Album Review : billy woods - Aethiopes (2022)
Being relatable is not a very important concern in general for American rappers. In success or struggle, it’s a musical style based around confrontation and exceptionalism. Few of them feel like real people for they are distant cousins from pro wrestling personas. Alternative rappers billy woods ain’t like that. For twenty years, he’s been that gifted, creative but volatile friend who doesn’t know you that well, but that you brag to everyone about. woods is exceptional in the most normal way possible.
On his latest record Aethiopes, he perfects that identity of a man torn between his aesthetic quest and his self-destructing side.
I was a big fan of billy woods’ 2019 album Hiding Places. The Kenny Segal beats were bare and grim and woods’ lyrics filled with a brooding anger and antisocial sadness that I highly related to. These feelings are still present on Aethiopes, but they’re explored in a more allegorical way. Along with his numerous guests, he is narrating stories more often than he is rapping at the first person, which gives Aethiopes a richer, more literary dimension, but it also is a more abstract and challenging record.
The beats on Aethiopes are something else. There’s a spare, organic quality to them, which set a proper tone for each song without ever stealing the show. One of my favourites was for the song Sauvage, which has a low piano chord that punctuates the bass. Preservation understands and perpetuates the embattled existential aesthetic of a man fighting for his soul in a hostile world that eats its own present on all billy woods records. Aethiopes is filled with guitars, pianos and saxophones who sonically occupy a lot of space.
One of my favourite musical moments on the record happens at the end of the song Haarlem, where the beat deconstructs itself into some crazy, avant-garde, atonal John Cage-like piano and woods and Fatboi Sharif KEEP rapping over it like goddamn assassins. The horror-themed Christine also has a pulse-pounding, classical bass tinged quality that is really intoxicating. The discreetly Eastern-inspired beat to Heavy Water was perhaps the most creative and unexpected one I heard.
Long story short, the beats are great and they have an old world quality to it, like billy woods is rapping over a broken radio that plays haunted music from an alternate universe. The beats aren’t why you’d listen to a billy woods record, though. Fans tune-in for his heavy hitting, literate and multifaceted writing. woods incorporates brains, brawns and questionable mental health into his unique literary style and Aethiopes more than delivers in that regard. But he’s more of an observer and narrator than an active participant.
A songs like Wharves explores generational trauma from slavery to Tupac and establishes clear causality between the general experience of Black people and his own seething anger. Versailles (featuring the immortal Despot) is one of the most tightly-wrapped songs on the record. It draws a chaotic portrait of capitalism that ran out of control and the general helplessness of the common man to change it. woods has a great line in it that I love : Somebody made a killing, I just dug the grave. I live for billy woods lines like these.
Sauvage has some of the coldest descriptions of police brutality and people trying to survive in a hostile world. He notably talks about a kid who got beaten by police so bad that he got a limp and a dent in the head. Haarlem is a little hard to follow, but offers some terrifying post-apocalyptic imagery about a decaying stripper bar. It has some Stephen King Dark Tower energy to it. Speaking of which, Christine harnesses the King novel as a metaphor for an unfathomable death that chases people around.
On Aethiopes, I feel like billy woods is trying as part of an heritage. A violent and unfair heritage, but one that he is a part of nonetheless. I would interpret it as an attempt to feel less alone and alienated from everybody, which was the domineering theme on Hiding Places. It is a clever, erudite and oddly hopeful record, like there is something still worth fighting for in this ugly world. I mean, it’s not a positive by any means, but it’s one that acknowledges the value of the struggle. There’s an emotional maturity to it.
*
billy woods is one of the few rappers I feel is 100% authentic on his records. Alternative rap in general offers this rawer and more heartfelt vision of what hip-hop can be and woods is one of the very best at it. His songs are complex, often highly allegorical and offer imagery you simply won’t find elsewhere. Aethiopes was a little more amibitous and a little less urgent than some of his earlier work, but the more you listen to it, the more intoxicating it becomes. It’s not a new side of billy woods, but it’s a more sophisticated version.
