s “rooted” but “roam[s] free.” Presence and absence. Lost and found. Accustomed and unclaimed. The course he charts is in the form of an infinite loop. Augé writes of the Kafkaesque trappings of corporate-controlled travel: “Airline company magazines advertise hotels that advertise the airline companies…they outline a world of consumption.” The literature of non-places. You think you’re getting somewhere, but you’re not. “Everywhere and nowhere,” woods recently said. He, like ELUCID, is a real nowhere man and Everyman and all in one fell loop.
On “Soft Landing,” woods references a “brief, sweet moment” in which there’s “nothing in the thought bubble.” His final, concise verse on Maps, for all intents, is that fleeting instant. “All narrative goes back to infancy,” according to Augé. On “Baby Steps,” woods talks of “breasts out for the feeding,” which is a profane practice when he’s “feeling vulgar.” “Large areolas,” he lusts, “bite like I’m teething.” Not exactly the sacred act of nursing between madonna and child.
But that was earlier. On “As The Crow Flies,” woods is present. He concentrates upon his child with colostrum closeness and sees the journey has already begun, has always been. Drawing on Michel de Certeau, Augé writes that the “gleeful and silent experience of infancy is that of the first journey, of birth as the primal experience of differentiation, of the recognition of the self as self and as other, repeated later in the experiences of walking as the first use of space.” For all his expressions of misanthropy, an antinatalist woods is not.
“I’m in the park with the baby on the swing,” woods raps. This isn’t a reminiscence of park jams where your man gets shot for his sheep coat, though. He’s not evoking Kool Herc’s soundsystem in a jam-packed Cedar Park. If anything, we fixate on the mesmerizing motion of the swing—the symbolic push away of the parent and the insistent return of the child—a prodigal child where the only currency is glee. The child is thrust into oscillatory motion when typically we think of the father setting forth. A spirit quest under the guise of stepping out for a pack of cigarettes. But here, woods pushes his son farther along—fatheralong, for John Edgar Wideman. A preparatory speech on the pendulum swing of time. Feel-it-in-the-pit-of-the-stomach pain—a queasiness, an uneasiness. The child swings high, swings low. (Higher up, higher up, higher, the child calls like ELUCID from a storage closet stacked high with Betamax tapes—heart-wrenching home videos.) woods considers and counters Jay-Z’s image of leaving condoms on Nas’ baby seat. woods’ verse is not Supa Ugly but Supa Beautiful.
As woods sends his son into the stratosphere, it “hits [him] crazy: anything at all could happen to him.” We learned on ELUCID’s “Mangosteen” that woods’ hard shell [mechanical] only cracks when his baby gurgle, but as his son calculates risks and seeks to reap rewards, he fights the urge to tell the child: Don’t let me catch you intrepid. I mean, “he been climbing higher and higher on the jungle gym” (higher up! higher!), endangering bones and hazarding bruises. It’s like a jungle sometimes, you know, and it makes a father wonder how his child keeps from going under. The time goes so quick, another parent says, as you watch him “running faster, sometimes pushing other kids.” We shudder at the violence, innate as it seems, and struggle to navigate their dysregulated emotions as well as our own: “Tear-streaked apologies, balled fists—it’s a trip.” What he sees in the child’s behavior feels all too familiar—his own lachrymose regrets of being away—tripping. In Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin warns: “You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you can never go back.”
“It’s a trip that this is something we did,” woods reflects, acknowledging the presence of his baby’s mother for the first time. For Vincent Descombes, “The character is at home when he is at ease in the rhetoric of the people with whom he shares life.” As such, woods turns to the mother and “kiss[es] her on the lips.” The tender moment answers the stress heard about on “Soft Landing”: “It ruins the whole day when my baby-mother mad at me.” Here, home, things are set right. The ebb and flow of their relationship, the warp and weft of Penelope’s loom, settles into serenity.
Time moves differently, exponentially, when you have children. “I watch him grow,” woods says, as if his son is doing so right before his eyes. Conceptualizing the multiplying of his son’s cells inevitably forces the gaze inward. woods is “wondering how long [he] got to live.” The last of his mortality raps on Maps, “As The Crow Flies” lands woods at the site of his final resting place, his thoughts dwelling on the immutable certainty of death. The Child is father of the Man, and the son—in all his vitality—raises the volume on the tick and the tock of the clock’s pendulum. For woods, it swings from bliss to bleak. Each split second a split atom—catastrophic. “Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors,” Poe writes—they “die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat.” Or pleurisy, like Wordsworth. Or nine bullets, like Big L. So you should pump this shit like they do in the future. woods is in possession of a plan to protect his neck and his legacy, in case. We heard it on Earl Sweatshirt’s “Tabula Rasa”: “Give my babies my rhyme books, but tell ’em, Do you.”
billy woods’ final words on Maps are a final exercise in approximation. They are against idealism; they enact that which is approximate. It is a verse composed of imperfect rhymes—close, but not quite. They point to good-enough parenting (word to Winnicott). Imperfect rhymes for imperfect lives. woods tells it slant. Like ELUCID—not fully in the kitchen, not wholly in Arizona for the show. Planting his feet in the Pacific and washing his face in the Atlantic. We sense the not-quiteness in woods’ sequence of slant rhymes:
swing | him | gym | kids | trip | did | lips | live
These end-rhymes are joined by the internal assonance of short-i sounds—a doubling-up; an overcompensation for when everything don’t always go according to plan, man.
woods’ final words are short-lived, ephemeral as a push on the playground. While he wonders how long he got to live, his brief verse ends abruptly—oddly, after the seventh bar he falls silent—signaling a sooner-than-thought demise. That gnawing fear: a premature death. Time is of the essence, so he rather not waste words. He crouches at eye-level to tell his children what they need to hear before he’s gone (Western Education is forbidden, et al.). On tour, billy woods’ tendency is the same, ending songs in his set suddenly during shows. It’s on to the next performance, the next city, the next life.
Footnotes:
[1] “to be ghost” [disappear]; “to be Ghost” [face]
[2] woods has dabbled in these hip-hop double entendres before. “It’s walls topped with broken glass—I’ll show you slum village,” for example (from “No Hard Feelings”).
[3] Robert Leder, an executive at SMW Trading Company, was in his office on the 85th floor of the North Tower when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the building. “The whole office reeked of jet fuel,” he recalls.
Images:
“Alexander the Great in his griffin-powered flying chariot,” Roman d’Alexandre, 1444-1445 (detail) | “Cosmographia” (1544) by Sebastian Münster | LL Cool J, Radio album cover, 1985 (detail) | “It Shoots Further Than He Dreams,” John F. Knott (March 1918) | “Truck transporting people between the Republic of China and Libya,” Raymond Depardon (1978) | Capone-N-Noreaga, “L.A., L.A.” music video, 1996 (screenshot) | Frontispiece from Matthew Hopkins’ The Discovery of Witches (1647) | Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, dir. René Vienet, 1973 (screenshot) | Frontispiece from Matthew Hopkins’ The Discovery of Witches (1647) | Konrad Kyeser, Bellifortis, Clm 30150, Tafel 21, Blatt 91V (detail) | The Seventh Seal, dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1957 (screenshot) | Guy Debord, Guide Pychogéographique de Paris (1957) | Vivez sans temps mort, Paris graffiti (1968) | “Engraving of Croatian mathematician Faust Vrančić jumping from a tower with a parachute,” Italy (1617) | John Bunyan, “A Plan of the Road From the City of Destruction to the Celestial City,” adapted to The Pilgrim’s Progress (1821) | Joos van Cleve, The Holy Family (ca. 1512-13) | “Alexander the Great in his griffin-powered flying chariot,” Roman d'Alexandre, 1444-1445 (detail)
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