November Preview

A couple of weeks ago I wrote to you talking about how I didn’t need to remind you that it was an election year. My stance on the issue has not changed! But we’re inviting you to read our November interview (“Past Futures”) a bit early because we think Dash Lewis’s conversation with billy woods is important to mull over in the coming weeks, regardless of what happens on Nov. 5 (or beyond). While not necessarily comforting, woods’s view of the world is at once tangled and clear minded.

Woods is not a politician or a political theorist or a pundit. He is a rapper whose work over the past two decades has undoubtedly been shaped and influenced by the decisions and attendant consequences that come from the offices of power around the world. The record label that he owns, Backwoodz Studioz, has released some of the most lyrically shrewd and sonically challenging albums in the world of independent hip-hop, and critical acclaim for him and the artists he champions has been wide. But we didn’t want to talk with him about music—or politics. We wanted to talk with him about history.

His father held two separate positions in Robert Mugabe’s Marxist government in Zimbabwe, and as a child woods grew up in a place that, as he puts it, “was in the midst of making history.” Scenes from this era have been sketched out in some of woods’s lyrics, which also touch on the Atlantic slave trade, the frustrating minutiae of child-rearing, and, as Lewis describes it, “the ambient stress of living in the present-day United States.”

In his conversation with Lewis woods talks about the cycles that have defined much of human history while also acknowledging how unpredictable they can be, from the co-opting of the printing press for the spread of religious propaganda to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Of the Arab Spring uprisings, 2010–2012, he says: “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?”

Take care and read well,
Finn Cohen, Associate Editor

Read “Past Futures” in our November issue