Maps

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The person who had found “Clear Blue Skies” in school was the same person who played me MF DOOM. I knew Zev Love X and KMD’s music and was probably 13 when “Peach Fuzz” came out. Years later, I’m in school and the dude has a couple of singles on Fondle ‘Em [Records]. The first one that hit me was “Hey!” and the B-side of that maybe was “Doomsday”. The lyrics and the vibe and approach were just totally different. In that era, there were many people just doing shit, but it was different from the rest of the underground scene. I was really close friends with Vordul Mega and knew Cannibal Ox. At the same time, EL-P was a pioneering voice that had this legendary record that was never followed up truly, in my mind. With this EP, things went from Vordul being this kid I know that raps and is dope to him signed to Def Jux and introducing me to this other cat and saying we’re going to be Cannibal Ox. Maps es uno de los álbumes mas sólidos y notables dentro de un año raro y poco extenso para el hip hop, la dupla de Kenny Segal y billy woods se siguen complementando mejor y están a unos lanzamientos de ser la mejor de esta época, como no, sonido existencial, inmersivo bastante alejado del boom bap, arreglos elegantes y mucha mística en cuánto a la producción. Líricamente no analizare mucho el álbum ya que no me gusta tener que entender una lírica tan compleja y mixta como la de Billy Woods (en Aethiopes era mucho más directa), he valorado sobretodo como fluye Billy en los beats de Kenny y los beats. This was the era when everyone didn’t have home recording systems, so I hadn’t done a lot of actual recording. I would go over to theirs almost every day on some boot camp shift and just write, listen to beats, write, smoke weed, write and record little demo things to cassette tapes. It was the first time I was really hearing my own voice. He recalls meeting photographer and collaborator Alexander Richter thanks to mutual love of a record. “He was listening to Jeru The Damaja’s “Come Clean” single on vinyl with his window open on campus,” woods says. Exchanges like this with friends shaped many of his early vinyl experiences. “I don’t think there’s a single record on this list that I had first”.

It bridged the era of underground hip hop I was first introduced to in 1996 when I heard “Clear Blue Skies”. Meeting Vordul and knowing someone who rapped and was an incredible prodigy – suddenly five years later it had all come together. It made it all real that I could try to do this. Maps is a giant transitional space for Billy and Kenny. Envisioned more or less like a travel log of thoughts and experiences from tours and trips and you know, this album seems like a big collection of vignettes at first. Kenny is giving Billy some surprisingly normal yet intensely detailed and textured jazzy production to hop on, and then he does just that, in his usual fashion. Yet, something is different here, no? Billy is in conversational mode on here, way more than he usually is, and it is, indeed, about the uncomfortable sensations around transitional spaces. As he weaves together his usual snappy bars, he is putting himself way more out in the open, quite in the vein of Church, but as that album looked inwards, Maps looks more outside of that. It's an album about questioning yourself, asking yourself what your humanity even means to other people, how much expectations can poison your mind, how you reflect upon change in yourself while asking if this is where you wanted to go. How much your home feels like your home after you've been gone for so long, especially if the next trip is right ahead of you, the airport gates you spent hours sitting in watching other people going through the same transitional spaces as you. You all want to get there, but you are not there yet. billy woods has been on a tear. Ever since becoming one of the internet’s favourite rappers over the course of the 2020s, the New York City-based musician has seemed intent on rewriting the rules of hip hop on each of his successive releases. It’s no different on Maps, the second full album-length collaboration between woods and Los Angeles’ Kenny Segal, which finds both artists exploring new avenues and coming to radically different ends than they did on 2019’s Hiding Places. Stylistically, woods is probably best known as a guy who shoots significantly left of hip hop’s centre, and all his highest-profile work tends to be somewhat difficult for the average listener to get into. But Maps is a little bit of a different thing, and right off the bat, its most salient feature is just how much easier on the uninitiated it tends to be than most of woods’ music. There’s less direct confrontation with the listener here, traded in for warmer and less abrasive instrumentals more tied to a classic East Coast sound, as well as to the rapper’s earliest releases.

Around that time, someone had the single “Must Be Bobby” on vinyl. It also had the instrumental version, and it was really dope. I just would put that on and write to it–putting in my 10,000 hours or whatever. Eventually, that led to me copping the album. Later in college, he was reintroduced to vinyl. “There were kids who’d get a turntable and steal their parents’ records. There were these older kids, and I used to go smoke weed in their room and they had reggae, roots and dub records”. I still have a strong place in my heart for the original one. Although the Sub Verse one is what I think of when I think about the album, my heart is with the original Operation: Doomsday record. It was groundbreaking. It just upended how I thought about rap, and that was when I was pretty set that I was going to do music. Blue Smoke es uno de los temas con el beat mas wtf que he escuchado este año, beat de free-jazz con cuerdas super efímeras donde sinceramente Billy Woods rompe la pista, chefkiss para Kenny Segal, beat brutal de free-jazz donde Woods flota, tema de minuto y medio apenas apetecible y excelente, sorprendente. Bad Dreams Are Only Dreams es otro tema con una influencia muy jazzera, tema de un minuto bastante corto y que juega con la abstracción del tiempo, parece más largo de lo que suena, estrofa corta pero compleja y buena de Woods. I first encountered this record in college when I met this kid from New York, who was into underground hip hop and was one of the first people I knew who really had rap vinyl. I’d never heard of them and when it was played for me, I was just blown away. I had some exposure to the underground hip-hop scene after coming to New York, but I wasn’t plugged in at all and they didn’t have a scene like that where I was coming from.

Single ‘FaceTime’ with Sam T. Herring underlines Woods as one of rap’s great storytellers. On it, he grumbles through a hotel lobby, thinking of home. Spoilt rich-kid festival-goers spill out of the hallways while he waits for his phone to ping. Then there’s ‘Hangman’, a painting of dread that digs into what stops him from getting comfortable with success: “any day could be the day they frog-march you in manacles.” The other disc was Company Flow. That side of the record was cool too and had a song called “Simple” that starts with “the day my watch got stolen” and I’ll always remember it. It was the moment when someone I knew was really doing this. EL-P had started his own label. My good friend is involved and this music they’re making sounds crazy. Although Company Flow’s Funcrusher Plus was a hugely formative album for me too, I’m going to say this release because we’re talking about vinyl.

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In billy woods’ music, personal history is global history. There’s a recurring figure in his songs: the Average Joe thrust onto the world stage and forced to select from a menu of bad choices. “It ain’t no compromise, I’m Ho Chi Minh, ruthless, MC Ren/Small caliber, close range, General Nguyen,” he rapped on 2012’s “ The Foreigner,” likening a petty street beef to the Vietnam War. Alone and as one half of Armand Hammer, he’s turned such juxtapositions into a mad and beautiful science. His unorthodox rhymes hit like jet lag, scrambling the body’s sense of time and space. Siguen y no paran. Cada álbum que lanza billy woods me hace pensar que es el mejor rapero de la década de los 20's. Aethiopes, Haram, Church, WBDTS y Maps son álbumes notables, ninguno baja del 7, este tipo puede ser para gente 'edgy' o al tipo de persona que le gusta el hip hop abstracto con diferentes significados pero sinceramente, se quedan cortos los adjetivos para calificar los trabajos de este hombre, rapero de culto, producción excelente, rimas contundentes y mucho significado literario y lírico, que mas le vas a pedir?

woods’ latest project, Maps, marks his second collaborative album with producer Kenny Segal and is a standout release of the year so far. VF’s Kelly Doherty caught up with woods to delve into the records that have played a significant role in shaping and inspiring his music. On his own, Woods is relentless. ‘The Layover’ riffs on Anthony Bourdain and grave-robbing while sneaking in his album titles (“Before History I made fire in a cave”). You can feel your synapses firing with each uncovered connection. Maps is the new album from NYC rapper billy woods and LA producer Kenny Segal, their first full collaboration since 2019’s Hiding Places. Four years after that landmark record, the duo have reunited with a vengeance. Maps is a story of the road, or roads, taken and untaken; of living the dream and dreaming of another life. It is an album about trying to find your way home, after making your home wherever you lay your head.There’s a song called “Lived In The Projects” where he’s basically listing things in between repeating the words “you never lived in the projects”. It made me realise you can just you can do what you want to do. You can break rules, you can cut loose, you can talk your shit. The production was just some raucous shit. It was funny, acerbic and ridiculous, but so in your face that it also had to be taken seriously. With The Records That Made Me, VF uncovers the vinyl releases that have influenced and shaped our favourite musicians, DJs and artists. Is that stylistic shift for the best? That’s tough to say - I like Maps, but it’s probably the least compelling woods has sounded to me, at least within the last five years. Is that because this album is one of the rapper’s most palatable and least challenging listens, or is it because of something else entirely? On paper, I like the idea of getting to hear him relent a little bit from the near-constant angst and anxiety that typifies most of his work, and Segal, one of the most talented (as well as underrated) producers working today, seems like the right guy to help facilitate that shift. But in practice, I feel that Maps sounds somewhat like billy woods fighting a lot of his natural creative instincts simply because he knows he can’t remake Aethiopes or Hiding Places and continue to be on the cutting edge of where hip hop is moving. The Layover me parece uno de los temas infravalorados del disco, un beat bastante elegante con un piano suave y simple pero que junto a unas baterías dusty crean una atmósfera bastante descafeinada y temple del estilo 'Griselda', buen rapeo de Woods y en general un tema con muchas vibes. FaceTime es el último tema que analizaré, tema con un beat bastante puro y existencial, me gusta mucho el flow de Billy en este tema y el coro Samuel T. Herring es muy bueno. Babylon By Bus es probablemente mi tema favorito del álbum, un tema de boom bap rudo que tiene una evolución en el beat cabrona, que pedazo de instrumental de Kenny Segal, primero vemos esta atmósfera tétrica con una batería sucia donde Woods te hipnotiza con su delivery monótono y luego llegamos al mejor feat del proyecto, ShrapKnel, escupe las barras de una manera directa y conduntente, por último evoluciona a un beat mas grandioso y celestial, brutal tema.

Year Zero tiene un feat bastante esperado de Danny Brown, sinceramente no me gusto, un beat que no me convence, no es de mi gusto, respeto al tema pero no es de mi tipo.woods’ record selections predominantly reflect a transformative era in underground hip-hop which influenced his artistic growth, ranging from the initial inspiration of The Juggaknots to the euphoria of hearing his friend in Cannibal Ox on vinyl. Even to this day, he continues to derive joy from the vinyl releases of his own music. “Before you even hear your record, it’s amazing just holding it in your hands and being like ‘wow’,” he enthuses. billy woods’ journey with vinyl began tentatively during a youth dominated by cassettes and CDs. “When I was a teen getting into music on my own, vinyl was kind of out,” he explains. During time spent in Zimbabwe as a child, woods had access to records and a turntable, but upon returning to the US, he no longer had a working turntable at home.