Billy Woods & Kenny Segal - Hiding Places

[Dylmatic]

TRACKLIST:

1. Spongebob
2. Steak Knives
3. Checkpoints
4. Spider Hole
5. Houthi
6. A Day In A Week In A Year feat.MOTHERMARY
7. Bedtime
8. Crawlspace* feat. ELUCID
9. Speak Gently feat. Self Jupiter
10. Toothy
11. Bigfakelaugh
12. Red Dust





No thread on this album ? Its been out for a week and its really dope.

 

[Llcoolbay]

Damn I slept on this

 

[IronFist]

love this project

 

[KingsOfKings]

Don't know how I missed this.

 

[IronFist]

i hate i have too split my posts cause of the 500 internal error but

A day, in a week, in a year

Where e'rything exactly as you feared

Lightning could strike me right here

Right here, holdin' a phone to my ear

The rest of my life I'ma be like, "Yo, I was standin' right there."

Billy opens the song by explaining what the basic concept of the song is going to be: walking through some day to day moments and struggles of a life that is going exactly how you expected it to go -- wrong. The next little bit I think is kinda acting out the same tone. He could get struck by lightning, but he kinda expects it, and while it is tragic, he is almost laughing about it. That is the sort of tone he takes for the whole song. So he is instantly illustrating what he says he is setting out to do literally in the first two lines.

Boxes under the stairs

Found some old Nike Airs, still tight

Dust 'em off like, I remember workin' nights for this pair

So Billy Woods has a different style than a lot of rappers. Often his verses are more like collages of lines around a theme or to illustrate an idea, rather than literal stories. This abrupt transition to a new vignette is example 1 of this. This is a different story, but has a similar tone to the lightening example above. It is something kind of sad and tragic that the narrator is looking back on with a sort of bittersweet nostalgia. It sucks to have to grind every night to buy a pair of shoes, a pair of shoes you don't even wear, but you remember it fondly in the same way he is laughing about getting struck by lightning.

Nightmares of what it'll be like

Lights from your flight's landing gear draw near

If I knew you was comin', woulda picked somethin' more debonair

Best laid plans of mice and tin men

I was dead, didn't need to pretend when the bayonet went in

These lines are a bit more abstract and less connected linearly than the previous ones. The imagery of the plane evokes the anxiety people often feel, like they are about to crash when they are landing. This sort of choking the landing thing ties with the "everything going exactly as you fear" theme of the song, which gets repeated right above it with the nightmares line. And the next line about disappointing an unexpected guest, again something going wrong, being a letdown. The use of not wearing something appropriately debonair also ties in with Woods' consistent contrasting of luxury and poverty, high and low art on this album ("Mosh through the orchestra pit," "I don't wanna go see Nas with an Orchestra at Carnegie Hall"). Especially on this song that is a lot about poverty, perhaps he says he'd pick out something that is more debonair, but in reality he doesn't have anything.

 

[IronFist]

A army of fiends, she put chrysanthemums and daffodils in the burnt end of they crack stems

Tears stream down they cheeks, just really really weep

But in the end

They hit-They hit the pipe again

Another vignette of failure. This one is pretty straightforward. So many addicts every day promise never again, they try to make something better. Literally turn over a new leaf, see the plant imagery. Also he sort of obliquely is referencing the rose that grew from cracks in the concrete by evoking images of these flowers from "crack stems." The use of stems obviously mixes the imagery with the flowers. But despite trying to move on, these fiends go back to the drugs. Everything going as you fear.

If I lose, it was rigged

I'm the man if I win

Before settlin' on a narrative, I took 'em all for a spin

On black ice

Steering locked

Driftin'

Calm from the shock, oncomin' brights hot

On the windshield it's one particular raindrop

Caught strugglin' in the incandescence

Took my hands off the wheel and cut the engine

I love this section. Woods starts off by highlighting the hypocrisy that is rampant in people's internal narratives. If something goes right, it is because you are great, but if you fail it was someone else's fault. He then proceeds to take the idiom literally. I love when rappers use this technique, and Woods does this often. He transitions from a common phrase into literally describing driving. And this goes with the theme of the verse. He is trying to take the narratives for a "spin" but it is on black ice, so he is literally spinning. He has no control over his situation, which ties with the themes of poverty he highlights in the next verse. Finally he comes to rest with the great imagery of a raindrop just streaking across his windshield. I think this is definitely supposed to evoke Woods' own plight, he is really just as trapped and helpless to greater powers as the raindrop is. That is highlighted by the personification by describing the raindrop as "struggling." And the lack of control is further emphasized by the fact that Woods takes his hands off the wheel, a common expression for giving up control. This all could be read as an extended metaphor of taking the narratives for a spin. He tries to figure out what is going on with his life, but he can't. There is no driving narrative to his life, it is just a meaningless spinout that he has no control over.

[Chorus: MOTHERMARY]

Do we fight it?

Do we like it?

How do we recognize it?

How do we recognize it? (How do we know?)

So we like (Do we fight it?)

So we like (Do we like it?)

I don't know

I don't know

The chorus basically is just asking these big existential questions, what do we think of all this that Woods is discussing? He doesn't know.

 

[IronFist]

[Verse 2: billy woods]

Grenades attached to rockets

And eager to tell you the names of they prophets

Rappers runnin' outta gas

Halfway through they second project

My buldin' smell like burnt chocolate

Knockin' that new Young Lil Willie Bosket

So here Woods is very obviously contrasting the classic imagery of a terrorist with rappers and criminals. I think the running out of gas is also a very winking call back to the last verse ending with the driving metaphor. He then goes on to describe the impoverished conditions he lives in. It smells bad, whatever new Lil Young rapper is banging. Willie Bosket is a convicted murderer whose actions lead to some arguably draconian changes in how juveniles are tried. So by describing trap rappers as "Willie Boskets" and implicitly comparing them to terrorists, Woods' message is clear: This focus on drugs and violence is destroying his community. This is a an example of a pretty common theme in music, and it can come off lame and preachy. But in this verse, Woods is wrapping it up in a much more creative and interesting way.

Paradise in a gold watch

I was right, the price was a lot (That shyt's expensive)

Mildly disappointed that all those guns was props

You tinkered with the flow, but yo, the whole style rocks (Somebody gotta say it)

Who knows, though? Nowadays maybe you gotta shoot your shot

I dipped in the fog, rollin' right off the lock

Put drums under Bach

He continues with this critique. That these rappers are trying to sell materialism as an escape. Again, he does this both explicitly with his sort of winking sarcasm in these lines, but also by putting the line about "paradise in a gold watch" directly after describing this dilapidated building. If the building is a mess, is a gold watch really gonna save you? But at the same time, Woods notes that these rappers aren't even real about what they are talking about. They sell materialism and pose as if they are violent, but it is all just a prop. Woods doesn't seem to like the violence, but he is perhaps more frustrated that it is fake. I think "rocks" in the next line is a classic coke rocks double entendre, and also calling people out for only tinkering with the flow. The whole style is just drugs, they aren't that original. But at the end of the day, Woods can't hate that much, you gotta do what you gotta do to get by. For him, he puts drums under Bach for his hustle. And again we have more imagery that contrasts high art (ie classical music) and low art (ie hip hop).

It's a game of inches, like when Police beat you to the fukkin' spot

Kept walking, head down, waitin' to hear stop

Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Brooklyn underneath the three clocks

Unsurprised when the choppers chop

I read the play, hatchet job, but you work with what you got

Again, he is describing the difficulty of hustling. You have the police to deal with, and they got to your corner before you did and now you have to just sneak away before they notice you and call out. In the hood it isn't surprising to hear guns go off, and with the police discussion right above I think this is a double meaning with police choppers ie helicopters flying above. Not as common in Brooklyn as it is in LA, but this ton of surveillance and paranoia that comes with being watched from the panopotical vision of the state is a pretty common theme in Woods' lyricism. I'm think the last line is kinda talking about seeing the way your life is going to go. Like the song set out, it is narrating everything going wrong, so your life's play is a hatchet job. It makes you look like shyt, but hey that's all you have, you work with what you've got.

Life is just two quarters in the machine

But, either you got it or don't that's the thing

I was still hittin' the buttons, "Game Over" on the screen

Dollar movie theater, dingy foyer, little kid, not a penny to my name

fukkin' with the joystick, pretendin' I was really playin'

Pretendin' I was really playin'

Pretendin' I was really playin'

 

[IronFist]

The last little vignette sums it all up in a tragic way. You only have one life, just like you only get one life with two quarters on the arcade machine. But in life, you either have money or you don't. With the image of still hitting buttons with "game over" the symbolism is obvious. His life is doomed, it is already over, he is just playing out the string and pretending it still matters. But it is even more hopeless than that. When the camera zooms out, he is just a kid with no money at all, in a world where "either you got it or you don't." Can't even play the game, it is all just pretend. Woods' point is depressing and clear: if you are born into his circumstances, the circumstances he's been describing for the past verse, you don't even have a chance, you aren't even in the game. This ties with the end of the first verse and the chorus. The core theme of this song is describing the pain of living a life where you have no agency, no control, and no answers.

Like I highlighted with Ka, a lot of the content of this verse isn't particularly novel. The critique of hip hop is pretty common. As is the description of a tough upbrining. There are ways to rap this content and be incredibly boring and cliched. But what sets Woods and other great lyricists apart is their ability to break down these tropes, get to a level of nuance, and present these ideas in fresh and innovative ways.

So as a lyricist, like I said, Woods is more oblique with his meaning. There is a lot more drawn by implication, by the images he chooses to place next to each other. For example, the line about terrorists has nothing literally to do with the rest of hte verse, but setting the stage with that before consistently discussing his impoverished lifestyle really sets the scene of this place being a warzone. In contrast, someone like Ka might use a lot of very creative vocabulary and imagery, but he is a lot more direct. Ka is much closer to a Raekwon or Prodigy type of lyricist, just doing it with different jargon and symbolism. Woods is more comparable to the loose associative style of MF DOOM. Neither style is better or worse, just different.

Questions to think on:

For those of you who have heard the album, what do you make of Billy's consistent contrasts with high and low art? What is he trying to say? I have some thoughts but I haven't quite figured out how to explain what I think is going on here. The language is most obvious in the chorus to "Spiderholes" but like in this song, that contrast comes up in bits and pieces all over the place.

Woods at the end of the first verse seems to mock the idea of calling the system rigged when you lose, but hasn't decided on a narrative. But by the end of the track (and from many other of his lyrics), it is clear he is critiquing modern America and capitalism as rigged. What do you make of this?

This song musically is very distinct from the rest of the album. It has a very slow, lazy, almost relaxing feel with the beat and light vocals on the chorus. This is pretty jarring after most of the album being pretty chopping, dark, and claustrophic with its soundscapes. How do you think this pairs with the lyrical content?

Tl;dr: Listen to Hiding Places, its dope. Expect to listen a couple times to process. But honestly, people make Woods and other lyricists out to be totally impossible and unapproachable. But no, this didn't take me a week of analysis. I cranked this out in a half an hour while bored at work. So if you find yourself vibing with some lyrics from an artists, sit down and think about them! Annotate them. Maybe they aren't as complex as Woods' bars here, but I'm sure you'll find something new. I promise it is a fun and rewarding exercise that helps you get more out of the music.

 

[KingsOfKings]

 

[Figaro]

I've only just come around to peep this properly, can remember giving it a vague listen around the time it dropped.

Spider Hole, Spongebob, Red Dust & Houthi are incredible.

 

[KingsOfKings]

 

[ReWiNd]

will the records only be available at the shows only? Or will there be a chance to order online at some retailer?

 

[KingsOfKings]