Boddhi: Billy Woods is a New York rapper who's been kicking around the underground for 20 years or so. This decade he's turned his focus toward solo albums and put out what I believe is some of the most lyrically impressive hip-hop of our time. Terror Management is his second album this year after the phenomenal Hiding Places with Kenny Segal. Jack, what did you think when you found out Billy was dropping another project?
Jack: I was extremely excited because Hiding Places is amazing, but I was also excited for an album full of producers rather than another Blockhead release.
B: Agree, Billy's done two albums with Blockhead, who I'm not particularly a fan of, but they're still good albums. After Hiding Places with Kenny Segal, who we can both agree is one of the best producers in the underground, was so cohesive, Terror Management feels like an impulse reaction. Billy's way of collecting the thoughts he had kicking around in his brain.
J: Would I be off the mark in saying this album feels more conscious of the outside world rather than inner paranoia?
B: For sure, even starting off on Marlow with
"World gettin' warmer we goin' the other way."
J: I thought that was the perfect way to open the record.
B: It's him addressing the grim reality. Previously there would be vignettes and stories from his life, whether real or fictional, but here there's lots of serious topics.
J: On this album he's still reflective but seems overly conscious of what's next for mankind.
B: There are a lot of beat switches here which felt like they could have been two short songs, what did you make of that compared to the brief cuts on Today, I Wrote Nothing?
J: Hit and miss. I thought on tracks like Gas Leak the production was amazing, how it builds from drums to screeching noise, but the second half of Birdsong was kinda...
B: It felt totally redundant, and speaking of which. Four or five FIELDED features?
J: This decade seems to have a bit of a tradition of bringing on a largely unknown female vocalist and having her appear on a couple of tracks.
B: Are you talking about L'Wren? Because she's on this album under Lauren Kelly Benson. I hated her past work with Billy but her singing feature here on Blood Thinner was actually the only one I liked.
J: In comparison with FIELDED, it feels like those features do nothing but stretch out tracks.
B: Maybe with the exception of Suzerain, which was kind of a misfit aesthetically, every song featuring her could have just had the rapping and I would have liked it more. Billy unloads these diary-entry type dense chunks of words really well and having a minute of singing after just doesn't do it justice.
J: Particularly on Western Education Is Forbidden, which is such an awesome song with bars on bars about academic imperialism, the sung refrain loses any momentum that the song had gained.
"Told my children Western education is forbidden/
might as well sell the rest of your ritalin."
B: I would have preferred an instrumental. I suppose the inconsistency is something you're gonna get when an album has this many different producers.
J: One track I wanted to shout out, if we're talking about the themes of climate change and whatnot, Long Grass had really effective features despite the production not being that interesting. It was still Billy's bleak outlook that stole the show though.
B: Billy's bleak outlook is probably his defining feature, which is why the 'world getting warmer' line is pretty much saying "strap yourselves in".
J: He basically tells us that when the impending apocalypse does strike it will be every man for himself and we shouldn't expect help from others. It's kind of a notion hard to dispute but it's not something spoken about.
B: The selfishness of man is another massive theme throughout Billy's work. This album is scatter-brained, let's not get it wrong, it's 18 short songs and an aesthetic mixed bag. I feel like he's doubling down on the themes that were present in his music.
It made me appreciate Hiding Places that much more as such a clean and self-contained summation of things, though I thought the last track, Stranger in the Village, was such an excellent way to cap off the album.
"Everything for sale 'cept the scale that's coming with me"
J: Yeah, it's funny because I feel like that's what might underwhelm some people. The production is so stellar across the album that a lot of it could be purely instrumental.
B: I feel that's what made Hiding Places so fantastic, the production was so immediate. Billy doesn't usually have production as distinctive and full of charisma as his rhymes are, and here was a slight step back beat-wise but lyrically I cannot fault this man. There's not even a point discussing it.
J: You know what to expect and get it every time.
B: Every damn time. Am I missing something? Does he spit a bad verse on here?
J: No, and even the verses I'm not entirely sure about, I read through them and think I just haven't deciphered them yet.
B: The criticism I would give generally is that sometimes his subject matter and delivery aren't necessarily in sync with the production. Let's go back to Trivial Pursuit because that is one of those songs I can just listen to on repeat. One of the craziest beats Billy has ever rapped on, one of his craziest flows, and the whole anecdote about him getting recognised at the butcher is a shining example of what makes Woods so different to other rappers.
"I'm out here cookin'/ I got recognised at the butcher the other day like/ 'all due respect are you Woods or you not?'/"
B: Then his voice in the background says 'I'll take the lamb chops'. It's such a excellent deconstruction of something that's so normal to most rappers.
J: He goes on to say "I forget white people is born police, impressed" in reference to that situation, which is just hilarious.
B: Billy Woods is kind of a character, but he's also kind of the realest rapper out. If you didn't like Woods before then this album isn't going to get you there, in fact I'd say the opposite. Hiding Places is far more cohesive and the disjointed aesthetic of this album only made me appreciate that cohesion more. Just because one is better than the other, doesn't mean it should be overlooked.
J: Completely agree, and also those dark climate change themes come before you even get to the imperialism, the distance between classes...
B: The album's called Terror Management, clearly this man is having a hard time. It's not something you can listen to a couple of times and really 'get' it.
J: It's not like he just brushes over these themes either, he really dissects them.
B: Because Billy's been in the game for so long, I feel so few other rappers today can consistently operate at the level of lyricism that he does. Like I can count them on my hand. Every verse he writes has substance and is well thought out, and that's something he deserves more respect for.
J: Yeah, fair statement to end on.
- Boddhi Farmer & Jack Jones.