Scattered across GOLLIWOG, the ominous new album by billy woods, are images of death in slow motion. On its opening song, he sees “morose villagers queue in the sun” for vaccines; later, a still-living fly stares out of the upturned pint glass in which he’s been imprisoned. A drone flies “real low/no rush/real slow.” A man prays to every god he can remember as the fuselage of his plane shakes; CIA handlers crowd around Frantz Fanon’s hospital bed. Doctors stare at X-ray transparencies and frown, just a little.
GOLLIWOG follows 2023’s Maps, which detailed woods’ travels as an increasingly in-demand musician. Here, he returns to a story he wrote as a child about an evil version of the titular doll. (He quips that his mother, a professor of literature, at the time called it “derivative.”) The series of parables and contained narratives are also dotted with evidence of time travel. The terror weaves across decades and across the globe, but the threads themselves loop back on themselves over and over again.
I spoke with woods over the phone shortly after he’d returned to his Brooklyn, New York, base from London. As always, he was juggling multiple projects: In addition to the GOLLIWOG press campaign, he was continuing to promote new releases—like PremRock’s Did You Enjoy Your Time Here...?—from his Backwoodz Studioz label, slowly getting to his next collaboration with Elucid as Armand Hammer, and finishing a long-delayed book.
In this one, I decided each song was going to be self-contained. I was thinking about when I was a kid, reading Ray Bradbury or other science fiction writers, or Stephen King’s horror collections, or watching Creepshow—which is not my favorite—or Cat’s Eye, which was. Things where these different stories are tied together by this thread. And so I really tried to make the stories self-contained but fit into the same universe. They resolve themselves internally, as opposed to something like Maps, where you’re just trying to create an atmosphere.
There was initially the idea that the doll would fit into more of the songs, sort of like the cat in Cat’s Eye. But some of the songs just didn’t make it. The golliwog itself only shows up in a couple places. I was going for an overall idea here, but it’s more like a book of short stories than a novel. Maps is more like a novel, or a travelogue, you’re going directly from one place to another.
Well, one interesting thing that I thought about after I finished the record was that you could go through and pick out songs like “Bedtime,” on Hiding Places, or “Christine,” on Aethiopes, or “Hangman,” on Maps, and those are songs that could have fit onto this record. I think that’s an element that often is there in my work, but this record it was all that, you know what I mean?
My initial thought was that I was going to work on this album pretty slowly, and I knew that I wanted to do something with multiple producers. I had a couple other things going on creatively, so I was going to take my time with it. Elucid and I were working on something. I had this book. I was like, ‘I’m just going to slow-walk this and try to work on one song a month,’ or something like that. That’s kind of how it started out. It was my first multiple-producer record in a long time, so I knew I wanted to cast a wider net for production, just because it would be fun.
With Maps, the main thing was that I was totally focused on that. It’s tough, because I was also touring and traveling, but I was recording a lot with Kenny [Segal] or while I was on the road: I would record there, or write when I would come home, whichever situations would lend themselves to that. [GOLLIWOG] was all at home. Elucid got pretty deep into REVELATOR and was like, ‘I need to focus on this and come back to the Armand Hammer record later.’ We had a couple songs done, but he was locked into REVELATOR. So I was like, ‘Well, I should do something. And I have this idea, so I’ll start doing that.’ I think one of the first songs I recorded was one that didn’t make REVELATOR, and then another, both on Messiah Musik beats. It was still kind of a slow-walk thing, but not as slow as it would have been under the original plan.
Sometimes I just jot an idea down. The same thing happened with Aethiopes: I had that word written down for a while, just like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting, there’s something I could do there.’ At some point I was at home and I saw an old story that I had written when I was a child. My mom keeps them all, and is like, ‘You should redo this story from when you were 12!’
No; in the book there is something I wrote when I was a teenager, but no. My mother is like: ‘These are good! I don’t know what you’re doing now’ [laughs]. But anyway, the thing with words is finding good words. Sometimes you just need to find a good word, a good phrase that sticks with you. We Buy Diabetic Test Strips—I was seeing it and I wrote it down, I just had it.
It’s just about getting better, man. I’m always trying to improve, to push myself. I collaborate with some of the best artists in the genre: Elucid, obviously, Quelle [Chris], Cavalier, Curly Castro, PremRock, Open Mike Eagle. You’re trying to push yourself to get further. The flows, the styles are evolved and are doper to me than some of the old things, but old things have their own energies.
I’m happy to hear that. I’m always hoping that that’s in there. I think that that’s facts, you know? When I’m working and when I’m doing things I’m always like, ‘How can I move forward and push it to somewhere else?’ Also, when you’re doing a multiple-producer project where you can really be like, ‘OK, this is the thing that’s appealing to me today.’ As opposed to a single-producer project, where it’s like, ‘OK, this is what needs to get done.’ Which has its own benefits—I made a bunch of great records with a single producer. Sometimes having to force yourself to conform to what you got is good. There’s always new little things you pick up. Little skills. When you go back to do the next thing you’re like, oh, I can attack that this way, which I might not have done two years ago.
That’s one that I didn’t really have any idea how it would be received. But that was one I worked really closely with Steel Tipped Dove on getting it right. First, I was listening to stuff he’d sent me and was like these two [beats] sound like they work together. The opening sounds like what it’s supposed to sound like, you know?
Or the beginning of—what was that show? It used to scare the shit out of me, man. Tales From the Darkside? The music from that used to scare me. It just had that vibe, the beginning of something creepy. I talked to Dove about how to put the beats together, and we worked from there. I wrote and recorded it as one piece; later on, there was stuff with how it was mixed and the samples that are in it, but I wrote and recorded it as one piece. It wasn’t pored over. I really feel that how you start and end an album is big. To me, if it wasn’t the first song, it wasn’t on the album. I think part of it was that that song has almost all the things that are in the album, in it. The horror, the doll, the feeling of menace and strangeness.
The post-colonial ideas, the sort of [Joseph] Conrad–esque quiet horror of the colonial experiment and of the wilderness. The unknowability of the quote-unquote “native,” and then their own hidden knowledge of you. The time travel aspect; I talk about the Afrofuturist Acura Legend on cinder blocks. The little nod to anyone who’s ever had a trap in the car or whatever. Little allusions to all the things. And my relationship to the English language, the literature. The fact that I can only exist because of these historical things, the colonial project and its aftermath.
My actual favorite line in there is actually probably the Cecil Rhodes line. I used to have a picture, in college, a blown-up version of that famous illustration of him standing astride all of Africa with one foot in South Africa and one in, like, Egypt.
I think that might be an oversimplification. I wouldn’t say everything would be alright. But “NYC Tapwater” is the initial feeling of coming back home. And I wanted to get a little further: My mother would always say that the protagonist is changed by the journey. He comes home, and home isn’t the same place. But you are not the same. I get home and I have shit to do; I have to go pick up my kids, do the things. So having Elucid do all of that—it’s really a lucky thing that I have somebody who can deliver so spectacularly even if it’s in an understated way. As for “Dislocated,” again, I’m really glad that I work with—I think you could make the argument that he’s the best [rapper], definitely in competition. “Dislocated” is a song like [Haram closer] “Stonefruit,” where a lot of things were set up and I just had to come through.
Great artist, great Zimbabwean Caribbean [laughs]. I spoke to him only once. But he meant a lot. A lot of people when he passed made amazing songs—Mike Eagle, Aesop Rock. I just was like, I don’t have anything to add on that level. But I did want to make a tribute in certain ways. And so there are a couple aspects. One of them is the time travel—Viktor Vaughn, that being part of the idea. It’s a little bit of a quiet tribute, and depending on how much you’re into his music, then there are different layers to it.
Nobody’s going to put me in an Apple commercial [laughs]. My thought process was really just… this is my first album in two years. How can I make it dope? What’s going to be interesting? Once you’re into it, you’re just navigating and discovering as you’re going along.
It’s crazy when people ask… what are you gonna say? What do you say?
I have barely any time left. I’ve gotta do it.
Sooner than this year, Paul.