billy woods Makes Himself at Home

In the cult classic Belly, Nas’s character, Sincere, tells his girlfriend about his ultimate dream: moving his family to Africa. Not to any particular country in the continent where our ancestors are from, just that simple and loaded word: Africa. It comes after many scenes of violence and distress for the young Black man, and he’s looking for a way out. Obviously, this is gauche: Africa isn’t a magical land of safety and tranquility for Black people facing extraordinary strife in America. A solid sentiment on paper—and in a dynamic rapper but spotty thinker like Nas’s music—it’s also utterly ridiculous to the point of absurdity. 

So, when billy woods—all lowercase, no gimmicks, one-half of the underground rap duo Armand Hammer, and a former resident of Zimbabwe when he was a child—enters the restaurant, you remember that he can actually discuss what it is like to live there. He can speak to the link that Black people have to the continent and how that traumatic and imperfect link manifests itself when we’re in America—a heavy topic that he weaves into his music on songs like “The Man Who Would Be King”: “Facing existential threats, my advice, kill ‘em dead/ No regrets.” On “Asylum,” his first song on last year’s Aethiopes, woods wonders if former dictators live next door for him. Childhood history is so seeped into us that we can be paranoid about it still remaining in our dreams, and in our reality.

“When I got there, Zimbabwe was a brand new country in my eyes. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize—or, I knew at the time, but I thought more about—the somatic process that had brought about the birth of this new country and how we have the scars from it. You were exposed to some harsh and brutal realities,” woods tells me. “When we were in school, we had people come through and show you things like what a grenade looks like or a landmine or unexploded rockets and things like that.” Class differences were glaring. He lived in the heart of the city, near the embassy where his father worked. “My dad was pretty weathered to communist ideals. So, if he was doing anything for money, I never saw it. He prided himself on being a guy with a hole at the bottom of his car,” woods says. 

When woods was a teenager, in 1989, they moved back to DC, and he ended up going to the prestigious Howard University. Throughout his time there, woods was in a hub of blackness—but in all different class systems. See at Howard, the Black “mecca” could be spiritually fulfilling and fiscally problematic. “They’re all different sort of groups of Black people. It was definitely not a great place to be broke and trying to get a date. But I was also not the sickest brother there,” woods tells me.

Now 44, woods is a rapper of kaleidoscopic and philosophical profundity. His eleventh studio record, Maps, is out this week from his label Backwoodz Studioz, and in his music, he’s lofty, dealing not only in systemic politics but in what it means to understand empathy and shared allyship innately. It’s easy to imagine Talib Kweli or Mos Def rapping, “Dreams is dangerous, linger like angel dust/ Ain’t no angels hovering, ain’t no savin’ us,” as woods did on “Sir Benni Miles,” from the 2021 Armand Hammer album, Haram. But you haven’t heard any of the previous righteous Gods say something like, “Got caught with the pork/ But you gotta kill the cop in your thoughts still sayin’ ‘Pause’/ Negores say they hate the cops, but the minute somethin’ off, they wanna use force.” By mentioning pork—something considered haram in Black Muslim culture—he captures the link between previous generations of socially aware rap, their longstanding heteronormativity and latent homophobia, and how that all exists within the working class. It’s not about raising consciousness so much as living in the world, just like we are. To see woods is to see the large importance of community. 

With Armand Hammer, woods is a collaborator with rapper Elucid, and their collaboration has been fulfilling. Each album might zone in on a similar theme—life in a world that so demonstratively doesn’t value you—but it has a different production style, syntax, or overall mood. 2017’s Rome felt like a series of abstract discussions, with Elucid rapping, “I wanna see everyone who is made invisible.” 2018’s Paraffin—“That’s a good album to start at,” woods says after I tell him that was the first album I heard from his catalog—is full of challenging distortions and noisy dissonance; even the trumpets on “Hunter” sound like plastic is in the horn. But the key to Armand Hammer—and what people tend to ignore about their style and the style of their forebears, such as Def Jux—is that humor is drilled in their work like a seed in an olive. They have more personality than you are expecting, and while the dogma does not change, their anger or particular joy certainly does. 2021’s Haram is the sunniest—choosing to be less intense and more a celebration of human life in the face of inhospitable conditions. “Black Sunlight” has Elucid wanting to grow kale and telling Black men to smile more—a flip from nefarious sexists telling Black women to smile.

To love Armand Hammer is to love their ability to surprise you, and woods considers creating the group with Elucid a turning point in his career. “The first record was not a smash or anything, but the collaborations have helped our careers for sure,” he says. “Steel sharpens steel. We’ve become better artists as a result and continue to be better artists. He’s one of my closest friends, too.” He’s doubtlessly proud, but his everyday humility does not allow him to have an expressive face.

For his solo work, Hiding Places, produced by Kenny Seagal (also producing Maps), is where woods rapped the most resonantly. “I didn’t know his music that well. I thought his work on Milo’s So the Files Don’t Come was immaculately produced. I had asked him for beats, and once we connected, it took us a while. Not that it was bad, but I don’t think he knew my solo work that well,” woods says. “Once we had the song ‘Spongebob,’ he was like, ‘OK, now I can see what we’re doing.’” 

Maps, woods’s new record, is based on touring the world as Armand Hammer. On “Facetime,” woods finds peace by himself after the pandemonium of a Playboi Carti concert, where youngsters jump around and use their phones to communicate—afterward, he’s content to smoke alone in his room. “Going on tour yielded some pretty rough dates at times, but I was like, ‘OK, I am just making it through,’ and I have enough of a fanbase where I did do it,” woods says. On “Baby Steps,” he tells a story about taking a $300 Uber to a show and sleeping through the car ride. For woods, the road seems lonely and disorienting. 

A lot of the production on Maps exists in musical juxtapositions. It is patient and cerebral, eclectic and familiar. It has drums that pound and moments of near-soundless air. “Houdini” is imagistic: woods raps, “Jimmy Wopo draped over his steering wheel”, name-dropping the Pittsburgh rapper who was murdered while in his car. After ten years as a pure solo artist, woods is a veteran still at the top of his game. Still, he is clearly thinking about his place in the world, and his culture, and whether he can maintain his consciousness at the level of international touring. “I’m in between worlds,” woods says. “You’re there, doing the thing you are doing. It is separated from home, and maybe a part of me wants to be home. Another part of me is like, ‘We’re trying to have fun.’ But at the same time, not really being at home, you are going to spend a lot of time by yourself, waiting for things to happen.”