Consumer Guide Album

Billy Woods: Golliwog [Backwoodz Studioz, 2025]
The most literate as well as the most Marxist frontman/mastermind ever to go over the heads of alt-rap cognoscenti types, Woods has never fully mastered the distinction between rhyming and flow. Even when he's linking (and rhyming!) "armed robberies," "carbon copies," and "autopsies" he's kind of prosaic, more a self-made speechifier than a born poet. But he's so well-informed you stick with him—the relative plainness of his delivery makes you want to hear (I said hear) more about "bad hamburger meat," "pre Xmas eviction," "I spent all summer diggin' out a grave/Can't run with the wolves when you're a stray," "if you never came back from the dead you can't tell me shit," "the king's dead and your uncle's not my friend," "staggerin' postcolonial African zombi state," "I rock a clean pair of socks every day just in case," and last but not least "West 86th three beautiful kids and they wake up and make their own beds." A−