Maps

Product Information

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. 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.” 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.

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”. 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”. 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. With The Records That Made Me, VF uncovers the vinyl releases that have influenced and shaped our favourite musicians, DJs and artists. It’s familiar territory for an artist who’s ridiculed tasteless wealth and rap gentrification his whole career ( “I don’t wanna go see Nas with an orchestra at Carnegie Hall,” went one chorus from Hiding Places ) . His default mode is world-wise, worn out, and untrusting. But there’s greater clarity to the despair on Maps that makes it an ideal entry point for a complete newcomer.

Soft Landing es una intro bastante bien, con una batería bastante nublada, no se da nada de énfasis a los drums en este tema, me encanta la vibra de este tema, muy cálida y acuática, siento como si estuviera enfrente de un mar lleno de olas grandes chocando contra rocas, Woods navega el beat como un pirata, añadir que me gusta ese guiño e interpolación a Nina Simone en el coro, producción existencial e atmosférica, gran inicio. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

Contributors

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? 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

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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. 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.

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. 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.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.