Album Review: billy woods - Aethiopes

In a recent interview, billy woods touched upon familiar themes of “Blackness as an idea, Africa as an idea, Africa as a reality” when discussing the construction of Aethiopes, a record whose title is as oblique as the cropped Rembrandt painting gracing its cover. Whether the rapper is alluding to those living in Ethiopia, in Africa as a whole, or the entire African diaspora spread across multiple continents is left somewhat unclear; knowing woods, the answer is likely all of the above, and so much more. That his newest album finds him working with Preservation, a particularly cerebral producer whose 2020 album Eastern Medicine, Western Illness featured multiple guest verses from woods, is too perfect a concept to possibly disappoint, yet even their past collaborations are eclipsed by what the two auteurs of rap have accomplished here. Rarely is billy woods charitable enough to do more than hint at the empirical meaning of his words, yet Aethiopes is no less compelling for this ambiguity; indeed, there may be no stronger testimony in his catalogue to the frightening extent of woods’ musical genius.

Take the opener Asylum, laden with appropriately claustrophobic piano trills and bass strums crammed beside woods’ dry, intimate delivery in as small an aural space as the title implies. “I think Mengistu Haile Mariam is my neighbour” he quips as an introduction (a reference to the Ethiopian dictator who fled to woods’ former home of Zimbabwe in 1991) before adding “I watch from as high as I can climb/The dog looks up and whines, the hills are alive with land mines/I live in my mind/Not sure what I’m looking for, but I’ll know when I find”. Hiding Places, the rapper’s celebrated 2018 collaboration with producer Kenny Segal, was similarly obsessed with the idea of isolation as a refuge from external dangers, yet here woods reflects his own comfortable seclusion against the paranoia of a disgraced leader, sequestered in his mansion and constantly in fear of his life. As the outro sample cautions, “But so does captivity look well on a lamb we are fattening up for the feast”. The transition into No Hard Feelings is seamless, an uneasy procession of horns sans percussion as woods delivers short, vivid bursts of uncomfortable imagery in a familiar cadence: “Black boys burned crisp, pursed black lips/Black marionettes dance limp, over the pit/The kindly ones distant as the winter sun”.

Preservation’s contributions to Aethiopes are as inspired as they are eclectic, even if certain oddities such as the unhinged piano fumbling throughout the latter half of Haarlem are sure to put off many a listener. Luckily, woods’ first two verses are propelled by an old-school blend of horn stings and piano chords straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon theme, backdropping some particularly evocative couplets (“Speaking Afrikaans, British accent, I want mine from back when/Thebe said the wind get the ashes in the end, bruv”) interspersed with pieces of sampled dialogue hinting at the corrupt (and farcical) realities of autocracy (“You have your price.” “It’s rather high.” “How high?” “Gallows high.”). The snippets in question are (like most present on the album) lifted from Kongi’s Harvest, a 1970 Nigerian film based on a play about despotism, disparity, and tradition in post-colonial Africa; ideas which all lurk omnipresent in the lyrical content of Aethiopes. Wharves confronts them most pointedly, a track both musically and thematically reminiscent of woods’ 2012 masterpiece History Will Absolve Me. His poetics here paint a harsh picture of a coastal province ravished by conflict and imperialism (“Bones littered the beach, gnawed/Cracked meat out the beast’s claws”), and the production, composed solely of unsettling percussion and a few errant bass notes, offers no refuge from the rapper’s pragmatism.

As evident from his recent bona fides, Preservation has an uncanny talent for bringing out the best in those who rap atop his enigmatic beats, and the unusually abundant features on Aethiopes provide no exceptions. On Heavy Water, verses from woods, El-P, and Breeze Brewin trade off in a flood of threatening evocations, as an impressively chaotic instrumental replete with crashing cymbals and record scratches churns constantly underneath. The ominous production of Sauvage feels tailor-made for the grimy baritone of Boldy James (“Dug down in my soul and did some soul searchin’/All I found was a police report for a missin’ person”), while woods’ bittersweet nostalgia concludes with a particularly biting denunciation of Western hegemony: “Central American Übermensch is in the bed of a pickup/Building prefab duplexes, human traffic like Department of Corrections/Godless savages, fishbone necklaces”. Later, Shinehead blends two Bob Marley hooks into the chorus of Protoevangelium, a slick reggae-tinged moment of détente that gives woods an opportunity to deftly assert his talents: “The game thick with con artists and hucksters/Flip a cardboard box, Three-card Monte social justice/That’s a no from me beloved, and the rhymes is mostly rubbish”.

NYNEX, another highlight replete with a raucous groove and stellar guest verses from ELUCID, Quelle Chris, and Denmark Vessey, nonetheless finds billy woods stealing the show with an off-kilter preface that ends up as one of his most clever and quotable verses ever: “The future isn’t flying cars, it’s Rachel Dolezal absolved/It’s autonomous computers sending shooters back in time at the behest of defunct message boards”. Though both he and Preservation use Aethiopes as an opportunity for likeminded experimentation, the record’s last few tracks are an earned retreat into sounds and styles more familiar (yet no less impressive). By the time we reach the pensive-sounding Remorseless, woods’ banter has turned downright morose, mixing droll one-liners (“Spare me the Hallmark Karl Marx”) with hints at self-deprecation and spurned relationships. On Smith + Cross, he picks up this thread once more, remarking “The emotional affair was the best/Intoxicating, let’s not ruin it with sex”; more than simply ending on a high note, woods and Preservation are here perfectly in sync with the other’s creativity, the former’s broad lyrical strokes having coalesced into a work of graphic, tangible deliverance: “Fire in the cane fields, generational trauma/At the museum, eyes glassy from the pain pills/Me and her in the diorama”.

Kongi’s Harvest ends with the titular dictator murdered in a plot concocted by political prisoner Dr. Gbenga, who thereafter seizes power and continues the cycle of cyclical despotism…at least, that’s how the film version ends. Despite writing both the stage play and movie, Wole Soyinka disowned the latter (in which he also starred as President Kongi) as a result of its altered conclusion, a change no doubt insisted upon by the studio as a way to impose onto Kongi’s Harvest a worldview of (ironically) black-and-white morality. For those in the West, to levy anything but unequivocal hatred at Kwame Nkrumah (whose regime Kongi’s was likely a satire of), or Robert Mugabe, or Mengistu Haile Mariam, is anathema; self-determination is reserved only for imperialists, and not even in fiction do the colonized deserve freedom. Aethiopes, in title, lyrics, and instrumentals, is a scathing deconstruction of this idea, collating all of billy woods’ past analyses of African culture, European empire, and American exceptionalism into one auditory canvas of blurred lines. Like Soyinka, woods’ humour is as dry as it is disarming; like Preservation, his work is all the more captivating for its layered, unabashed intricacy. It’s difficult to say where the refinement on Aethiopes ends and the fresh perspective begins, but that is merely a symptom of billy woods’ intrinsic brilliance, and his inability to write a verse that doesn’t feel completely revolutionary in one way or another.

9/10

Favourite Tracks: Asylum, Heavy Water, Smith + Cross, Versailles