If professors aren’t teaching billy woods lyrics in literature classes after this album drops then we’ve failed as a species

nah this is exactly how long a video on billy woods should be.

Great video, as a Nigerian I loved the Soyinka reference. Also the "S" in Soyinka is pronounced as "sh" so it sounds like "shoyinka"

This isnt a video, is a masterclass

I love these types of reviews for well thought out albums. You're doing a great service for fans like us Prof.

I absolutely loved every second of this review Professor Skye. I'm an English major in the last leg of my studies, and if I'm honest, I haven't been entirely sure what direction I've wanted to take my life in after I graduate. I've thought about going to grad school, law school, going into marketing at some bullshit company I only work for for the money-none of which are bad paths of course, but they have not grasped at me and said, "Hey! This is your calling!". But this album and your review of it has me thinking, "What if this is something I could bring to the Academy?" Because sure, it's important to dissect The Illiad and the Romantics and take from them what they've taught us, but when I think about the bards and poets of our era, it isn't some white guy locked in his Ivory tower. It's Woods, It's

billy woods’ 2019 solo project Hiding Places is also a collaboration with a single producer, Kenny Segal, lending itself to be another cohesive sounding album full of dark eerie drones, fuzzed out guitars, and massive bass hits. A highlight in Woods prolific and consistently great discography, the album is one of Wood’s most personal narratives discussing themes of childhood, U.S. imperialism, and isolation. Definitely recommend checking it out Prof. Skye!

All I’ll say is that Billy Woods should be appreciated as a great musician because beyond his musical aesthetic, he coalesces a lot of the greatest aspects of the Black intellectual musical and philosophical tradition. His work combines an ethnographic approach- similar to Pearl Primus, Katherine Dunham, and Alvin Ailey-to storytelling, combining the geopolitics and philosophy of “Black” people’s across several countries in order to deconstruct Blackness as a concept and a matter of being. His work exhibits a degree of substantive meta-commentary that I don’t believe most contemporaneous rappers actuate: other-ness, exoticism, colonialism, African separatism, the universality of the Black experience but it’s lack of fidelity in describing these peoples via exaggeration, defamation of Black art, the concept of savagery, indigeneity as a slur, royalty in the Black context, Africa, Jamaica, the blues and jazz, and the concept of the Black intellectual. His oeuvre is cavernous in depth but idiosyncratic in presentation and initially impenetrable.

His work hit a really personal for me, I feel like he is a voice for the poor and forgotten. Also would love an essay on Lee Scratch Perry.

Yeeeeeees billy woods!!!!!!!!!

Always a treat to hear you discuss woods, it always deepens my understanding of his work. One small thing that I love is woods keeps themes/motifs throughout his albums. The MF DOOM reference "Notice parables of three and every other inference" on Protoevangelium is the hook of the Armand Hammer song Parables. woods has a beautiful album called Hiding Places and there are descriptions of hiding on this album as you describe. The challenger line reminded me of the first line of Armand Hammer's Pommelhorse. Little things like these make me love woods even more, makes all his work feel connected in a way.

im so glad you found billy woods man. just saw him live last week and he is electric and intense in person

I think the Ock in the weed line is a reference to corner stores moreso than anything else. Also I was wondering if you noticed like the sonic progression. The earlier songs on the album sound very tribal, for lack of a better word, and as we progress we get songs that incorporate blues, then jazz, then reggae, then soul. To me that’s very chronological.. with The Doldrums being the sonic representation of the middle passage. Just some random ideas about the record….

One thing that you don't mention specifically but that I think adds even more depth to the opening lies is that the gardener is the one who is sent to look for him when he is hiding in a high place, in the "sky". A gardener would be good at looking at what comes from the ground, him trying to find someone in the sky seems like the wrong man for the job.

Cannibal Tours is probably a reference to the 1988 documentary of the same name lambasting the way European and American tourists behave when visiting developing countries

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El-P’s a Brooklyn native, just as a note.

if you enjoy the bombardment of references and knowledge in this album i would really reccomend hiding places to you professor. Houthi is one of my favorites my interpretation of the song is really built on the lines "a labyrinth is not a maze" which is a fantastic analysis of first world government's intentional entrapment, resource stripping, and destabilization of countries and regions all over the world that leave their people in a labyrinth, not a maze.

Preservation and Ka did an Album together back in 2015, themed and named after the movie character Dr. Yen Lo. Dense bars as always, plus you have the comparison of Yen Lo brainwashing and manipulating people into being murderers, and the streets of BK, NY back in the 80s doing pretty much the same thing. I know you dont go back in time to check out older records of artists, but I didnt want to not leave this comment, because you appear to like both Preservation and Ka.

"Accruing generational wealth by inflicting generational trauma" is a hell of quite Professor. Kudos! I love the train of thought Billy Woods put you in