I've been listening to a record by billy woods and Kenny Segal for three days solid. If you are wondering who those guys are, billy woods (not his real name) is a guy who has been an underground rapper in New York for the better part of three decades and Kenny Segal is a producer from Los Angeles. billy is sort of what most would call a "conscious" emcee, but that phrase might be dated as hell and I wouldn't know because I'm fifty-two and who are these kids and why is there a flag with a red star and a black background on my lawn? That's actually an awful term but I'm trying to build a communicative bridge here, so I'll just remark upon my listening to the record, which is one that I find myself immersed in. It's a world that is shakier than your typical foundation, so one kind of has to roll with it and give an unorthodox guy some time and space to kind of wrap your head around it if you like the aural aesthetics.
I probably couldn't disagree more with some of the things that he thinks or the way he processes events in his life, e.g., I don't believe catharsis is a good thing (nor real, even, and I think social psych work confirms this), and I am certainly not one to espouse the politics of the left nor do I have much sympathy for that worldview, but if one puts aside the philosophical dispositions and substantive disagreements where they can be put aside, and go from there. If philosophies about life, how we should frame experience, and how to process information are almost inextricable from an analysis like this or more importantly, the music and lyrics in woods's art, what can we learn from the other? What does a grown man, who is American-born by way of Zimbabwe's political trouble and revolution have to say about the world? What can he tell us about how the acute danger of political violence that may appear in your African dwelling as a youngster shapes one's psychology and worldview, or what can the personal trauma of his upbringing with his politically-involved father and reluctant mother tell us about the importance of our families and how can or should we relate to it?
I don't know those answers. Perhaps we can treat the art as strictly emotive and relate to it in that way. Or we can take the whole thing holistically and try to ascertain a pattern through which we can empathize and understand him. I know he thinks with an unusual and remarkably trenchant depth. It's not political sloganeering nor easy social libertinism at all—the politics and immediacy of city life are the backdrops of his life, a background I think would passionately inform anyone’s understanding of the world. Maybe making an attempt to understand our common humanity is all we can do to find a potential place to meet. I'm not going to understand his Marxist/anarcho-Afro-pessimism, and he would reject almost all of the reasons why I would say, "woods's sociopolitical solutions will only end in tragedy—don't do this for reasons A, B, C, D, E , etc.” But a look at his lyricism and art illustrates that unlike many others, woods warrants a response.
If I might shift the reader into an example of his narrative strength and writing, his recent song, “Born Alone,” is a standout track, one that is explicitly about history, cycles of violence, and patterns that repeat. "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce," is the Marxist dictum, and the song is an anecdotal examination of this claim; something woods does through the repetitive use of the loss of one's shoes as one's death knell. Weaving through location and history in the song, he illustrates the physical spaces and the time-stamped events that move him to tears—in one verse, a cousin is murdered for his shoes; upon seeing the cousin's bare feet on the news, woods's aunt looks at his own feet and remarks that they look just like "the baby feet on the news," and woods informs us that he breaks down in tears later that night.
The second verse finds him in both fight mode and brimming with pathos as he transports us—bear with me—to himself in a near-present time, observing himself in the recent past wishing that he could visit his even-younger self deeper in history to give that younger self the counsel to "fight like hell." But the last line of the verse shows billy at present realizing that his previous dreams of contacting that youngest self is just woods at total remove from free will and ability, and he communicates the self-aware realization that all those times he dreamed of traveling time to tell his younger self to "fight like hell,” he was actually trying to tell himself that in that particular present, but now, given history's machinations and inevitability, it's "just as well" he didn't realize that's what he was trying to do. The dissociation of body and spirit from his own desires is a stunning observation that reveals he believes his situation is and was inevitable and demarcated, and that the resulting fatalism and hopelessness that afflicts him is something gradually accepted but never comfortably worn; the desire for justice and love misfire and only manifest in impossible dreams never realized.
“I'ma go back in time, tell that young boy, 'Give 'em hell
If it's a fight, fight to the bell'
Peep the six-CD carousel, Skytel pager, my eyes well
I wager he never realized he was talkin' to himself (Just as well),”
woods then shifts us to the absolute present to let us get our bearings and says
“Back in the present
Bustin' open a pack, fingers sticky with resin
I've heard it all before like Russian peasants
That's that loop for you
That's what the loop do
Sebb Bash pulled it out the dollar bin where he had his stash, handed it to Al and said, "Track two"
(It's true)
History never repeats, it do rhyme though, tryna catch the loop
loophole like a gun show
Dropped out of JUCO like it's donezo, puto
Let's get it out the mud
Son was barefoot by the end of the month (You know how it always goes, you know how it goes, you know how it goes)”
woods succinctly lodges his dissent from the dictum of exact histories repeating, and never mentions farce, but he posits that similar histories and the forces that move us either directly against our will or that we unconsciously accept make us prisoners of our own circumstances. And we can say this because we have seen him looking at the futility of himself longing to go back in time to advise his teenage self shadowboxing in the mirror (my interpretive license). His contention is that his impulse was not misdirected from the present to the past, but was actually the only avenue through which an impossible, conscious hope might exist because direct free will in our lives can't exist within the currents of our history—history subsumes any individual action or attempt to change one’s circumstances. He then chooses a meta-narrative for this postulation by shifting the lyrics to picking a "loop,” or a beat for the song's foundation after alluding to Russian peasants, so we are guided to the thought that woods, the writer, has Marx's dictum in mind. "I've heard it all before like Russian peasants, That's that loop for you/That's what the loop do,” and at that moment he is he is making an abstract point through a (possibly real) record shopping excursion where he and his friends pick and create the loop for the song.
So when he is “tryna catch the loop" he offers that we are trying to catch up with our cycles and histories, reinforcing the dictum but changing it slightly and astonishingly, until we are left with woods's claim that "history never repeats, it do rhyme, though . . . tryna catch the loop," where he's trying to act with free will in history’s current, but the beat goes on, circular and repetitive, and one can almost say that woods's implicit claim is “history repeats as facsimile by force." The song continues, the cycles of violence continue, and we see an imagined "puto" who no longer has any shoes.
And so we have the foundational beat of the song (a cyclical piano loop that repeats throughout), the deaths of two shoeless people, an invocation of Marx's interpretation of Hegel's history, and how that might have affected the Russian peasants he mentions, who, if I might take license so that I can tap woods on the shoulder and remind him (even though he is well aware), were likely either slaughtered by a faction of Russian communists or starving to death in a famine; or who might have sided with and fought with a faction of Russian communists only to be slaughtered by a different faction of Russian communists; or who might have sided with and fought with the winning faction of Russian communists only to be slaughtered by a splinter faction of the winning communists they had once sided with.
Anyway, this has been dense and verbose. "Born Alone" wasn't even the song I came in here to post about, but there it was and there you go. I've been listening to woods's and Kenny Segal's "Hiding Places" for days, and I just wanted to drop a song that I thought had an unorthodox but great hook. It really isn't (well, overtly) political in the least, but is about the aforementioned catharsis in reaction to an event I'll let the reader examine if he or she chooses to do so for themself. On the surface, it seems to take an arc of descending from a bad situation to self-critique to anger to horrorcore madness.
Heh. Really just came in to post a song I like that I thought had a great hook and got completely carried away with explaining why. Explicit lyrics, of course.
"Red Dust" - billy woods, Kenny Segal (producer)
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