The arc of the golliwog virtually comically aligns with billy woods’ fascination with world historical past. The racist British caricature was invented within the late 1800s by an American cartoonist working in London, who based mostly it on an outdated minstrel doll. She co-wrote a dozen kids’s books utilizing the determine, which turned a success amongst English youngsters and a preferred toy. However when she did not trademark the golliwog, enterprising Brits turned it into a world icon and a number of racial slurs. Lately, unique variations of the dolls are collectibles that may promote for 1000’s of {dollars}. The woods zingers virtually write themselves.
However GOLLIWOG, the Brooklyn rapper’s first solo-billed album since Terror Administration in 2019, isn’t the Backwoodz Bamboozled. It’s a visionary horrorcore file in regards to the infinite methods individuals really feel and reply to concern. Melding jazz, noise, and ambient, woods makes use of dread for groggy journeys by means of time and area. The file’s imaginative and prescient of horrorcore, a subgenre enamored with transgressive intercourse and violence, is psychedelic and dissociative. The brand new mode intensifies the ability of woods’ oration, which has grown extra stentorian and dynamic. As he catalogs terrors mundane and excessive, these off-keel songs sway like shadows from a campfire.
Previous collaborators like Metal Tipped Dove, the Alchemist, Messiah Musik, and Kenny Segal man the boards, however woods gravitates towards their haziest and loopiest beats. Melodies smother greater than they smoothen. Drums patter and fizzle as usually as they strike. And there’s not often drama to the frequent beat switches; the preparations dissolve reasonably than combust like these on the equally atmospheric BRASS. Though lots of the songs are constructed round jagged samples, rhythm is usually generated by the interaction between woods’ winding flows and the assorted layers of devices and vocal loops. As in a horror flick, the temper is intentionally unsteady.
woods has lengthy included bits of fables and fantasies in his music, and GOLLIWOG pushes additional into the surreal. The album’s frequent mentions of goals and fantastical creatures make his imagistic writing much more evocative. “Waterproof Mascara,” set to creeping bass strums and a vocal pattern that feels like a weeping ghost, percolates with unease. “Watched my mom cry from the highest of the steps/Scared when it got here by means of the partitions/I coated my ears, half hoping you-know-who would die/Then he did (Shock!)/Cautious what you want for, you would possibly simply get that shit/Mothers confirmed us the place she stored the passports hid,” woods raps, repurposing the refrain of 2019’s “Houthi” for the final couplet. He delivers every line with a quiet however constructing disbelief, as if the narrator too is not sure what’s transpiring. The anomaly of the story, which might be a few haunting or home violence, ups the strain.