Review Summary: Over time, symbols eclipse the things they symbolize
GOLLIWOG is violence personified through a caricature of a subhuman, perpetrated by the systematic atrocity of the English language, and witnessed through the dour, exhausted eyes of the increasingly prolific billy woods, whose creative renaissance shows no signs of slowing throughout the 52-minute runtime of his best solo project yet. While
Maps occasionally showed signs of a guarded desperation that emerged only in the secluded outposts of a nomadic lifestyle,
GOLLIWOG offers up its nightmare fuel front and center to weave a venomous web of abstract horrorcore brutality. woods’s lyricism has long been punctuated by prophetic visions like ships full of skeleton slavers or awakening in the grisly wreckage of a plane crash, but they’ve never been as vivid or bone-chilling as they are on his latest release, a disquieting pulse-raiser whose astonishing beats and dizzying flows are bound to encourage rabid dissection for months to come.
The golliwog itself, a racist rag doll offshoot of minstrelsy, haunts more than just the eerie calm of the record’s artwork. Every symbol and metaphor woods chooses can be unpacked to reveal numerous layers, and our grotesque friend’s origin story being a late 19th-century children’s book is no exception. On the stomach-turning opening number “Jumpscare”, woods bluntly states “It’s a dark road, but it ain’t no accidents / no coincidences, it’s all praxis” over a woozy loop courtesy of Steel Tipped Dove, who walks away with one of the most impressive showings of all the highly regarded producers on the project. woods remains unafraid to tackle the macro throughout
GOLLIWOG, likening the neocolonial pillaging of Africa to the fiefdoms of the
Dune universe and lamenting “12 billion in USD hovering over the Gaza Strip”, but the true thematic horror of the record unveils itself within the caricature’s tender and violent connection to childhood, an experience that woods is more candid about on this album than any other.
Tracks like “Lead Paint Test” or the harrowing “Waterproof Mascara” are tense, teeth-grinding sketches of recalled domestic abuse and ghosts terrorizing the walls of dilapidated homes. Producer Preservation makes the bold decision of punctuating “Waterproof Mascara” with an unforgettable sample of a woman sobbing uncontrollably, adding nauseous emphasis to the emotional low point of the album, in which woods opines “sometimes it’s all you can do not to do it like Sylvia Plath.” The insistent stalking of the golliwog throughout the album’s narrative begins to intertwine with woods’s emotional state and becomes akin to a kind of hideous fate he is resigned to. Sometimes it literally intrudes on his physical space, such as on the aptly named “A Doll Fulla Pins”, but most of the time it prefers to send its legions of monstrous subordinates after woods’s throat.
GOLLIWOG’s lyrical landscape is one of blood-sucking succubus vampires, cannibalism, dead-eyed and downtrodden blk zmbies, and cyclical nightmares that make your sweat grow ever colder. If the monsters aren’t chasing woods, he is forced to watch as they claim pile upon pile of victims, culminating in a hazy survivor’s guilt that dominates the narratives of “STAR87” and “All These Worlds Are Yours.”
The grimy solitude of the album’s production serves as a perfect vehicle to drive the intent of the lyricism home. Downright nasty loops that often eschew percussion and push queasy samples to the forefront transport the listener to the uncanny valley clearing on the album cover with ease. This review has already given Steel Tipped Dove and Preservation their flowers in passing, but it’s really worth gushing over how star-studded this roster of producers is. The Alchemist and El-P hit back-to-back home runs on the infectious “Counterclockwise” and sinister “Corinthians” respectively, while frequent collaborator Kenny Segal is able to convey three unique moods on “Misery”, “Pitchforks & Halos”, and “Born Alone” while injecting a common thread of hollowness and yearning into each track. Willie Green’s “Lead Paint Test” will likely emerge as many listeners’ favorite beat due to its grainy gut punch of a keyboard line and horn section, but it’s the consistency of the spooky and amorphous cuts that transform
GOLLIWOG from a merely commendable hip-hop release into an immersive graveyard of dead memories. The amount of times woods (and guests) are able to spit over beats with genuinely mystifying timing cannot be overstated, and neither can the expertise present in the collaborations between him and the murderer’s row of partners behind the boards.
woods’s golliwog is the rare symbol that truly awakens from the dead on what seems like his twentieth stellar full-length, given breath by the cursed voodoo that permeates the entirety of the album. This doll full of pins is all at once a societal punching bag and a murder weapon, storing agony and exacting violence, and ultimately serving as the one thing woods spends the majority of his music confronting; a reminder. Whether it be stinging memories of crying mothers at the tops of staircases, unavoidable amputation videos in the feed, or inescapable nightmares, it feels like it’s always watching, ready to tighten the rope and squeeze the life out of him. In a world of steadily churning violent machinery, woods uses his pen to fight back, while simultaneously coming to the Afropessimistic conclusion that retaliation will only cause blood to continue to be spilled. Don’t trust anyone, and sharpen the shiv that is your tongue. It’s the only way to survive.
The English language is violence, I hotwired it / I got a hold of the master’s tools and got dialed in
