Our Interview with Billy Woods

The other night I was out with an old friend of mine from my days in the NYC underground hip hop scene. This was a person I have discussed hip hop music with for almost two decades. We have watched the ups and downs of the genre, been part of both a burgeoning and a dying scene; what I am saying is that we have been around bruh. Bushes bro.

After the usual small talk and catch ups, we got to talking about the plethora of new and exciting music that is out right now. If you aren’t aware, 2013 has been one of the best years for hip hop in at least 5 years.

We were both pretty geeked about this development. When you have been listening to something as long as we have been listening to hip hop, you expect the ebbs and flows, you soldier through the down times and revel in the good times.

What struck me most about this conversation was the reaction we both shared about Billy Woods' amazing new album Dour Candy. It was one of those moments where the conversation turns from casual to a steady incline of elevated excitement that goes something like this:

Me: But you heard that new Billy Woods?

Him: (Eyes open wide as Fuck, nodding his head) Oh yeah. So good.

Me: (Sporting a shit eating grin) So fucking good.

Him: (giggling) Amazing.

Me: (Almost spastic) Right?
(Two or three seconds of silence)

Both of us: (Laughing) Holy shit it is awesome.

Not much was said, but everything was conveyed. This fucker Billy Woods made an album we will be talking about 20 years from now. It is the kind of reaction that you can only have when you truly understand a medium and the impact that a piece of work will have on your impression of said medium.

Billy Woods is entering legend status with Dour Candy.

Sure you may not know him and you might need to study up on the past 20 years of hip hop to truly get what is epic about Dour Candy, but if you take the time to get there you will be able to share in the unbridled joy of the above conversation.

I recently sat down with Billy Woods to talk all sorts of shit. Our interview with Billy Woods starts now.

SYFFAL: Our readers are best known for their strict adherence to the spiritual tenets of the Force and the inability to move out of their parent's basement even though they are in their late 30s. For some reason this group of slovenly shut ins have decided that we are their go to source for all that is important and delicious in the world of music. So help us help them by answering the following:

Who the Fuck are you?

Billy Woods: I refuse to answer on the grounds that I may tend to incriminate myself

SYFFAL: Noted. What do you do?

Billy Woods: I fix broken slot machines out in Queens.

SYFFAL: Resort World must be a boon for your business bro. If you could get a tattoo of one or more Stars Wars characters which one(s) would it/they be and why?

Billy Woods: The band from the space tavern place. I am almost certain that they are playing a Blockhead instrumental that no one picked off his beat tapes.

SYFFAL: Speaking of Blockhead, you worked with him on Dour Candy can you tell us what is it like to work with a genius?

Billy Woods: I think I should let him answer this, but I'm sure he felt humbled and eternally grateful.

SYFFAL: Zing. Does he ever take off his baseball hat?

Billy Woods: Not to my knowledge, but I suspect he turns it backwards when engaging in sexual relations.

SYFFAL: I always thought he went rally cap style. Does said baseball hat smell more like 13 years of sweat or 13 years of masturbation?

Billy Woods: If it's an Orioles hat it probably smells like failure.

SYFFAL: It is and it does. What is your favorite non-Dour Candy Blockhead beat of all time?

Billy Woods: Tough one but I am going to go with "The Harbor is Yours"

SYFFAL: When I reviewed Dour Candy I said:

Billy Woods is a monster and Dour Candy is his murderous rage being taken out on the villagers who shunned him.

Is this what you were going for? If not what were you hoping to achieve?

Billy Woods: Hmm, honestly that seems to me to be a more accurate description of my previous album History Will Absolve Me but perhaps enraged-Frankenstein's-Monster is my default and I don't even know it!!

As far as what I was going for on Dour Candy, I would say there were two angles. One of them is that I tried to make a Billy Woods' version of a "lifestyle rap" album. When I say "lifestyle rap" I am thinking of someone like Curren$y (whose work I generally quite like) where his music is basically just about his lifestyle, ambitions, work, leisure, etc. But obviously there is no similarity between our lifestyles, real or imagined, besides the fact that we both smoke weed, so that's where, hopefully, my record distinguishes itself. I'm not jet-setting across the world, driving expensive cars, and being serviced by an endless stream of compliant concubines. I'm hustling for pennies, rapping in half-empty venues, riding the train and arguing with my ex. If you looked at the album purely in terms of surface subject matter, 85% of this album is about sex, drugs and rap, not unlike all of the "lifestyle rap" currently owning the top tier of the indie-rap scene. I find that relatively amusing.

The other angle kinda springs from the same place, which is, I made this crazy I-might-never-rap-again-so-Fuck-everything-scorched-earth album in History Will Absolve Me and then it made a very minor amount of noise where I was like aiite, I guess I am not quitting. But then you realize you still have to get back to your life; shit really has not changed in a substantive way. You're not living off rap, you don't have any groupies, you won't be moving into a new apartment, but at the same time, you are also not in jail, not dead, not sitting in your mother's basement day-drinking. So, you gotta get back to the grind of YOUR life in the city and yeah, it's a grind, it's mundane, it's a job. This album is the day after HWAM when you gotta get up, clean up your trashed apartment and make it to work with an excuse for why you didn't come in yesterday.

SYFFAL: Fuck that was deep, I feel stupid with the follow up, but Fuck it, it’s a follow up about monsters bro. If we can imagine your style as a reanimated Frankenstein monster made up of the body parts of your influences who would be the arms?

Billy Woods: Ghostface Killah. I have probably never been more enamored with a rapper's style of rapping than I was with Ghost's from Cuban Linx through Pretty Toney. Not that PT is anywhere near the record that CL is but I feel like Ghost's evolution over that stretch, in the ideas that he brought and the ways that he delivered them, was really unique.

SYFFAL: The Legs?

Billy Woods: Chuck D. Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions was the first album I ever bought and my first real introduction to rap. Say it like you mean it. Everything else will follow.

SYFFAL: It is pretty much the best rap album ever. The Torso?

Billy Woods: Western Civilization's canon. My parents were both born into European colonialism, despite being in completely different parts of the world. This system operated under the ostensible logic that Western Civilization, in all its trappings, was a boon to be delivered to its subjects and the best hope for the "inferior races" to advance. Both of my parents gamed this system to escape their circumstances and in the process came to master the pillars of Western thinking and society. Then, in different ways, they used this knowledge to attack the colonial system, sociologically and ideologically. It's kinda interesting but my point is, this was what I grew up around when I was a child. Shakespeare, Conrad, Bronte, Dickens, Kipling, Camus, Twain, Heller, Marx & Engels. It's in my DNA.

SYFFAL: The head?

Billy Woods: James Baldwin. I hate to pick one but if I had to, he is my favorite writer of all time.

SYFFAL: The syphilitic diseased brain?

Billy Woods: Daniel Dumile. I honestly believe that he is one of the greatest rappers of all time. His run from 99-'04 is unimpeachable. His ability during that time to build layers into the music, his confidence in his own vision, his ability to balance comedy and tragedy in one line, are all things I aspire to in my own way. And he is half-Zimbabwean, half-Caribbean, so I ride for that too. It's funny because people always think the fact that I shy away from showing my face is a DOOM-ism and it's not that at all, but I am way beyond being a fan of his. If a university wanted to offer me a salaried sabbatical, I would gladly become an MF DOOM scholar and churn out tomes poring over the sociological and ethno-cultural implications of "Rhymes Like Dimes" within the context of African diaspora oral traditions. Nahmean?

SYFFAL: Nailed it. The Eyes?

Billy Woods: Stanley Kubrick.

SYFFAL: I often hear people describe you as an acquired taste, why do you think that is? And does this offend you?

Billy Woods: I think they do that because it's kinda true. Some things are so different from what people may expect or be conditioned to hear that you kinda need to say that to get people to maybe give it a bit longer to soak in, especially in these ADD times. I do not get offended. I do sometimes read reviews where they spend the whole time making listening to my albums sound like something only the weirdest shut-in would want to do and that is weird. But it might very well be true. I dunno.

SYFFAL: What books you reading these days bro?

Billy Woods: I never read Dave Eggers before but L'Wren gave me What Is The What a while back and it's actually really good so far. I also have been on a Cormac McCarthy run for a while. Off-topic, if Cormac McCarthy was a rapper, he would be KA. Um, other than that, I am staying at someone’s house for the long weekend and found a copy of Bones, Butter & Blood that I am going to try and get through before I leave. Or steal.

Also, everyone shits on the mainstream media and not without cause, but I read the New York Times every day and think it's the shit. You want to talk bad about the Old Gray Lady, we got beef off the top. That's like my wife right there.

SYFFAL: If you like What is the What? I highly recommend Zeitoun, which is the same style of storytelling, but about a Muslim contractor who stayed in New Orleans during Katrina and what he faced from the storm and the authorities, it’s god damned good.

Back to the interview….Your music is chop full of references that the listener kind of needs to be in the know to get. Which one are you most proud and why?

Billy Woods: God, that's too tough but if I confined it to just Dour Candy...hmm...I really like the "She's lying there wide open like Congo at Independence" line but I would probably pick "Anwar Sadat/Death Parade", especially given the context of that song.

SYFFAL: Mine is the “Ignore the fact that her stories don’t add up like Scheherazade”, dope shit. Our site started out as a group of friends sharing the music that was moving us, in this spirit who are three acts (other than yourself) that we should be checking for?

Billy Woods: I am going to skip the obvious ones that I know you already probably know more about than I do and offer some only slightly less obvious ones:

Shabazz Palaces- As great as their album is you need to check em live. Their openers, Thee Satisfaction, were also dope live.

Elucid- His last album with A.M. Breakups as Cult Favorite is one of the best records of the year so far. He is one of the best rappers I have ever encountered.

Cavalier & Faro Z- Willie Green put me onto these cats. They are both great live, make good records and are chill cats. Cav is pretty well-known I think, Faro is just as good though. I think Green has some work in the pipeline with them that I am eager to hear.

SYFFAL: When all is said and done, and you are living in a retirement village somewhere in the Florida panhandle, what do you hope your Wiki page says about you and your influence?

Billy Woods: Unique. Insightful. Always improving or trying to do something different, challenge prevailing notions. End of the day, I want it to be possible for a credible case to be made that I was the best of my era. Not there yet but that is the goal. My mom really did always say "If you are going to do something, do it properly".

SYFFAL: Mom’s was wise bruh. Promote whatever you want bro.

Billy Woods: If we have our shit together, and the label has their shit together, Elucid and I are dropping an LP as a duo in the winter. Group is called Armand Hammer. Album will be called RACE MUSIC. It's easily some of the best work of my life. Doing Dour Candy was really helpful going into that because I really became a better writer doing this record with Blockhead. I became much more meticulous in my editing process, more organized, more concise, my entire creative process on Dour Candy was different from before. And hopefully I took other steps forward on this Armand Hammer record.