Billy Woods ‘Golliwog’ Review: An Impressionistic Portrait of Meaninglessness

The opening bars of “All These Worlds Are Yours,” a track on Billy Woods’s Golliwog, serve as a fitting distillation of the rapper’s worldview: “Today I watched a man die in a hole from the comfort of my home/The drone flew real low, no rush, real slow/He curled up into himself, a fetus in the womb, the womb was the Earth/Grenades landed at his feet, and he scrabbled in the dirt.” His is a surreal vision of modern life where violence is both literally distant and figuratively intimate, where cruelty is systematized, state-sponsored, and chillingly arbitrary. Woods assumes the role of the poet laureate of our end times, chronicling the quiet horror of an existence where survival itself constitutes an act of defiance.

Woods’s worldview is one not of paranoia but of weary resignation. He doesn’t dwell on the fear of what could come next, but rather on the stoic acceptance of a life where disaster, inequality, and brutality are constants. On “BLK XMAS”—where the eccentric Bruiser Wolf’s run-on-sentence hyphy raps serve as a tonal counterbalance to the track’s bleak outlook—evicted neighbors, casually kicked out of their home just a week before Christmas, cram their belongings into a cousin’s whip while their sobbing children make a public scene.

The dynamic is flipped on the sneering “Cold Sweat,” where Woods, the last tenant in his apartment building, imagines fucking over his landlord by continuing to pay his rent, preventing the landlord from selling the building. As Woods puts it, “Every slave dreams of the day they get a hold of the whip.” This inversion of power, however fleeting, offers the rapper a brief yet sweet taste of rebellion; it’s a minor victory but a palpable one.

Woods’s knack for toggling between bleak introspection and biting dark humor has always given his music unique emotional textures—suggesting that sometimes all you can do is laugh, because crying will never save you. But Golliwog places much more emphasis on the former than the latter, resulting in a sinister and intense collection of songs.

Standouts in this regard include “STAR87,” where producer Conductor Williams layers on waves of relentless tremolo strings and old-school phone rings before closing with dialogue and sound effects lifted from what sounds like a slasher flick. On “Waterproof Mascara,” a jarring piano cluster chord acts as a kind of musical jump scare, accompanied by stray marching-band drums and an ominous Theremin sample—perfect nightmare fuel for Woods’s bedtime story from hell. Even tracks that aren’t explicitly gunning for terror manage to unsettle: The El-P-helmed “Corinthians” kicks off in full menace mode, riding a wave of John Carpenter-esque synths before the mood lightens as Despot shows up to deliver a masterclass in shit-talking.

With Golliwog, Woods has crafted a body of work that’s both sonically immense—thanks to a production team of underground heavy-hitters, from the Alchemist to Atmosphere’s Ant—and lyrically precise and unsparing. His observations and insights span the overwhelming bigotry of the internet (“Leave the comments on, the racism pouring in”), the lingering societal and economic legacies of colonialism (explored on the hypnotic “BLK ZMBY”), and the ghosts from the past that never seem to escape us (as captured in the desolate “Golgotha”).

When using sex to drown all this pain, as he does on “Misery” and “Counterclockwise,” Woods paints a portrait of lust like few others: “She got a lover and a husband, she got a summons/For sex in public and laughs telling the story, she laughs from her stomach/I love it.” He later escalates to the grotesque—“Grasping, gasping, fish I slide them into fresh grease/Spattering, sputtering epithets”—blurring the line between desire and revulsion, as if to suggest that the act of indulgence is itself another form of decay. In Woods’s world, there’s no such thing as salvation, only brief respites from the tragedy known as the modern human condition.

Golliwog is intensely confrontational and makes no effort to hold your hand. But challenging times demand unapologetic art to reflect them and offer no easy answers or catharsis. In a landscape where much of modern art and music seeks to soothe or entertain, Golliwog stands as a brutally beautiful reminder that sometimes the only way out is through.