Lumumba’s Tooth & Other Stories :: billy woods x Preservation’s “Aethiopes”
Having been writing about woods’ work every year for ten entire damn years, and listening for fifteen, it’s great for once not to try and convince y’all why he’s nailed Album of the Year — the kudos been coming in far and wide. He’s entered the GOAT chat and I don’t need to keep that to myself either anymore. So what, then, hasn’t been said, and what specifically is he doing on Aethiopes that’s new and makes it a capstone on ten solo albums and nearly a twenty year career?
It’s crazy to think that all the rappers and producers he started out with way back in the ’00s — Marmaduke, BOND, Vordul, Thrill Gates, the Reavers, Privilege, Dr. Monokrome, etc. — none of them are making music anymore. He’s like the last, bloodied dude left standing in a war movie, some Khe Sanh type shit. And it’s even crazier that, eighteen years since The Chalice, he’s making his best records yet. Name one other artist who’s done that (and do not say King’s Disease 1–3). Is it the collaborators he picks that keep it fresh? All that fish he’s always eating on every other podcast appearance?
Lumumba’s Tooth
In June, the Belgian government returned Patrice Lumumba’s gold-capped tooth to his children. Lumumba was a founder of the Congolese independence movement and its first post-colonial prime minister, until Mobutu Sese Seko’s coup in 1960; regarded as a hero of pan-African independence of that era.
He was put up against a tree and shot by Mobutu’s goons and Belgian mercenaries, dug up from a shallow grave the next day, and his corpse dismembered and dissolved in sulfuric acid. The tooth was taken as a souvenir, as a trophy. The tooth is all that remains.
In the first quarter-century of Belgium’s colonial rule, ten million died. On the rubber plantations, they would light fires at the base of the trees to make the children up in the branches work faster.
Failure to meet quotas was punishable by death, and soldiers had to bring a severed hand to prove this. As a Danish missionary recorded:
The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. … The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber … They became a sort of currency.
This wasn’t centuries ago. This is around 1900. Peep woods on “Haarlem”:
Slash and burn, the past is never far
Reaching with chopped arms, lopped hands, no spare parts
Arm leg leg arm head? Give us back the martyr’s tooth.
Lumumba’s tooth is a woods type beat: a bit of African political history for those who know/schooling who doesn’t, terrifying in its inventively cruel state violence, and uniquely poetical in detail.
So much of rap — like the lives of so many rappers — is confined to a single housing project, a single neighbourhood or borough, a territorial narrowview imposed by the American carceral redlines. (It took Nas 27 years to get from Queensbridge to Paris, and all he had to report is that baguettes are French bread that’s long and narrow.) woods always brings that larger world, longer view—other countries, eras, wars and revolutions, the lives lived there.
What woods excels at is those three card monte on the old Deuce type verses — except the cards are an Ace of Clubs, a Chance card from Monopoly, and a Tarot card, or maybe a 1973 baseball card of Carl Yastrzemski with the muttonchop sideburns. He flips through time and space: African history, rap history, old and new New York, like on “Doldrums” — from a notoriously horrible prison in Equatorial Guinea, a major center of the slave trade, and the urban present in five lines:
Fernando Po’s Black Beach
Yemeni traders off the coast of Mozambique
Packed bodegas, akh in the weeds
Gold shimmering in the reef
Tha Carter III pour out a double-parked Jeep
Even when he’s writing about the death and life of great American cities, it could be 1972, 1982, 1992 or 2022. It’s New York, it’s Baltimore, it’s DC; it’s The Sprawl. Always lyrically flipping back to “42nd Street” on Cape Verde: Eyes of a king, all you gotta do is watch that red queen…round and round she goes, round and round she goes…
woods has even been unpacking some of the deep cut references for those of us scoring at home (via Post Trash):
Yeah, you have the smoking a Dutch in Amsterdam [in “Haarlem”] on the steps of a mansion built off the things that are talked about earlier in the verse. Even in that song, you have a reference to “Those Were the Days,” a song by Mary Hopkin, from 1968. It is itself a remake of a Russian — I don’t know if folk song is the correct word. It doesn’t really matter, but in terms of the internal thought process, that song is actually sampled by a producer named BOND, who I worked with for most of the first half of my career, on what was one of our more memorable songs on the first album that we ever did together, and my first record.
That was a little easter egg, but it also has a bizarre connection to the 1960s execution of — let’s just say political dissidents for now, because I don’t remember exactly whether they had plotted a coup or what the thing was, in Equatorial Guinea. The dictator of Equatorial Guinea had these people executed in a stadium, and supposedly they played “Those Were the Days” at the stadium when they executed them.
(Fun fact: Macias Nguema was deposed and executed at Black Beach prison in 1979. Even more fun fact: seeing the coup coming, he sent his three children to live with his homeboy Kim Il-Sung, where they lived for decades as ‘guests’ of North Korea. Rap about that, mr. woods!)
“Does anyone really want to read poetry with a bunch of footnotes on what the poem’s about?” woods asks on his Weird Rap podcast interview. Well, they have that — it’s called Genius Dot Com and sometimes they hit the Fernando Po right and sometimes they’re like “here woods is critiquing capitalism.” Yeah, thank you, Genius Dot Com. They have that elsewhere too: double-sided gatefold editions 180gsm with the obi strip of The Waste Land with the poem on one page and the unpacking footnotes on the other. (Not a random name check either: like T.S. Eliot — like Joyce, like Woolf, like every great modern rapper — woods is a modernist, creating jigsaw rhymes of interconnecting pieces, representing consciousness rather than forced sequences.)
But Aethiopes (and Church) see him dealing those three card monte cards out into different hands, filming more narratives than montages, and honing in on a tighter range of themes — ‘Africa’ as a place and an idea; his own autobiography (or at least autofictionalbiography); and across it all, recurrent imagery of water, of travel.
OB4WI
Rolling it back for a second though, what Preservation has done on this joint is just brilliant: the meticulous assembly of samples that draw from across the world, giving it a wide palette of Ethiopian music, steel drums, dub, blues, noise jazz — without losing an overarching flow and unity, but each bespoke to the song/theme and special guest stars. He intimates and implies with the samples to Ali Farka Toure and others; they’re allusions rather than loops. The Kongi’s Harvest samples harken back to early woods records like NPR, but like many it’s a full collabo, two foils playing off each other.
I’m saying this though: the record is actually two EPs, united by Pres’ beats. woods has said it started as an EP and grew from there, and he’s also talked about the importance of sequencing, the first and last two songs on every album being key. Aethiopes kicks off with two autobiographies and going deep on the Africa theme; it ends on “Smith + Cross,” carrying that theme to Jamaica along with the blues type songs he’ll then expand further on Church.
In between, it’s pretty much seven joints with a clutch of crazy guest verses. I mean, they brought back Shinehead and y’all too young to remember “Who The Cap Fits.” An Indelible MCs reunion! New luminaries like Quelle Chris and Fatboi Sharif! Rare sightings of Mike Ladd and Despot! It’s a history of rap music as much as it’s about Black history. These add deep layers and flavors and styles to the record, for sure.
But, while woods and sometimes the guests carry through the themes’ throughlines (Mike Ladd in particular), we’re not gonna get Despot rapping about hammers AND sickles. That middle EP is a continuation of Preservation’s producer-led, Asian-music-themed compilation from 2020, Eastern Medicine, Western Illness — call it Western Medicine, Western Illness or Only Built 4 Western Illness.
Bless The Rains
woods has been upfront about the album’s overarching theme: the concept of ‘Africanness’ as an artificial construct, how the diaspora in America and the Caribbean thinks about it, and how people in Africa see them, and themselves — Africa as reality, as invention, as place and idea — and in his own memories growing up there.
The samples bookending the songs we also know are from the movie Kongi’s Harvest — sampled way back in the day by BOND, and taking a decade for woods to track down (which, he’s bitterly admitted, is now all over streaming and YouTube). It’s a post-revolutionary fable about yams as political power, the tensions between a deposed king and young dissidents; good intentions gone bad. It’s the whole me sowing/me reaping thing, word to Octavia Butler.
‘Aethiopes’ itself is an archaic Roman word used through the Middle Ages to refer to anyone from the African continent. Both this joint and Church muse over the ways we construct different ways to bend reality to fit ideas about belonging, community — and who’s outside these identities, and how they’re enforced through brutal violence. It’s interrogating Blackness, and whiteness, who came up with these in the first place and what violence they wreaked with them.
From the 12th to 17th centuries, white Europeans passed the myth of Prester John around like a blunt, and man they got mad high off this. He was supposed to be the emperor priest of a lost Christian nation somewhere in the known unknown parts of the world — maybe India, maybe the Middle East, maybe Mongolia. Portuguese explorers believed he was in Ethiopia. The Christian Ethiopian kingdom was sending emissaries to Europe from the 1300s, but a hundred years later Europeans were still referring to the Ethiopian Emperor as Prester John, even after they said: yo, would you stop doing that? The Europeans saw what they wanted to see. They wanted a Prester John, in Ethiopia. But they weren’t sure where it was: maps from 1457 show ‘Ethiopia’ in seven different places.
We think of nations as being concrete, established things, but they’re no more fixed than the stars in the sky. We just accept this country and that one, their current borders, as who we are and who are they. But it’s all made up, fam. Nations only exist because we believe in them and invented the flags and passports to go with them. A passport is just a magical piece of paper with your name on it.
In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson says a nation is “imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” — that is, it has defined, finite borders, fixing people in a place on Earth, whereas religion was fixing people’s place in the cosmos (which as on Church, doesn’t really work for woods either). The rise of nationalism and the idea of defined nations was contiguous with the fall of the religious worldview in the face of science: a continuation of the need to be a part of something larger than yourself, something that’s collectively believed will go on forever.
But nations are defined by otherness — they are on the other side of that imaginary line, and we are us on this side. Yet there’s still otherness and usness within, arbitrary and contradictory: the Jewish German wasn’t really a German to the Nazis; Hutus and Tutsis are both something known as ‘Rwandans.’ The 80,000 Indians Idi Amin expelled weren’t ‘Ugandan’ and when most fled to England they still weren’t ‘African’ and they sure weren’t ‘British.’
Anderson says that the three institutions of power which codified nationalism to enable imperialism were the census, the museum and the map. The census (to count up and classify new imperial subjects) created the systemic quantification of ethnicity you see every time you fill in a form — there wasn’t that granular level of distinction before that. The looting of monuments and artifacts, bringing them back to display as trophies in Europe’s museums was to show the current residents of the colonies aren’t capable of their ancestor’s achievements. Me and her in the diorama.
And it was the 1761 invention of the chronometer to calculate longitudes which enabled a grid for the empty squares on the maps. Anderson talks about old English maps which showed British Empire countries in pink, French colonies in purple, Dutch in yellow — the world as a jigsaw puzzle, pieces of ‘nations’ detached from linear geography. And the pieces don’t even fit: as Dipo Faloyin notes in “Africa is Not a Country”:
Countries with unnatural borders and divided communities tend to have greater economic problems and political violence…nine of the thirteen most arbitrary states in the world are in Africa.
Queen Elizabeth II was born when a quarter of the entire world was part of the imagined British Empire. Ashanti gold on Queen Elizabeth’s neck. She was the biggest historical symbol ‘soft power’ — getting what Britain wanted through coercion, shaping hearts and minds. For her Platinum Jubilee, a couple months before she died, they rolled out a golden carriage with a hologram of her from her coronation in 1952. It waved and people waved back. They waved at the hologram. Real Frozen frame rate hours. Soft power through hard light. They waved at the hologram.
Anderson says: “nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations: outside history.” See also: serpent seed theory, and Washing the Ethiopian White. We’ll get to those. It all ties together fam, I promise.
(Anyway, you should go read Imagined Communities. It’s not that long and he even tells you which parts you can skip over.)
Aesiopes
Aesop (the fables guy, not the multimultimultisyllabic rapper) may or may not have been ‘Aethiopian;’ whether or not he was Black has been an argument on and off for centuries. As one anthropologist said, “if Aesop was not an African, he ought to have been.” In the absence of hard facts, we see what we want to see.
He definitely was a slave.
You may remember Aesop from such fables as ‘The Goose That Laid Golden Eggs’ and ‘The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse,’ ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf,’ and so on. You probably haven’t heard of the one called ‘Washing the Ethiopian White’:
A man once bought an Ethiopian slave, who had a black skin like all Ethiopians; but his new master thought his colour was due to his late owner’s having neglected him, and that all he wanted was a good scrubbing. So he set to work with plenty of soap and hot water, and rubbed away at him with a will, but all to no purpose: his skin remained as black as ever, while the poor wretch all but died from the cold he caught.
Meaning, you can’t change what you are; or, an impossible, futile task. It’s an underlying theme of “Othello.” It was a pretty well-known proverb for almost two thousand years — they were still using it in soap ads in 1900.
In Barbados during the slave era, it took on a new meaning: the process by which over generations mixed race people had less and less African heritage was called ‘washing the Blackamoor white.’ So, I guess it wasn’t impossible after all: just needed slavery, rapes and forced pregnancies. The slave master’s children all looked identical.
And in Dambudzo Marechera’s “Black Skin What Mask,” the internalised loathing is embodied in the narrator’s mentally ill friend: “He was always washing himself — at least three baths every day…He did not so much wash as scrub himself until he bled.”
But I pulled Aesop into the convo more because fables are defined as ‘fictions that point to the truth.’ That’s woods. And “Wharves” is a fable: the wolfish monster white tourists, the bones on the beach—it’s mixing imagery of fairy tale, imagined/fragmented Africa, horror tropes. Listen to the playful but haunting beat Preservation hooks up: it’s almost sarcastic. Both the beat and the lyrics link back to “Giraffe Hunts” on BRASS, that broken merry-go-round beat, the zoo-as-fable/stand in.
(The “eyes like jaws/Jaws” / “swimming with the virus” is real Burroughs hours though: images, millions of images, that’s what I eat. He was saying the word/the image/control was a virus decades before the first instant was ever Grammed.)
The thing is though, a fable has a moral. woods doesn’t offer those. Like KRS said: The moral of the story is there is no moral, you finish the story for me.
Time Piled Up, But It Was Never Enough
Aethiopes continues from BRASS in a lot of ways…woods has always been the folder and unfolder of maps, jumping across continents and across seas, and Moor Mother is the Black quantum futurist healing the past and reclaiming future time. But maybe as woods begins to dig deeper into his personal past, he’s started collapsing time as well as space. James Baldwin said: “He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.”
On “Haarlem,” it becomes a mad montage, it’s the last half-hour of 2001 with Fatboi Sharif as the giant space baby—everything is consumed by time, by entropy, by history. And Kubrick’s unknowable alien monolith — that Black Ark not Scratch Perry’s, but another coloniser, another lopper off of limbs; the track calls down Colonel Kurtz, the Judge in Blood Meridian, all of history a carousel ring backwards.
Think for a second about ancient astronaut theory: that earlier civilizations couldn’t have built the pyramids, Great Zimbabwe, Mayan and Aztec temples…so it must have been aliens what helped them. Sure fam. Those brown people couldn’t have done that. Musta been Whiteys from Outer Space. A rat done bit my sister Nell, but whitey’s building Angkor Wat. Go back up to what Anderson says about museums. The photograph of young Tutankhamun, spaghetti links tangled like ramen. Everything behind the mask rotten.
And then there’s:
At the museum, eyes glassy from the pain pills
Me and her in the diorama
It’s Ota Benga, the Mbuti displayed in the zoo as a human exhibit; it’s the Museum of Natural Wonders in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad—escaped slaves acting in exhibits as Africans, as slaves. And it’s Charlton Heston finding the stuffed body of his astronaut friend in the ape museum of natural history in Planet of the Apes — that dystopian b-side to 2001 about what’ll happen when whitey goes past the moon. And the Planet of the Apes series loops time into a flat circle. Time piled up.
The Sea Is History
It’s always the sea with woods; It’s always driving, motion, journeys. Waves on wharves. Real Joseph Conrad hours. Derek Walcott wrote:
Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.
It’s a poem laying the Bible over the slave trade, parallel parking the sacred and the profane. The same is threaded through Aethiopes. There’s heavy Walcott vibes as woods continually loops the water images, brings his Jamaican heritage towards the forefront. (You should really go read Derek Walcott.)
“Smith + Cross” is a blues song; but it also dips toes more deeply in woods’ Jamaican links (and sugar, molasses, rum: all products of the colonial slave trade—the personal is never ahistorical), and it tips its face up to the sun, for a finale that both laughs and slumps aghast at what we’ve done.
I kept hearing about a newish genre called ‘auto-fiction’ which got really popular behind some cat called Karl Ol’ Dirty Knifeguard or some shit, so I looked it up: it means memoir with fictional elements. What? Oh. You mean, like rappers have been doing from the jump. (Of course, nationalist origin stories, religious texts — these are auto-fictions too.)
There’s many snippets and self-portraits and auto-fictions here and on Church from the guy who never shows his face; we don’t know what’s autobiography and what’s fictional, we don’t know what he’s workshopping for his memoir-in-progress and what he’s holding back to save for that. In hindsight, it seemed like someone else’s life. Aethiopes kicks off with “Asylum,” an auto-fiction of his Zimbabwean childhood and one of his most direct, song-length narratives — a memory palace ringed literally and figuratively in barbed wire. On the next track, “No Hard Feelings,” he’s jump cut to adulthood in that some-American-city-some-time-in-the-late-20th-century I spoke on.
What’s drawn from life and what’s off the dome? We don’t know and it doesn’t matter. Never told the truth in your life, can’t start now. He’s drawing these more sharply but at greater length than he used to (a verse, a whole cut rather than a couple of bars, or a line folded in amongst others in a song on many themes) — like his verse on “Sauvage,” a sketch of high school years as sharp and tight and unforgiving as one of Leonard Michaels’ stories out of I Would Have Saved Them If I Could.
But his work’s also become far more openly autobiographical (or at least autofictionbiographical) — on his parents of Caribbean and Zimbabwean descent (both of them born in colonial countries that no longer exist), his childhood in the newly-minted Zimbabwe, teenage and adult years in Jamaica. And as much as I resist the lazy interpretation of artists’ work through their life experiences, his father’s death in a car crash hovers over this record and Church.
This plays out heavily on “Christine” — it’s a Robert Johnson song, mixing that deadly accident with Stephen King’s demonic car, and The Upsetters’ “Mr. Brown”…the evil spirit, riding around town in the coffin where there is three crows on top. And two is laughing. As woods says: Now I know it was the shadow of them black wings. (And Mr. Brown, here, is also the cops—a hovering specter of death if ever there was one.)
Like one of his key inspirations, as the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera does in The House of Hunger (Marechera’s father was also killed in a car accident), woods twists this defining incident around, changes it up, comes back to it again and again in different ways. But in the end, all that matters is as Marechera puts it: “The old man died beneath the wheels of the twentieth century.”
Then again, so did a lot of people. Maybe, like woods has titled his memoir, we should let the dead bury the dead. Mr. Brown rides around town in a coffin, but we all swim in the dark.
