Interviewer comes off as a f***in donut, but happy to hear woods weigh in on misinformed discourse surrounding his music lol

Dreams Come True still cracks me up

WHT LBL is too good to be a limited vinyl only release

“I Told Bessie” confirmed 6/10 🥲🥲🥲

two books coming out by woods:
Let The Dead Bury The Dead - a memoir under his (real?) name Madziwanyika
A Is For Anarchist - "children's" alphabet book with M Musgrove
and that HWAM booklet coming soon... hell yeah

Billy Woods really be helping me through s*** mehn. I can’t wait to thank bro when I see him live in the future. This album is incredible.

Rly liking WHT LBL, had Halloween track on repeat there, big jam

Wasn't even sure how I felt about Fielded until now tbh but she killed her feats on this

When is that booklet coming?

is there anywhere i can hear WHT LBL?

copies should be shipping out anytime now, website says 'starts shipping april 29'

and this snippet is from the 'bonus' weird rap interview, I thought it was impactful in itself:
interviewer: "What is the value of reading?"
woods: "There’s a great Baldwin quote here but, I do not remember it. Let’s see, we can blame marijuana...feel free to look it up. I think it goes along the lines of:
'I once thought no one had suffered as I had or felt like I had, then I began to read.' There’s no thing that has been more impactful and valuable in my life than reading, it wouldn’t even be close. On all sorts of levels."

The actual Baldwin quote is: "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”

Interviewer:- I previously asked you for a definitive list of literary and political influences. And you said that was too big of a question to properly answer. But you mentioned:- "Bell hooks, Edward Said, Walter Rodney, Deleuze and Guattari, Alexis de Tocqueville, James Baldwin, Frantz fanon, Mike Davis, Musifiky Mwanasalii, Stephen King, Mark Twain, Roald Dahl, Flannery O'Connor, Dambudzo Marechera, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Marlon James, and Mariana Enriquez" can you talk about them?

billy woods:- I would say Roald Dahl in some ways because when I was a kid his books were so, I got like Judy Blume and stuff like that. But Roald Dahl's books were transgressive and mean sometimes. Like there's a book called 'The Twist' and it had these horrible drawings of people in it. And I remember that. But also very tight like James and the Giant Peach is very touching. I would say Stephen King from a very young age I like because to really power through his work, it's easy to read. It was compelling. He had a real knack for dialogue. And a sense of place. At his height. And you know, at that age, reading ferociously, to the amount of material that he was turning out was really great.

James Baldwin just because the way that he wrote his actual prose and style flair were Beyond other people. It's like when the kids saw Jordan playing basketball and other people score that same two points, but they didn't make it look like that. Beautiful command of language.

Interviewer:- What Baldwin book would you recommend? What's a good example of his creative flair program?

billy woods:- His nonfiction that's also very good. But as far as his fiction, I really like 'Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone'. But 'Go Tell It on the Mountain' is really good. People like 'Giovanni's Room'. And it is good. Just wouldn't be my first choice. Also, the ability to always be discussing political things and his characters although never become caricatures, you know, he wrote an essay 'Everybody's protest novel'. That was perhaps in some ways uncharitable this description of Richard wright, but it was influential on me in terms of my music. I don't try to make characters to make a political point.
That's work. I feel like reveals something about human beings and life. Also, the political point of the day may later not be relevant or important or your perception of it may now be questionable. But things that have to do with life and love and hate for things are always going to be relevant, like Shakespeare's relevance always. So I think yeah, it's just someone I read whose work really I just thought it was A useful and B really always managed to grapple with being a human being. As much as it did with questions of race and inequality and power. People aren't in the book just to exemplify a particular point.

And then I guess lastly Flannery O'Connor. The ability to do a lot in a limited amount of words because a lot of my favorite work of hers is her short stories that are her best work. Although you know 'Wise Blood' is a novel. And I didn't read that till later in my life, but it's incredible. Another person, great at setting place. And yeah, like I said, doing a lot in a short amount of words, having an impact dealing with ambiguity, subverting the expectations of the reader. In a story like 'Good Country People'.

Cormac McCarthy a writer, I read later in life. The bleakness of his prose, and the willingness to leave conventions behind like quotation marks' ability to set place is really strong there, and although he is on a different level where very few of his characters really seem like real people. But able to nonetheless have them fully inhabit, their roles and not. Weird to say this because they're not, but rarely do I read a book of his and feel like this seems like a totally real person, there are exceptions, that's not true there are exceptions but the ability to avoid caricatures nonetheless.

Doris Lessing, my mother gave me her short story 'A Sunrise on the Veld' which she was teaching in her class in Zimbabwe, and told me to read it. And then talk to me about it when she came home from the work session. That was a, was a powerful one for me, in seeing how much you can do in the short space and having somebody write about, you know, reading a book about the place where I actually live for. So many of the things I read were not set in Africa or Zimbabwe, And to read something that was set there and to see somebody describe your surroundings. Although there were still different from my particular sound and surroundings. I was familiar.

Did anyone get the HWAM book ?

My fight different,
Type twisted,
Banging a nemesis
In flight Griffon
Might flip and pegging a pegasus

Do you have a link?

Do you have a link?

ELUCID interview starts at 50:30
mixcloud.com/Sterrenplaten/sterrenplaten-13-mei-2022-armand-hammer

Vid otw

coldest album of the year

I gave this a second listen, this time in the car which I'm glad I did. The production is crazy.

It's tough for me to get into that style that Billy and some of them other underground dudes be kickin for a whole project. That nigga Despot verse was super cold

Preservation is a master, man