Mr Magpie

Anyone who has seen billy woods perform live knows that he likes the lights low – preferably off. Not only does the darkness hide his face, it also blurs the barrier between the audience and the stage, putting you in the room with him and making his words inescapable. With Golliwog, released a year ago today, woods managed to assemble an album dark enough to not only match his live show but eclipse it, in an eerily successful attempt to match the darkness of the moment – and the world is a shadowy place these days. 

Menaced by the spectres of pointless war, preventable famine, and predictable hatred, cultivated by those with enough money and power to remain unscathed by the crises they create, we are also haunted by the tantalizing possibility of utopia and its many ghosts: the shades of those we might have saved from missiles, disease, or catastrophic climate change, in any of the manifold better worlds we might have made. Our moment is defined by an increasing awareness of the fact that a handful of people really do have the kind of fantastical power which could save the world, and an increasingly crushing certainty that they will never use it – save for their own enrichment. It is our absurd fate to have been born, in this best of all possible worlds, in time to witness this, the apex and culmination of all human achievement: in which AI and the iPhone are hailed as saviors, instead of AIDS relief to Africa we send Katy Perry to space, and in which one man’s bad day could be our collective last. You have to laugh – to keep from screaming. 

Golliwog was billed as a horror record, and it is: its horrors are real, and happening to real people every day. It is how they are framed–in surreal combinations that reveal underlying patterns of violence, injustice, and hate–that makes it filmic. The songs play like a sequence of bad dreams, one after the next, unrelenting but never straying (except, perhaps, in the brilliant, Conductor Williams-produced ‘STAR87’) into the terrain of horrorcore, a genre I have always found to be unconvincing in its theatricality and gratuitous in its violence: reality is grim enough; as woods raps on ‘Waterproof Mascara’ “you can’t make this shit up, but you’re welcome to to try.” woods knows that there’s a nightmare lurking somewhere in every dream, and a dream lying buried in every nightmare. He knows that the worst ones are those from which you want to wake but can’t, and so you lay there, hoping you don’t have to watch yourself die. He also knows that nightmares and dreams are made of the same stuff – fragments of reality, warped and rearranged, their impact depending upon the context in which they are placed. 

That, fittingly, would do just as well to describe Golliwog’s sonic landscape, crafted by his most eclectic set of collaborators since 2019’s Terror Management. Golliwog never quite reaches the same level of sonic cohesion as Hiding Places (with Kenny Segal), Aethiopes (with Preservation), or Church (with Messiah Muzik), but it makes up for this minor fault with some excellent–and sometimes quite bold–production choices. ‘STAR87’, previously mentioned, makes deeply unsettling use of a sample from the 2006 horror flick When a Stranger Calls; ‘Waterproof Mascara’, produced by Preservation is one of the most genuinely uncomfortable encounters I have ever had with music (a compliment); and the DJ Haram and Shabaka Hutchings-produced ‘All These Worlds Are Yours’ allows woods and ELUCID to capture the voyeuristic horror of watching footage of someone, presumably a combatant in the Russia-Ukraine war, be killed by a drone-dropped grenade. As someone who has seen more of this footage than I would like to admit, I can attest to the song’s almost photographic evocation of this uniquely cold and disturbing experience: the initially beatless atmosphere affords woods the space to depict–in language so plain-spoken and observational that it manages to be simultaneously respectful and totally pitiless–the violence of the image before it explodes into one of DJ Haram’s characteristically fractured beats, over which ELUCID evokes sensuality and violence, body horror and war. Other notable songs include ‘Corinthians’, featuring a typically merciless verse from elusive NY legend Despot, the welcome levity (laced with a little irony and self-deprecation) of ‘Misery’, ‘BLK XMAS’, its appearance from Bruiser Wolf brilliant in its verse-length double entendre, the Fela Kuti-referencing ‘BLK ZMBY’, and the bloody, brutal colonial critique of ‘Maquiladoras’.

All of the blood that spills here has to come from somewhere. You can find the record’s heart in the way woods raps, first about the murder of his cousin, left barefoot after the theft of his shoes, and then, in the very next line, about his child’s bare feet and their resemblance to his own on ‘Born Alone’ (the music video for the song features his child.) These touches of tenderness hit like gut punches. You can find the heart, too, marooned in the empty halls and bedrooms of the childhood homes to which woods, ELUCID, and Cavalier return like Argonauts on the melancholy and nostalgic ‘Lead Paint Test’. Nostalgia comes partly from the Greek word ‘nostos’, which, in Greek mythos, was a virtue, a special kind of heroism earned by a seafarer upon his return home from a particularly difficult journey. Instead of triumphant, our narrators sound weary, and pensive; not conquerors so much as survivors (the ‘algia’ comes from algos – pain.) The homes they return to are home to another family now, in Cavalier’s case; home to ghosts and visited only in the mind, for woods; or full of complex feelings, for ELUCID, whose line about a graduation photo on a mantle–perhaps a loved one’s–wearing “a smile fit for a homegoing”, is preceded by an evocation of nuclear fallout, that threat of apocalyptic violence hanging over us all. This song could almost have been written by astronauts, future descendents of the Argonauts, splashing down in a dead sea to find us all gone. It’s lines like these, the ones which conjure up other images and open doors to other worlds, asking questions instead of offering cheap comfort, which make the record so affecting and replayable. While, sure, it has only been a year, I’m confident that Golliwog will weather whatever time we have left.

As anyone who’s seen a few knows, horror movies usually end in one of two ways: either everybody dies, or one lucky someone finds a way out, and survives. The record’s closing track, ‘Dislocated’, refuses us any resolution; it seems to hint at the door to a hiding place while denying us the key: “You can’t come in here with me, you can’t come in here, you’ll see.” We are left to wonder at our fate while woods riffles through images of survival and demise–whether from the atavistic past or our soon-to-be-future isn’t clear–like a tarot deck, as if trying to divine his own. He hasn’t found a way out yet, either. We are suspended: stuck, as ELUCID puts it, in “someone else’s dream / Out of reach”; caught, ragdolls all, in the teeth of the great beast, unsure whether to play dead or make a run for it – but run where, if we can’t go home?

Golliwog, for all that it toys with cinematic conventions, is definitionally a record, in the sense that it is true. It is honest about things, and things are not good: yes, the call is coming from inside the house, yes, what will kill us is already here, lurking in the shadows, and yes, the late-stage machine keeps grinding away while we sleep. None of this makes for pleasant subject matter. woods’ unique gift as a lyricist–and what keeps this record from falling into misanthropic doomerism–is his humor. The fact that the rough beast has arrived crowned with an American flag ballcap and quoting Pulp Fiction as it points with a gilded cross to the great heights of the Dow Jones is so absurd as to be almost laughable, and it is in the crawlspace of that ‘almost’ where woods does his best work. I suspect he rather enjoys playing the role of the Eternal Footman: holding your coat, knowing you’re next, and having a good chuckle at your expense. Having “plucked the lights out a cat, so [he] can see in the dark”, he can see what’s lurking in the shadows, and he knows–like some, while others only sense–that we are all watching the moment of our greatness flicker – and in short, we should be afraid. This may well be someone else’s dream. For everyone else, it is a nightmare from which we cannot wake.

NB: I highly recommend the accompanying film Gowillog, featuring remixes by August Fanon.