KENTUCKY MEAT SHOWER #25: THE ANNUAL "I ONLY LISTEN TO RAP AND COUNTRY" LIST
Hiding Songs//The Ten Best Billy Woods Moments
Happy Holidays. It’s time for another Kentucky Meat Shower. At this point in the year I’m too lazy to see if I’ve introduced the zine every time. If I haven’t, then this is less a stylistic error and more me moving out of a formal “written” voice to try and talk directly to whoever’s reading.
When I first started writing end of year music issues, it was to try and get some eyes on music I loved, and that remains the case. But if there was anything about the EOY music issues I found stressful, it was the need to keep up with everything I listened to in whatever year. Which has two issues: one, I’m now forced to be a music reviewer instead of somebody who writes about music and two, I’m not always listening to new stuff. I wrote a novel this year, and there wasn’t new music for it, so I just made a big writing playlist that acted like a soundtrack. I wrote an essay about Dolly Parton, so I spent a bunch of time with her catalog, as well as other country music. I got into Cocaine and Rhinestones and was surprised that Tyler Mahan Coe was a Mars Volta fan, so I listened to their first three or so albums and found myself a fan of Mars Volta and At the Drive-In. Because The Mars Volta were known for extending songs out in concert, there’s plenty of bootlegs. There towards the end of the year I started to realize I was becoming a freak and expanded my diet a bit. I am not the sort of person you want to give their opinion on Harry’s House. I haven’t even listened to the Mars Volta comeback album, and they’re (now) one of my favorite bands.
A lot of this has to do with access and the internet, though I suppose it’s easier than ever to get new music with the advent of streaming. But if anything, I think that means new music is always in competition with diving into the past for me. I heard Special Interest’s “Midnight Legend” while I was driving around with my partner went “what the fuck is THIS?” (a sign of appreciation) and haven’t listened to song or the album it’s off of in full once. Lotta Bjork and chicha music, though, and not Bjork’s new album.
It’s a coward’s move to base this on anything but my own peculiarities. It’s hard to find new music, and I guess I should try to find it. But I’m more likely to do that when I’m not concerned about finding new music to write aboutit. Removing that barrier made me feel a lot freer in what I enjoyed. To go back to Special Interest, “Herman’s House” bangs, but I lack a lot of the context to write about dancey stuff, and I’m going to embarrass you, me, and Special Interest if I try. Some things I enjoy without having done the initial analysis as to why. There are plenty of things I enjoy without having anything to say about them, on the level that makes for something worth reading, and there’s no sense in wasting time trying to get you to get why I enjoy it when I don’t know.
Which is why the music issue focuses a lot on my favorite songs.
HIDING SONGS 2022
I’ve been writing Kentucky Meat Shower for however long. I do this every year, and this one is no different. Each year, I look how old I’m about to be, and do a quick ballot of however many songs that is of songs I consider to be my “favorites”. Effectively, the general idea is I find a new song to add every year. Then, I compile each year of results and compare and contrast to get the truth of what my favorite songs actually are. By the time I either a) retire from writing or b) die, there will be however many years of measured taste and shifts. Links to prior lists can be found in the archives.
That being said, because we now have 3-4 years of data to go off of instead of me going through my ballot and writing about each song, I’m going to break this up into three sections of writing. However: to make this an easier to read piece, my plan is to do some very basic formatting. The core of 16 songs that have effectively made it every year will be bolded, underlined, and italicized. The next several songs that have made in and out appearances over the years will be italicized. And new songs get no marking whatsoever. Let’s look at the final tally, and then begin.
Little Red Corvette- Prince
Tumbling Dice- The Rolling Stones
Gilgamesh- Billy Woods
ATLiens- OutKast
Codeine Crazy- Future
Bloxk Party- Sada Baby feat. Drego
Saeta- Miles Davis
Brando- Scott Walker and Sunn 0)))
Blue Factory Flame- Songs: Ohia
Diamonds and Wood- UGK
The Drowners- Suede
Angel from Montgomery- John Prine
Please Stay Once You Go Away- Marvin Gaye
Debonair- The Afghan Whigs
Desperadoes Under the Eaves- Warren Zevon
O Death- Ralph Stanley
Bridge Over Troubled Water- Aretha Franklin
The Anvil Will Fall- Harvey Milk
The Shy Retirer- Arab Strap
Nothin’- Townes Van Zandt
Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me- Waylon Jennings
Protect Ya Neck- Wu-Tang Clan
If White America…- Manic Street Preachers
The Band Played Waltzing Matilda- The Pogues
Untitled (How Does It Feel)- D’Angelo
Roulette Dares (The Haunt Of)- The Mars Volta
She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinking Doubles)- Gary Stewart
Ole Man Trouble- Otis Redding
Planet Caravan- Black Sabbath
Impatient Freestyle- Drakeo the Ruler
Slip Inside This House- The 13th Floor Elevators
CORE TASTES
Those first 16 songs have solidified into a canon as. With the exception of the Afghan Whigs’s “Debonair”, every song has been on this list every year I’ve done the competition. Because the Afghan Whigs are one of my top five bands of all time (off the top of my head: The Rolling Stones, OutKast, Wu-Tang Clan, Prince, and them), I figured “Debonair” has a pretty safe, canonical place in my personal canon as my favorite Afghan Whigs song, beating out its album neighbor “When We Two Parted”. I’m pretty firm on thinking it’s the height of guitar based music in the 90s: you can play the chords to the opening riff right, but you can’t play it like they play it. It’s similar in that regard to “Tumbling Dice”, a song I’ve been infatuated with since I was in 9th grade. I’ve written oodles about these 16 songs, and don’t want to reiterate too much, because I’m not sure why I love what I love. A lot of those songs got here by the simple magic of being there first. The order up there doesn’t really matter other than the first four songs. If we were to get truly specific, Ralph Stanley’s version of “O Death” would round it out, despite being lower on the list, which is entirely an accident of listing. I’m mostly just glad I put some stuff from the teens on there, including probably the most purely fun song on the list: Sada Baby and Drego’s “Bloxk Party” (I probably think “I ain’t never had time for no arguments/big ass shotgun look like Lauri Markannen” once a day). My aesthetic tastes are always going to trend towards extremity or duende, and there’s not a ton of fun to be had in there. Even “ATLiens” has the line “Shout out to my uncle Donnell, locked up in prison.” Life’s pretty brutal, and I’ve used music to shield me from that brutality when it can. It tracks that my favorite 16 songs might tend towards the night.
RETURNING FAVORITES
It makes some sense to me that the songs that have appeared on this list a majority of times and still made it this year would be a smaller portion, which accounts for shifting tastes and rediscovery of new folds in the music. “Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me” has a sweetness and nostalgia to it I didn’t hear those first few times I decided to binge on Honkytonk Heroes, a bittersweetness that accompanies how often you pick up the tent pegs. “Protect Ya Neck” is still as vital to me as the first time I heard it. Putting Wu-Tang on these lists is always difficult. As outsized influence as they have on me, you’d think I’d have found a space for them, but Wu-Tang Clan for me has always felt like the songs on their albums are like scenes in a movie, and some songs are movies in and of themselves. I can’t divorce “Glaciers of Ice” from a coked up Ghostface Killah rambling about how you dye Wallabee shoes, and all of their songs feel like that to me. It is very rare that I want to hear a Wu-Tang Clan song on its own, because when I do, I want to hear “Protect Ya Neck”. Everything great about Wu-Tang Clan, from the chemistry of their handoffs to how each verse serves as a perfect introduction to each member is available in that song. No wonder it was one of their early singles.
“Ifwhiteamerica” was one I wasn’t sure about. I went from listening to the Manics constantly to the musical diet I talked about above, and wondered who would make it in the process. The Manics were politically ahead of their time: few songs in the 90s were able to advocate for the continuum of white supremacy available in both English conservatism and American liberalism.
But if there was a story this year (and forgive me if this all reads like ESPN coverage), it’s D’Angelo’s “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” returning. A few year dive into post punk and country made me forget how important r&b and soul were to my overall musical development. But the song’s evokes building, climbing eroticism, only to tear it away with a hard cut. By the end of the song you realize it’s never truly peaked: the building up is the fading away. It’s the sort of creativity that D’Angelo brought to smoky, sinewy r&b that made him such a beloved cult figure, and the thing that should earn him a statue in Stuart Circle.
NEW FAVORITES
Roulette Dares (The Haunt Of)- The Mars Volta
The most misunderstood rock band of the 2000s, where critics see a pretentious, navel-gazing progressive group of hacks, I see the most creative rock music of the oughts. “Roulette Dares” is the result of one of America’s most interesting musical partnerships (Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez) combining the history of rock music into their own heady compositions. But the band is not a mere set of revivalists: the influence of soundtracks, Fela Kuti, and dub reggae soaks the band’s signature sound. If anything about the band makes them “progressive”, it’s the sneaking of world music sounds into hard charging rock songs that best even Led Zeppelin to these ears. As controversial as that is, what is worth celebrating about The Mars Volta is that they are a band not of the United States but the greater whole of America. It’s not insignificant that band is from El Paso, on the Texas border: the other Americas are not far away. From the band’s start in At The Drive-In, with their recording of an EP named after a group of Ecuadorian leftist guerillas called ¡Alfaro Vive, Carajo! and songs like “Arcarsanel” and “Invalid Litter Dept” that speak to anticolonial concerns ranging from Western control of the global south and the murder of women in Juarez, to lyrics illustrating the military occupation of Puerto Rico by the United States, few bands have a better claim to being an American band, and a lot of the more harsh critical appraisal comes from an inability to dig into the uniqueness of the band from this critical lens of anti-colonial protest of the Americas in full, including the Caribbean states. The Mars Volta are exemplars of a psychedelic influence in Latin music: calling forth the influence of Santana, Jodorowsky, and Peruvian’s psychedelic chicha music as equally as the Pink Floyd and King Crimson comparisons they’re most often associated with. T
Their greatest song, “Roulette Dares” begins to solidify the mold their music would take: cryptic, expressionist lyrics and constantly shifting arrangements. A stomping, staccato guitar riff leads into propulsive verses about the descent into a hallucinatory train station in the afterlife. After the opening verses Omar Rodriguez-Lopez plays the first of the many freak-out guitar solos he’d become to be known for. Few soloists encapsulate the promise of their bands like Omar, and as the solo drops off into a nasal filtered return of the open riff, you know why the guitar worship magazines of the era spoke so highly of him. The final few minutes drop into a watery, yearning outro, where Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s moans beckon the listener further into the album’s narrative, a Gigerian book of the dead that gains resonance through its ability to tap into uncanny symbols and a sense of atmosphere doubtlessly learned from the way the group studied dub reggae.
One last thing: the very thing keeping this song from almost making it is Rick Rubin’s production muddies everything up, where if you listen to the best of their live performances (I’m a fan of the 2003 Maida Vale sessions) you see a balanced band where Ikey Owens’s organ adds in a gospel flavor.
She’s Acting Single (I’m Drinking Doubles)- Gary Stewart
Nobody sings like a drunk the way Gary Stewart did. You can read as much into that or as little as you like. An alcoholic has a deep need to medicate something, is chasing something. Not all alcoholics are drunks. Gary Stewart typified a drunk. Singing with the swagger and the two-fisted bravado honk that comes with double-fisting drinks, he sits where drinking because you want to have a good time and drinking because you’re having a rough one cross. Similar spirits haunt country music: a music where beer and whiskey and strawberry wine are as integral as marijuana to Rastafarians. If country music has a church for its music, it’s not the church but the honky-tonk, where weekend drinkers sit next to drunks, ones who have seen “their devil and their deep blue sea”, as Gram Parsons (a drunk, but maybe an alcoholic) would sing. The first song on Gary Stewart’s Out of Hand tells you: I have a drinking thing to keep from thinking things, only for the second song to turn around give a rowdy tale of going out on the tiles. Drunks know both well, and know they are maudlin in their comedy even as it approaches the devil.
“She’s Acting Single (I’m Drinking Doubles)” is a universe suspended in beer, where Gary Stewart sits watching the bubbles break like his heart, singing out his heart out about how someone pours themselves all over other bar patrons. Heartbreak is another one of the great muses for country music, and Gary Stewart is heartbroken two ways. In his philandering partner, he sees the one he loves act more like the thing he loves: how she acts contrasts to how he drinks, how she pours herself on another is like a drink spilled on their coat.
Gary Stewart’s career spun out into dependence on alcohol and other merriments. There weren’t many other ways for it to end.
Ole Man Trouble- Otis Redding
Did we ever produce a better, male soul singer in this country? I would say no. Otis Redding’s voice sounds like it could cut paper. As an instrument, it sits equally in raucousness and weariness and jumps between the two like it’s playing scales. The lead-off song on Otis Redding’s great Otis Blue and the b-side to “Respect”, it shows Otis at his pleading best. When he asked for “Respect” it was after he came home from work. But “trouble” is just “trouble”. It’s how life erodes our resolve. When Job was quiet, trouble still arrived, and when Otis Redding lives his life, trouble is not far behind.
Popular music has always served as a place to relieve quotidian aches and pains, no matter the kind. Whatever trouble is faced, there’s a song for it. Begging for peace has never sounded so strong as it has here. As the song climaxes, the stabs of Steve Cropper’s guitar, the Stax horns, and Otis Redding’s begging can make space to express any fear, failure, or doubt.
Planet Caravan- Black Sabbath
An anecdotal story: members of Bob Avakian’s Revolutionary Communist Party, at one time at least a well meaning left-wing organization before they became a joke and did things like support the unofficial segregation of bussing in Boston, were going to Appalachia to work in the coal mines as a part of the left’s turn to industry. The general idea with the left turn is that socialists would join an industry and make direct appeals to the working class, especially during an era of strong union density. Because so many of these organizations were obsessed with communicating their purity and integration in the working class, it was decided that they’d cut their hair, lay off the weed, and show up in their church clothes. When they got to the mines they realized all the miners had long hair and smoked weed.
Ignore whatever implications the story would have for political organizing, and instead focus on the form of the miners. Even today, when we talk about “the working class”, there’s a tendency to put it only towards the workers in heavy industry and manufacturing, and from there, there is an extrapolation that these workers are inherently conservative. You can insert that great Blazing Saddles bit here: “You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons.” Their imaginative capacities are never considered, so the attempts to reach them with anything are always pre-censored, with the fear they can’t understand, or strain to try and understand.
“Planet Caravan” is an oddity in the Ozzy Black Sabbath catalog: a quiet, jazzy song about floating through space with someone you love. In three minutes, a bunch of smelly Birmingham druggies do Aronofsky’s astoundingly overrated The Fountain, and it’s their most underrated song, in case you’re wondering how things will be written in the Book of Life. Black Sabbath was a band with some tendencies towards experimentation and amalgamation; they’re often remembered as stomping dinosaurs who worshiped the devil and invented metal. But their best work has an ethos that I can best describe as an electrified hippie version of old folklore. Odd figures at the end of your bed, fairies wearing boots, and heroin personified as a hand of doom: all of these are old fears (though heroin was definitely facilitated by the Vietnam War, which is specifically what “Hand of Doom” is about) that modernity could never displace. Even with all of our technology, we are not as modern or as enlightened as we’d like to think. We also have a capacity for ecstatic visions and transforming every day experience. In some crappy Birmingham flat, somebody held somebody and wondered what traveling throughout the sky was like with them. Never bet against anybody’s imagination.
Impatient Freestyle- Drakeo the Ruler
What’s the value of a freestyle? Other than it as a bedrock of hip-hop, it serves as a proof of a rapper’s dexterity, their ability to adapt to certain production styles, and the ability to make something out of nothing. Removing all the words to a song and leaving yourself with just the instrumental means you have half a song. The best freestyles are the ones that use that space to display a rapper’s magnetism, inventiveness, and sheer ability. When Dipset rolled into Rap City and rapped over “On My Block” by Scarface, what was on display was their mischievous approach to New York rap. It didn’t matter that Scarface is from Texas or “My Block” is a nostalgic story about the place that made Scarface: what was left was the Byrd Gang huddling around their leader Cam’ron, counting money like a cartoon villain.
It makes sense that Drakeo the Ruler could bruise a freestyle. He told us when he called out RJ on RJ’s own song “Flex” that he wasn’t like anybody else, he could really rap. His most indelible flow, one that sneaks in the nooks and crannies of the beat, is found on “Impatient Freestyle”, his rap over Jeremih and Ty Dolla Sign’s “Impatient”. He takes three minutes to brutalize the instrumental with a silky, unpredictable scansion, his nasal LA drawl glazed with cough syrup. He doesn’t raise his voice as he beats his chest and shows off his jewelry. To him, it’s all regular, as his catchphrase went, and if you get hung up on a lyric, consider what an old woman once told a girl about playing spades: “if you don’t already know, you never will.”
“Impatient Freestyle” is not the apex of Drakeo’s career: that would be either his classic tape Cold Devil or Thank You For Using GTL, the rap album he recorded inside the Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles, sitting for a murder charge put forth on faulty evidence he eventually beat. When he came back, he began recording at a furious pace, as friends were targeted by the vicious gang politics of LA, and it’s the vitality of those albums--release strategy be damned, this was a man’s life-- that serve as a reminder of how unique of a talent Drakeo was. He was stabbed at Once Upon A Time in LA. His assailants were never charged. He died close to a year ago. When I hear “Impatient Freestyle”, I remember records are always out of time, and when Drakeo raps he’s always alive.
Slip Inside This House- The 13th Floor Elevators
During the English revolution, there was a song called “The World Turned Upside Down”. When the world is upside down, people look for answers in songs called “The World Turned Upside Down”. Due to the accidents and secrecies of history, one way this came about was the readily available supply of LSD in the 60s and 70s. What was once a spooky research chemical became a sacrament; a daily bread requiring hymns.
The search for answers is rarely that easy. Just as many merry pranksters fried themselves, reawakening ancient terrors of the uncaring world harboring a secret malevolence when care was never in its vocabulary to begin with. Granted, the vast majority of people who took LSD were fine. It’s just that some people overdosed on their quests for truth or were purely dosed. Roky Erickson, the hellion voiced singer and rhythm guitarist for the 13th Floor Elevators belonged to the latter. As lead singer of the first band to call anything they did “psychedelic”, there are certain pressures, sometimes forced on you by your electrified jug player to live up to the band’s hype, and if you are a rock and roll wild man, you don’t mind the acid. It’s fitting that it’s the folk music instrumentalist, Tommy Hall of the jug, was the acid guru and later Republican that sent Roky out in the psychedelic experience without a paddle. Tommy Hall’s acid svengali act resonates. The protagonist of the 60s picaresque is the grifter who changed music, and everybody else is a play on that theme.
It’s fitting that Tommy’s electrified jug is the signature sound on the band’s LSD anthem: a flanging wobble that simulates being at sea. Nothing is separate from anything else: jug bands from rock and roll, the inside of a house from the outside world. Even the biblical themes at the edge of plenty of psych music find their place in the songs’s references to seven seals and churches. Considering how things ended up, it’s fitting they were from Revelations, a title drawn from the literal translation of “apocalypse”.
Truth can get revealed in a lot of ways. Not all of them are good. The best psychedelic music has dangerous, ugly truth spinning against its orgiastic elements.
THE TEN BEST BILLY WOODS MOMENTS OF THE YEAR
Rap hurts. Careers are mercurial. Promises get met by half, then never confer. Then there’s the fact it’s a youth driven genre--though plenty of veterans are lining best rapper alive lists-- and being young and black in America is dangerous. In some instances status can’t save you.
People can point to the fact that rap stylizes itself as American narcocorridos and say that you get fleas when you sleep with dogs. The response is two-fold: only focusing on rap’s insistence it’s a cinema veritie documentary ignores how it stylizes itself in genres like blaxploitation, grand tragedy, slapstick Trailer Park Boys style comedy, and countless others and that if it focuses on the darker aspects of life that coincide with legal gray areas, it’s because black life in America is face to face with that danger. Criminality is the last refuge of the abandoned. And that also we don’t see Hollywood celebrities with lives this close to danger. Rap is constantly on trial, and that hurts. The genre is always having to prove its worth. But spinning against urge to prove its value to prying eyes is that rappers also have to prove a degree of authenticity, oftentimes in paths they want to transcend. For every hedonistic celebration of ill-gotten gains, there’s a song about trying to build a life away from them. Rap hurts, and it’s exhausting. I still remember my letdowns.
The facts above then make the runs so much more impressive. It’s periods of time where rappers string together a transcendent body of work. Periods like Ghostface from Wu-Forever to Fishscale, Lil’ Wayne and Future’s mixtapes, and Andre 3000’s post OutKast guest verses. Because of the genre’s fickleness--and I’d argue it largely exists as a singles genre-- it’s worth giving people their flowers at the top of their games. Who knows what’s coming next. That brings us to billy woods.
A career that began a steady climb after the possible goodbye album History Will Absolve Me has reached a point where his albums are featuring in Time magazine. Aethiopes was The Fader’s top album this year. Woods’s reach has gone beyond Roc Marciano and Ka fans, and it’s coincided with his unending experimentation, showcasing different facets of his artistry with each project. To showcase that this year: Aethiopes is heady and paranoid, soaked in the history of African exploitation by the western world, showcased over Preservation’s unique vision of world music, one cracked like an explorer’s map. Church, on the other hand is buoyed by Messiah Muzik’s haunting, gauzy soul samples, to tell stories about relationships, weed, and the ever present memory of violence, fought for with righteous intentions that do nothing to qualm the horror. These are the sort of albums that could be magnum opuses, but for woods, they are other projects. Starting with Dour Candy, every billy woods album has made for rich, immediate listening. This is the sort of hot streak that makes an understandable pick for somebody’s GOAT, and I’m not far off from making that proclamation myself; all criticism and lists are biography by aggregate. This also doesn’t include his role in Elucid’s I Told Bessie as an executive producer as well as his continued role in backwoodz studio’s excellence. Rap hurts, and it makes the need for praise when it’s excellent all the more vital. On to the praise.
“Asylum”
“I think Mengitsu Haile Miriam is my neighbor” is the line that kicks off woods and Preservation’s Aethiopes, a claustrophobic album full of paranoid diaspora poetry. Over an Ethipioan jazz sampling beat, Billy tells a story of a child in a house with a failing marriage and a neighbor who may or may not be the ousted socialist President of Ethiopia. In Woods’s music, turmoil doesn’t have a begin or the end. It’s a cliche to say the personal is political, but woods makes political concern alive. In plenty of interviews, he’s mentioned his family’s connection to the Zimbabwean war for independence and the Patriotic Front government. If there’s any meaning to diaspora art, it’s that what you think is done never is. Miriam is trapped in a house, living in reminders of the Derg’s failure. An audacious opener that sets the tone for Aethiopes’s reflection on the generational trauma political strife inflicts.
Best line: “It's ghosts in the building's bones, so many skeletons in the ground/When everything collapse, he just melt into the crowd”
“No Hard Feelings”
From “Asylum’s” woodwinds to the anxiety inducing flute and Kill Bill synth stabs of “No Hard Feelings”, woods rattles off the best 1-2 punch of his career. The song is a juxtaposition of its simple titular phrase. First woods tries to kick a crack addict off his stoop. Later he gets stood up for a suite rendezvous and left smoking weed and watching tv alone. As far as woods songs goes, he can be remarkably straightforward when he wants to. This is a song about how a simple phrase can cover for a variety of unpleasantries. But put in the context of his best work, the question becomes “when you say that, do you mean it?”
Best line: “Black astronaut, cop a space suit and jet off my steps/Challenger launch burnin' bright, burn to death”
“Paraquat”
When Church dropped, I was at first thrown off by the opening. Messiah Muzik’s beat immediately drops you into a ghostly reminiscence woods has of buying weed illegally at a spot on 115th street in New York. From there, he reflects on his days hustling, dodging Nuwaubians telling him to lay off the pork and feeling like a bench player destined for greater things. Messiah Muzik’s beat flips into the sort of wind-bit hustling music that could soundtrack a day on the block with your hands in a puffy jacket, just trying to get home. Both the openers to Aethiopes and Church made the list as songs that set the tone for the rest of their projects, ones that, as you listen over and over, resonate throughout the respective albums. Church’s bluesy laments of dealing and relationship betrayals are all there in the first song.
Best line: “My dude came home like Papillon, his spirit never captured/But truth be told, he never had a second chapter”
“Sauvage” feat. Boldy James and Gabe Nandez
Auteurship is a tricky notion, because if you call yourself one, you’re a dick. But I do think there’s a fingerprint you put on your work and decisions an artist made can be analyzed. Thus, let’s turn our attention to woods’s excellent selection of guest rappers. You never once get the sense a guest rapper is chosen to spit a verse because they’re hot, and with backwoodz studio’s excellent scouting skills, they usually have somebody hot. On this song, Boldy James (first ballot best rapper alive with woods) weaves one of his noir tales of hustling as woods recounts piquant details about teenagers shooting abusive uncles and high school girlfriends who lock their little brothers in their room so they can have sex in the living room. Gabe Nandez, an underrated NYC rapper whose deft ability to rap in multiple languages makes him a natural woods foil and gives the song a catchy hook. Like “No Hard Feelings”, everybody is bouncing off the French word for “savage”, which I won’t belabor too much, but like woods says, “I grew up on the line between north and south/1-95, two airports, triangular trade routes.”
Best line: “Reg flew off the dirt bike like a carton of eggs/Came back stutterin' with a limp and a dent in his head”
“Fuschia & Green” feat. ELUCID
Woods has absolutely improved as a rapper. Where he was once a very good rapper whose lyrical powers were so overwhelming that he occasionally seemed breathless to catch up, the last few years have seen him experimenting with flows, different textures of beats, and even the timber of his voice. That brings us to “Fuschia & Green”, the best of his collaborations with rhyming partner Elucid. Elucid’s lyrics trend towards the beatific, raw, and emotional just as woods trends towards small scale, grimy storytelling, making them a great pair. However, it’s woods who has the lightest feet on this track. Spitting the best verse of his career, woods gives a cubist portrait of a Middle Eastern plug and her associates with a bouncy flow. By the time woods slurs a gully punchline that ends with “Ceaucescu” and “q’est que sai” into the sort of bar length assonance, it feels like a victory lap.
Best line: “Me and my girlfriend ride to the bloody end like the Ceaucescus/q’est que sai when you see the new chess moves”
“Tabula Rasa” feat. Armand Hammer
Over a smoky beat with tinkly keys that sound like Rick Blaine smoking a spliff, everybody does their bit. Because this is a woods centric list, I’m going to point out two things:
a) in the video, woods raps while grilling ribs, the sort of absurdity he gives you if you give him enough time. Woods is actually funny, but it takes a moment to know when he’s joking. He’s 45 and telling you “if they’re playing the oldies, I’m gonna go ahead and get sweaty”. Woods’s penchant for sly humor is one even I don’t give enough space, relatively, but it makes you think of how Kafka used to laugh reading to Max Brod.
b) people focus so much on woods’s often weighty subject matter it’s fun to enjoy a verse where he dances and makes chicken for somebody he picked up at a grown and sexy night. Woods’s chronicles of urban life make me think of an American Splendor where Harvey Pekar keeps a great record collection to hunt for samples.
Best line: “I’m from where every car is foreign and we drive them on empty (Zimbabwe, man)”
“Christine”
What first brought my eye to woods was how similar I thought his rapping and lyrics were to the high modernist literature I loved so much in college, to the point when I first wrote about him back on wordpress I called “Gilgamesh” the rap Mrs. Dalloway (mostly because there’s a stream-of-consciousness story around a single event, sleeping with your ex before she gets married and you’re still dealing weed to make ends meet). “Christine” comes from a different source, of course: the Stephen King novel about a nerd who gets an evil car. The story that he gets from it is a retelling of Bob Marley & The Wailer’s “Mr. Brown”. Using the Jamaican ghost story that inspired “Mr. Brown”, woods tells stories involving cars and the specter of death. A ghostly car follows his family. A hot car sits in a wicked grandmother’s backyard, only to come out and rove the streets at night. And when somebody falls asleep at the wheel, only one person remains. When they ask woods why, all he can say is “God’s not real.” Tough crowd.
Best line: “In a hospital room full of flowers, I plucked the best one/In a world full of cowards, it's bound to be tension”
“Pollo Rico”
As woods’s songs get more emotional, conceits flitter around, like a monologue in your head as you walk to the scariest moments of your life. “Pollo Rico” may not have a central conceit, but his reflections are some of the most poignant of his career. Church is the closest we’ve heard to a woods break-up album--though I’d make the point that it’s less about a single break-up than romantic failure is one of the recurring themes-- and the first verse gives credence to that, with a series of confessional barbs. But it’s the chorus that hits the hardest. Whoever woods is visiting in the hospital, he’s been there enough to know off hand where the cheetos are. Settled right before “All Jokes Aside”, a self-penned obituary, woods confronts death bravely, because all he has is words.
Best line: “Hospital vending machine/d-2’s the cheetos/yucca fries, pollo rico/Louis XIIIth in a vape, you hit it twice/I hope there’s nothing but love in paradise”.
“Remorseless”
Back to “Gilgamesh”, off his Dour Candy: woods wrote about an affair that can only happen one more time. In an interview, he gave his reason that, while a lot of rappers rap about their lives in self-congratulatory tones (rappers he enjoyed, specifically), woods’s life hasn’t worked out like that. “Remorseless” takes a similar tone. Woods could do a straight-forward braggadocio song, but similar to “Gilgamesh”, what could be a standard rap conceit takes on a world-weariness and angst that is woods’s signature. While braggadocio will carry the signature of any worthwhile rapper (the way I brag about my cars is going to be different than the way you do), woods’s signatures makes that bragging a bittersweet affair. “I’m not concerned with generational wealth, that’s it’s own curse.” Hard.
Best line: “Spare me the Hallmark Karl Marx/I was in the Dollar Tree break-room playin' cards with quarters”
“Smith + Cross”
Our final song closes out Aethiopes. Since I’ve listened to woods, you find certain genetics of songs that repeat across his catalog, but are different based on the project. The guitar sample undergirding bleak poetry calls to mind “Cuito Cuanavale” from Dour Candy, but woods has only improved since the album in every way. While there’s not an immediate meaning to the song, each line creates a verse that sits like a sculpture made of disparate parts. Meaning comes from the assemblage, which is something Rap Genius has always missed about the poetry of rap. Closing Aethiopes on the image of looking at a display in a museum with someone on pain pills only to see yourself, the album that began telling the story of Mengitsu Haile Miriam’s exile and house arrest ends with woods seeing himself trapped in a diorama.
Best line: “Generational trauma/at the museum, eyes glassy from the pain pills/me and her in the diorama”
We’ll see you in the new year. Have a good one.
C.S.