In his 1961 book, What Is History?, Edward Hallett Carr explains that history doesn’t write itself; it’s historians—human beings with biases and specific motives—who determine its basis. “It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue,” he writes. “The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context.” Throughout the tumult of 2020 many American cities, particularly in the South and parts of the Midwest, addressed the reckoning brought on by the George Floyd protests by taking down Confederate monuments. Beneath the cheers from many celebrating the long-overdue actions, right-wing activists shouted that removing the statues was “erasing history.” The Right’s cries of erasure reflected a view that history is rigid and static.
For New York–based rapper billy woods, history is a tool for understanding the world we live in. Woods sees history as fluid: perspectives change over time, tipping points are only recognizable in hindsight, and everything is tangled together. In his songwriting, references to politicians, global conflict, and leftist theory abound. To lay out his themes, woods folds time like a sheet of paper, pulling disparate historical events into the same space. “There are a lot of histories,” woods says, “so if we examine the places where they bump up against one another, then maybe we get something approximating truth.” The first verse of “spongebob,” the opening track from his and producer Kenny Segal’s 2019 album, Hiding Places, weaves together mentions of Mao Zedong, Robert Mugabe’s eviction of white Zimbabwean farmers from their land, the capture of Saddam Hussein, and the Atlantic slave trade, all to illustrate the ambient stress of living in the present-day United States.
Woods’s parents met in New York City as graduate students. His mother is a Jamaican English-literature scholar and feminist writer, and his father was a political refugee from Zimbabwe with a PhD in history and a law degree. Woods was born in Washington, DC, but his father moved back to Zimbabwe in 1979 after the collapse of Rhodesia, eventually holding two separate positions in Robert Mugabe’s Marxist government. The family followed in 1981 but moved back to DC in late 1989 after woods’s father’s death. After a stint at Howard University and an itinerant young adulthood, woods settled in New York City. He wrote his first rap while working in a Maine laundromat in 1997, and when he moved back to New York in 2000, he invested all the money he had into a music career, eventually founding his influential label, Backwoodz Studioz, in 2002. His first album, Camouflage, was released in 2003, but his music career didn’t take off until the release of History Will Absolve Me in 2012. (The album’s cover is a close-up of Mugabe’s face). Woods and fellow Brooklyn emcee E L U C I D formed Armand Hammer in 2013, and between his group and solo work, he’s released more than twenty albums in less than two decades, to increasingly wide critical acclaim. (In all public-facing photographs and videos, woods keeps his face or eyes obscured, a choice he made early in his career to protect his anonymity in a constantly surveilled world.)
I spoke to woods twice for this interview: once at his apartment in Brooklyn, seated beside boxes of his LPs, and again via phone on July 4, 2024. Rather than focus on his musical output, each conversation spiraled through time, with woods moving from one historical event to another in a matter of seconds. “Human behavior is a problem,” he said at one point, illustrating that one of our most consistent through lines in history is also one of our most inescapable.
Not all conversations are as linear or succinct as they appear. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.—Ed.
billy woods
© Paul Rousselet/Gather
Lewis: Do you consider yourself a student of history?
woods: “I’m a student of history” sounds like a big thing to say for yourself, but it’s a fair assessment for somebody to make of me since I have literally been a student of history and I explore it a lot in my work.
My father was a professor with a PhD in history, so the topic was always around, always being discussed. I think it interested me more than it did my sibling; I don’t know exactly why. We lived in a house full of books. Maybe it was also just the fact that we had moved somewhere that was in the midst of making history, if you will. Zimbabwe had just started as a sovereign country [in 1980], so it all felt very palpable. It doesn’t seem so in retrospect, but I think the early 1980s, at least globally, still had that sense of continuing the upheaval of the seventies. Although it had already gone wrong in a lot of places, it was just starting in Zimbabwe.
Lewis: Is there a particular aspect of history that you find most fascinating?
woods: Give me an example. What’s one you find fascinating? Maybe I can see what you mean from that.
Lewis: I like the history of social movements. For a US-specific version, I think the idea of the seventies sort of being a hangover of the sixties is really fascinating.
woods: “Hangover” is an interesting term. Yeah, I find movement history fascinating. I find revolutionary and counterrevolutionary history interesting too, and those could all fall under “movements.” War. The history of human innovation: how it happens, where, and why. Technological, social, political, and religious innovation.
What was so specific about the Jewish faith that its various offshoots eventually became the two largest religions in the world? Why? This is a small group of people in the Middle East who don’t even believe in proselytizing. But from that faith comes Christianity and Islam. And then these different faiths find themselves at war with each other, and oftentimes they make a very clear and direct enemy of the Jew, whose religion they have adapted.
Lewis: Do you find it helpful, when thinking about your own existence, to take a thirty-thousand-foot view of humanity itself? You’ve named all these things that you find fascinating, and it’s a pretty all-encompassing list.
woods: On some level I feel like it’s informed how I think about the world and things that are happening and how human society has changed, doesn’t change, or atrophies: identity and the culture of geography. These help me understand the world that I live in. How I think about even something small like hip-hop culture and history—there are opinions I once held that now I might be like, “There are other sides to that,” or, “There’s more nuance to that.” I don’t think about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today the same way that I did when I was eight years old, or fourteen, or sixteen. The world has changed. I might have the same opinion about what’s right and wrong, but my ideas about how to move through the world and how the world works may have me thinking differently than I did before.
A good example would be in Africa. For much of my life I felt that the existence of these colonial borders was an obstacle that needed to be overcome to create more just and sustainable societies on the continent. As an older person I still feel that it would be great if all of the borders could be redrawn, but when you’re dealing with human beings, redrawing borders inevitably leads to lots of violence and death.
Apply that to the United States: There are people in this country with very different ideas about what they want, the type of country they want to live in, what they value in the world, and what they value in their fellow citizens. But if you said, “Let’s split the country up,” I think you’d be talking about millions and millions of people dead by the end of it. Because people don’t always live where other people want them to. Not that I’m against movements for greater autonomy, or separatist movements per se, but something that I once thought of as a workable solution I now realize might not be realistic. Should the Congo be one country? Probably not. Is there a way in 2024 that a country with that type of resources, that size, that much ethnic diversity, and that many different forces weighing on it from outside could be divided up and not result in catastrophic violence? I don’t think so. At any rate, it’s not something that should be looked at as a blanket solution.
Look at Sudan. For most of my life I’ve been a big supporter of South Sudan and separation. Soon after it actually won independence in 2011, South Sudan became a war zone due to the ambitions of men in power. It was the result of the building up of conflicts and personal armies over time. Not that I want to reverse it, but just to recognize the fact that sometimes when you solve a problem, you create more problems, or different problems that might be equally serious. Everything’s tangled together. Sometimes we’re not able to do what’s right in a way that will ultimately bring greater justice to all the people involved. But what to do then?
Lewis: I suppose that’s why we study history: essentially it’s a study of patterns.
woods: Sure. Things seem like they can only be so until they’re not, you know?
My family left Zimbabwe in late 1989. In 1988—again, I was a child, but from a very political family—there was no sense in my mind that South Africa was any closer to collapsing than Israel. And within a few years apartheid rule had collapsed in South Africa. We can have a separate conversation about what came after it, but apartheid rule did indeed collapse. Majority rule came into effect, and for that to happen a lot of people died throughout the entire southern-Africa region. And here we are, however many years later, and Israel is actually bigger and more powerful than it was at that time. So it just goes to show that sometimes things are not as far away as they seem, and sometimes things that seem on the verge of happening end up being far away—or they’re never going to happen. [Laughs.] Nobody knows what is under the surface.
Think of all the forces, energies, and waves of history that it took to bring about the transformation of the Republican Party into a Donald Trump cult of personality. It goes back through the Tea Party to when talk radio was dominant in the nineties. I remember going into a friend’s house, and their mom would be listening to Rush Limbaugh. He would just be droning on for hours, and I’d be like, “Is this for real?” The presentation was different from the traditional presentation of right-wing politics that I had seen up to that point. At that time Bill Clinton was president, but before that, there had been three straight terms of Republican presidencies. So all of these forces are happening, and it just takes the right person, at the right time, to light the right spark and make what previously would have seemed impossible the law of the land.
When I was a child, Somalia had a government. They might not have one again for the rest of my life.
All of these forces are happening, and it just takes the right person, at the right time, to light the right spark and make what previously would have seemed impossible the law of the land.
Lewis: If history is a study of patterns, it seems like it’s mostly the study of the moments that start them. The patterns maybe aren’t the most important thing.
woods: I don’t think there’s any one most important thing. Why things happen is such a complicated stew. If somebody asked you to explain Trump’s rise, you could say there are simple answers, but it’s also complicated.
This all goes back to things as you perceive them. Gun control in America seemed to me such a simple thing, and I still support it, but then you really think about it and look at the numbers. There are so many weapons already in everybody’s hands, so many weapons in the streets, so many commercially available. There are huge runs on weapons when something big happens. During the George Floyd protests, gun sales shot up. After January 6, gun sales shot up. Pandemic, gun sales shot up. So just think about the feasibility of implementing any law that would remove guns from private owners in the United States. If people sensed that was coming, they’d buy even more guns. Some people have been sitting around waiting for that, as if that’s been “the plan all along,” you know what I mean?
Once people start to view gun ownership as “This is my culture. This is foundational to who I am and what I am,” and you try to change that? Somebody said to me, “Oh, well, they could do a buyback.” And I was like, “You think you could go to Afghanistan and pay the citizens to not be Muslims anymore? You think you could go there and tell everyone, ‘I’m going to give you X amount of money if you convert and give me your Koran’?” It wouldn’t happen. Even if you’re appealing to something like greed, it’s just not feasible. In the same way, there are people here whose feelings about having guns are an integral part of their identity, their culture.
Lewis: We’re living in a time when there’s a stratification of reality. There are echo chambers on social media and twenty-four-hour news channels that have a very specific lens. They’re feeding a very specific idea of reality, and therefore history, to these siloed segments of the population. I guess what I’m asking is: Are history and truth the same thing?
woods: I mean, they can be. There are a lot of histories, so if we examine the places where they bump up against one another, then maybe we get something approximating truth.
Human behavior is a problem, but I think the answers, a lot of times, are easy. The answer to gun violence is obvious: if everybody got rid of their guns, you’d be safe from gun violence. But actually making that happen, as we just discussed, is very complicated, because human behavior is complicated. This goes for individuals and for whole countries. You could say to two people you know, “You guys should be able to squash this problem with a conversation,” but how often does it happen? Say this person owes you $10,000. They can’t get $10,000, but they could probably get you $4,000, which would be better than nothing, and we could all move on. But that’s not how it is.
What’s the answer to religious and territorial disputes? You could sit both sides down and say, “How should we make this work?” But human beings just don’t work like that. Why would the leaders of this brand-new country of South Sudan, these two factions warring over control of a desperately poor country that just formed, be willing to destroy the country they just built?
Lewis: Technology has allowed us to rewrite history in many ways. Do you think it has made the study of history obsolete?
woods: No, how could it be obsolete? Why would it be obsolete?
Lewis: Because I think it’s more malleable and more easily embellished, especially now with the rise of AI. It seems like the truth is in danger.
woods: Hasn’t it always been? Was it not in danger when the Catholic Church used to tell its followers what to think, and the Church’s ceremonies were performed in Latin? You kind of have to take for granted that the magicians are in charge. And the magicians will remain in charge. We use devices every day that we don’t understand and could not fix if they broke. You just have to believe what the magician tells you is going on. I don’t know about your technological savvy, but much of what underpins modern life in America is beyond the full understanding of the average person.
People have always contested what is true and what is real. It could be something as small as what actually happened in the Gulf of Tonkin or something as big as the ideologies that spurred colonialism or the Crusades. Colonial powers weren’t like, “We must go here and murder, exploit, and steal from these people who are doing nothing to us.” They created a narrative about missions to save people, to bring Jesus to them, and pursued various types of manifest destiny that presented Indigenous people as obstacles to the natural order of things. Or they argued that they were actually improving these Indigenous people’s lives by bringing civilization to them. It’s the same thing. Human beings will always attempt to manipulate reality and history, and AI is just a new tool.
There was a time when, to start a pogrom, people had to spread propaganda face-to-face. Then you had the printing press, and people could print up anti-Semitic flyers and distribute them around whatever European country they lived in and cause a pogrom that way. But the end result is still the same.
Lewis: Would you say you have a grim view of human nature?
woods: I think I have a realistic one, and that can be grim. But human beings also do some incredible things. Problems are overcome all the time. Sometimes I just look around the world today and think about how it’s changed for the better. It wasn’t that long ago that I went to a big high school in the States, and there wasn’t one openly gay person. Coming out would have required a level of bravery that I don’t think you could find in many teenagers, nor should it be expected. And now that’s not really the case. I’m not saying there are no problems with teenagers, but this is a major difference.
In my lifetime I’ve seen probably one of the most successful public-health campaigns of all time, the result of which is that people don’t smoke cigarettes everywhere in the US the way they used to. [Laughs.] Sometimes when I’m in European countries, I’m like, “Wow, people really smoke out here.” When I was younger, if you didn’t like people smoking in a bar, you either went outside or stayed at home. When I was a little kid, you could still smoke on planes. The right to smoke was considered more important than other people’s right to have clean air. When I started college, smoking was just what you did, you know? Probably one of the only things I did in my life just to fit in was smoke cigarettes.
Lewis: This goes back to what you were saying about not knowing that you’re witnessing the historic event as it’s happening.
woods: There’s a similar thing with how we work after the pandemic. Postpandemic, people will talk about looking for a job and be like, “Oh, they expect me to come into work like two days a week,” or whatever. That’s now a factor for some people in how they choose a job. For the entirety of the time that I have existed, and for generations and generations before me, the vast majority of people in the US went to work every day. It may never be like that again. And we’ve already kind of adjusted to it. Before, you were expected to go to work five days a week. If people had a really good job, they’d be like, “I have half days on Fridays in the summer.” And you’d be like, “Oh, that’s dope. I’ve never had a job like that.”
Lewis: I think a lot of people take comfort in using history as a predictive tool.
woods: You can, but that only works so much. The team that wins the title in basketball for years and years might have been the one with the best center, and then it wasn’t that way anymore. I think it’s human nature to assume that the reality you know is going to perpetuate itself, even though change, innovation, and destruction all come without warning at times—or, at least, they come with warnings that people can only see afterward.
We know how human beings react to change. There are certain things that are immutable, but there are so many factors that weigh on different events that you can’t predict things that have not yet come to pass. You can predict that somebody might make something like an atomic bomb, or the internet, but the how, why, and when—at least, to me—are beyond our abilities to pinpoint.
One frustrated street vendor sets himself alight in a relatively sleepy, politically insignificant North African country [Tunisia in 2010—Ed.] as a protest against the administration of his city and the frustrations of his life. That sparks a wave of protests and, in many places, armed uprisings throughout much of the Muslim world. Who could have known? What made that particular day the catalyst? You can predict there’ll be upheavals, but knowing the triggers? No. If you looked at history, you’d probably be right more often than you’d be wrong, but sometimes you’d be wrong spectacularly.
Lewis: Is that why it’s so important to be the one who writes the history?
woods: Important to whom?
Lewis: Well, to both the audience and the one controlling the narrative, I suppose.
woods: I don’t know if I know how to answer that question. That’s an interesting one.
Lewis: Have you ever found yourself taken in by propaganda?
woods: Depending on how you define that term, yeah, undoubtedly. Propaganda is such a loaded word. I definitely grew up in a culture where sometimes I had beliefs that were encouraged, then later on I had to question them. Not that I don’t think those beliefs are valuable, but certain things I thought, I don’t necessarily think anymore.
Lewis: Have you developed a particular kind of filter to recognize propaganda? Or is it all by experience and looking at it retrospectively?
woods: What would that look like?
Lewis: I think there are some demonstrable things that define political propaganda. In this day and age it takes the shape of misinformation or disinformation.
woods: Here’s something: At one point in my life, I believed that—and, obviously, this could still prove to be true—Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy and was just a patsy. And, while acknowledging that I don’t know anything for sure, I currently lean toward thinking that it was Oswald. But I wouldn’t say that either belief was a result of propaganda—though one could say that, I guess! One can be rightfully suspicious of something that had lots of suspicious aspects to it. Certain things just made me question my assumptions about the nature of the government and the political culture I grew up in. Seeing the movie JFK, for example; is Oliver Stone’s movie propaganda?
Lewis: I don’t know. I mean, you could also argue that Marvel movies are propaganda.
woods: Yes, you could. I really liked comic books when I was a kid. But, to me, propaganda usually has to come from a certain source. So when I think about the reactionary white-vigilante movies of the 1970s and ’80s that I grew up with, I don’t think anyone was getting together and being like, “This is a message we need to churn out.” I think it was a reflection of ideas that were being passed around in society and were probably held by some of the people who were making the movies. And, on top of that, those films proved to be financially successful.
Do I think Death Wish functioned as a sort of anti-liberal propaganda? Yes, 100 percent. But do I think of it as actual propaganda? No. It’s not like Leni Riefenstahl [who produced Nazi propaganda films—Ed.] or something commissioned by or in some way connected to the power structure or a political movement, even though it shares the beliefs of a particular political movement. I don’t read The Grapes of Wrath and think, This is propaganda, although it is undoubtedly political and was written by a person who had political thoughts and opinions.
Lewis: I guess I keep coming back to this idea of malleability because I want something concrete. And I don’t think I’m ever going to get it necessarily.
woods: Concrete about what?
Lewis: Some sort of truth about reality, I suppose.
woods: What’s a truth that you would say right now is missing? I can list a few. There are several different versions of exactly how Patrice Lumumba [the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who was assassinated in 1961—Ed.] died and who was there and what happened to his body. I’d love to know which ones are true. I’d love to know how [former Liberian president] Charles Taylor got out of that prison in Massachusetts in 1985 and who exactly helped him. I would love to know who shot and killed Olof Palme, the prime minister of Sweden, in 1986. I’d love to know the exact nature of the biological and chemical warfare waged by Rhodesians and their South African patrons in the Rhodesian Bush War—which may or may not have taken the lives of my grandparents in the seventies. There are lots of things that would be really interesting to know. There are people still alive who could answer these questions, and I think about things like that a lot.
I think it’s human nature to assume that the reality you know is going to perpetuate itself, even though change, innovation, and destruction all come without warning at times.
Lewis: Do you think the arc of history actually does bend toward justice?
woods: Probably. I mean, there’s maybe a stronger argument that it could go either way. But do I believe the world I live in now is more just than the world my great-grandparents were born into? Yes, I do.
Lewis: Is there a point at which the arc stops bending?
woods: Who can know the future? It may have already stopped. It’s one of those things. When you play roulette at a casino, part of you feels like if the ball lands on red five times in a row, the next one’s got to land on black. Later on, when you’ve lost all your money and you learn a little about statistics, you realize that each spin of the wheel is a discrete event that has no necessary bearing on what’s going to happen next. Now, if you spin the wheel ten thousand times, in theory it should balance out, but that has nothing to do with what you’re going to see at the roulette table in the span of two hours. Similarly I feel the arc of history I can observe could very well be the batting of an eye in terms of the universe. So I don’t know it will continue to bend. I can’t even say for sure how long it has been bending for. But if I had to take a guess, I would say the world has grown more just in the time that I’ve been in it.
Things change. Challenges change. Some of the ways in which injustice is facilitated have changed and are changing. You can’t know what’s going to happen before it happens. In 1988 everyone wasn’t sitting around thinking, Communism is about to fall, and in six years Nelson Mandela will be president of South Africa. In retrospect things often seem inevitable, but at the time it’s not always clear what’s about to happen. People talk about a path of inevitability for somebody like Donald Trump. But at the time even the Republican establishment, even Donald Trump himself, did not think he was going to become the president—or, at least, not until it started to seem like he could.
Lewis: It reminds me of something you said earlier about how there are multiple histories at once. I wonder if saying that the arc of history bends toward justice actually helps us at all. If there are so many histories happening, and we can’t know anything until it happens, can we still use history as a guide?
woods: Of course. I mean, it’s not infallible, but as something to factor into your analysis, yeah, I think it’s a great place to start. The past cannot tell you everything that’s going to happen. That’s silly. But it certainly can provide a lot of context clues and information with which to understand what might happen, how things have come to pass, and what they may signal.
My children are going to grow up in a world so far removed from the one I grew up in that we probably can’t truly understand aspects of each other’s experience. That’s my assessment. Young people today are already so far away from what I grew up with that it might be challenging for me to understand what it’s like for them.
Here’s a simple example: If you’re in your teens and early twenties today, you lose touch with people only if you want to. When I moved to Zimbabwe as a child, and again when I moved back here from Zimbabwe as a preadolescent, it was a lot of effort to keep in touch with people I’d left behind. International calls were expensive. Forget international calls; you could lose touch with somebody you went to high school or college with in the US. If you didn’t have any friends in common, then you didn’t really know what was going on with the person, where they lived, or what was up in their life. Now it’s almost impossible to lose touch like that. Somebody would have to be intentionally trying to get off the grid. Everyone is so connected through social media that probably anyone can get in touch with anyone from their past, if they want to. If they really needed to, they could find a way to contact that person within minutes, hours at most. So that’s totally different. When I moved back here, I had to start over completely. Now you could still be in touch with your old friends. You could talk and interact with them every day. That was not even remotely feasible.
How technology affects human life is significant. The way my mother grew up, until she left rural Jamaica for teachers college at the University of the West Indies, was much more similar to the way her father had grown up than the way I grew up was to the way my father had grown up. And the way I grew up will be unfathomable to my children.
Lewis: It’s an exponential change.
woods: Yeah, especially because my childhood involved, in some ways, stepping out of the time flow that I was born into by moving to a developing country. Lots of people in my generation have never been to a drive-in movie theater. Zimbabwe has nice weather, though, so they still had drive-in movie theaters when I was growing up there. The drive-in era in the US, especially outside of California, was over by the eighties. I don’t know if the idea of watching a movie in a theater will even make sense to my kids.
Lewis: How do we keep history in perspective if so many of our narratives now are essentially sponsored by corporations?
woods: Explain that to me. What are we thinking here?
Lewis: A good example would be the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which has bought up a significant number of local newsrooms in the US. They force a perspective on their newscasters. If all these different outlets are controlled by corporations, how do we keep history in perspective?
woods: Again, I feel like it’s the same as always. It’s a group project, something that involves everybody. How have we done it thus far, and how good of a job have we done at it? History means a lot of things to lots of people.
It’s funny; my mom said this way back, and to date nobody has done it that I know of. When Trump started using the phrase “Make America Great Again,” why did nobody—especially somebody who was debating or arguing with him or interviewing him—ask, “When was America great, so we know when we’re going back to? Because you said ‘again.’ When did it stop being great?” It’s just such an obvious question. Part of the slogan’s success is that it allows people to create in their minds an image of this time that supposedly existed. But I guarantee that, if asked, people would have a hard time defining it or defending their choices. When was America great? Somebody tell me. Are you going to say the 1950s?
Lewis: That seems to be the default for a lot of people.
woods: That would be crazy. I don’t think that would fly if Trump were like, “Let’s take America back to the 1950s.” But “Make America Great Again” allows each person to individualize, to imagine the moment that they feel was best. It’s wholly in the imagination. Any attempt to make it solid would fracture that. Of course, some people would be like, “The 1950s? Great!” But professional women might be like, “What? No.” Black people—depending on who you ask—might be like, “I don’t know about that.” Does Kid Rock want to live in the 1950s? Does Trump, a serial philanderer who had his best times in the eighties? What I’m saying is that there’s a lot of heavy lifting being done by the listener’s imagination. Because these halcyon days of America never existed. But each person can craft a version to their liking and insert a vague sense that things have been better. Any good piece of propaganda has enough room that you can make whatever you want of it.
