The Salt Has Lost Its Savor :: billy woods x Messiah Musik’s “Church”
Houses of the Holy
Church follows Aethiopes thematically: how woods’ writing is refining, and working in a tighter scope — one is the epic, career-capping keystone novel but the other is a tight collection of masterful stories, very similar to how Edward P. Jones followed up The Known World with All Aunt Hagar’s Children. (Actually, I hope it’s not like that, since Jones hasn’t published anything since then in 2006.) As Jones said in a Paris Review interview:
HILTON ALS: If I was going to start writing short stories, what would you tell me to read for inspiration?
JONES: What I would do, I would start with the Bible. Not for any religious reasons, but for all the stories. I mean, you have Lot. And an angel comes to his door. He doesn’t know it’s an angel, but it’s a visitor and you’re supposed to treat visitors like royalty. Well, the townsmen in that story come up, and they tell Lot to send out the visitor so that they can molest him. Well the visitor is royalty, so Lot gives them his daughter.
You can come up with something comparable in the twenty-first century. Hell, that’s one of the reasons why I watched those court things, when I had a TV. Judge Judy had a case where a woman took her ex-husband to court because she wanted money to pay for the burial of their son. And it comes out, in court, that the father possibly knew who killed his son, but because he didn’t want to be a snitch, he didn’t say. Now, you can see the mother’s side of it, of course. But what is it in a man that he could say, I love my son, but there’s a code. I can’t break the code. That’s the stuff literature is made of. Stupid codes where love means nothing.
Aethiopes synthesizes some of the themes woods has explored for years: the failures and betrayals of revolutions, the hollowness of national and racial identities; the lies, violence, demagoguery, genocide, atrocities, trauma. Stupid codes where love means nothing. Church follows on from that: if we can’t save ourselves in the secular, what about in the spiritual? (And…no, we can’t.)
If, as woods once spat and it’s locked in my brain, “five cigarettes says the revolution ain’t gonna change shit,” what have we got? Hope is an assassin, fear fill up the casket. What’s going to sustain us? Where is grace, solace? How do we transcend our small painful lives and inevitable deaths — this desire that drives most of human endeavors? Life is short. Who am I to judge how you terror manage?
The difference between pre-revolutionary polemicists like PE or Immortal Tech and woods is that post-revolutionary cynicism — woods has lived in and seen how these states inevitably turn out, and written about most of them (wondering though when he’ll get around to penning a couple bitter bars about Daniel Ortega). And for woods, it’s all at the human level, not the billboard-sized shouts of Chuck D or Paris.
Of course, so many revolutions overlap with religious righteousness — on December 8th, Iran executed its first Mahsa Amini protestors for “waging a war against God.” And the difference between a syncretic transcendental rapper of spiritual miracles like Killah Priest and woods is basically the bologna sandwich convo which closes out P.K. Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth.
So, in this one, the narrator and his friends have been trying to overthrow Satanic Alt-Nixon by putting messages into pop songs from an alien satellite…uh which is also God. Yeah. Anyway, the state kills his love and his homies, and the narrator’s chucked into a political prisoners’ labor camp. Over stale bologna sandwiches, he and another prisoner are talking about all this:
“Did believing that, about a heavenly father, get them anywhere?” Leon asked presently.
“Not in this world, maybe,” I said.
Leon said, “There has to be something here first, Phil. The other world is not enough…because this is where the suffering is. This is where the injustice and imprisonment is. Like us, the two of us. We need it here. Now.”
Said he had a vision, said we in a prison. There’s no god in woods’ whirlwinds. He hid while they went in the Ark. “Brother started on that Malachi Z…” — yeah fam, the Man from Planet Rizq can’t save you. He fell to earth and is doing a child molestation bid until 2120. Mayans never counted to there. You building pyramids in upstate New York? Please man, let me eat my breakfast.
Just as Kongi’s Harvest samples unite Aethiopes, Church peppers the stew with William Branham, a Cecil Rhodes to Kongi’s Mugabe. And there’s the sea again with the “Artichoke” to “Swampwater” segue of his sermon on Psalm 42:7: The deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts. All thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.
That is, a place so pure you’re consumed by the presence of God, in perfect communion, a breakthrough of the spirit, a rapture. Step into a world.
Branham was a major Pentecostal faith healer who wanted to bring a direct, personal experience of God, and by the ’50s was pulling in audiences of hundreds of thousands. But, see, this is also one of woods’ sly little reference jokes: Branham was baptized and ordained by the National Imperial Wizard of the KKK. He was big on ‘serpent seed’ theory: that Eve and the snake fucked and that’s where Cain comes from — there’s two races descended from him and Abel, one destined to be damned and one which will reach eternal life. All human history is a conflict between these two races. And: there’s ‘washing the Ethiopian white’ again.
Not only that, but Branham executive produced Jim Jones — you know, the People’s Temple Kool Aid guy — as well as Paul Schäfer, a similar cult leader and real piece of shit Nazi and serial pedophile who helped Pinochet torture and execute ‘Communists.’ By the grace of God, everybody else got caught.
Branham also died in a car accident. There it is.
(The rabbit hole of woods’ references is often educational or adds new layers, like the Shining Path check of Deng Xiaoping, dead dogs dangle from lampposts. But other times I hit ends like Chengdu Taste, crosstown, midday, I defy the establishment — not a deep dive Cultural Revolution atrocity, it’s…a Chinese restaurant in LA he probably went to with Alchemist. Real Susan Sontag Against Interpretation hours fam. Sometimes a wonton is just a wonton.)
Religion is also the ultimate flattening of time — into infinity, destinies, the here-before and the hereafter. Moorish Science entanglement tangents: Noble Drew Ali, like so many other prophets, was meant to be an Auerbach figura — Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Confucius, Noah all just reincarnations of each other. Imagining communities across millennia with alleged origins and unquestioned fairy-tale lineages: Asiatics, children of Cain, Nuwabians, Yacubians, whatever. It’s just more constructed identities to separate the true believers from the rest. Who is he talking about in the chorus of “NYNEX?” Said he had a vision, said he had a system; said he was the one true and living, said he had a mission: Which saviour is this? All of them.
If you can’t trust false prophets — and you definitely don’t want to go in for a cat like Branham — who’s saving us? Look, it’s not some big reveal what the rock is woods builds his church on; it’s weed. The solution to (and not cause of) all of life’s problems is: weed. It’s why we say get high, get lifted. C’mon son. He lays it out on the sixth lyric of the album: gave me the plug like a stock tip / I found religion, I’m a prophet.
OK, it’s not just that, but it’s a major throughline on the record so let’s just highlight it and move on. Because there’s other ways he finds to pull me in the sky, it’s the rapture. (Mostly though, the answer is: weed.)
Respect The Architect
Let’s give the beats their due though. There are a handful of top secret weapon producers; Messiah Musik and Preservation are two of them. (Wait, I mean music producers who are top secret weapons, not…OK, you know what I mean.)
I don’t know from beatmaking, but I’m pretty sure this is how Messiah made the beats on this record: using actual weed stems, literal stabs with broken screwdrivers, voices of ghost soul singers captured on paranormal wire recordings, melted-down fatbergs dredged from the sewers of Megacity One. Maybe chaining a horn player in his basement only fed on Soylent Yellow dissolved in Fukushima water. IT GIVES ME MOURNFUL SAMPLES OR IT GETS THE HOSE AGAIN. Maybe he heard Shabazz Palaces’ “32 Leaves Dipped In Blackness Making Clouds Forming Altered Carbon” and thought the title was a recipe.
Maybe MM’s working theory was: smoke clouds from bombed buildings are architecture in gaseous form. Maybe woods showed him Alexander Richter’s cover photo of rusty I-beams holding up an apartment block, simultaneously rising to the heavens while held down to this cursed earth, and said “I want beats like this.” But as with Aethiopes, it’s a clear collab where he’s mixed a muddy palette for woods to rhyme on — a Messiah Muse Sick N Hour Mess Age.
One thing the beats highlight is the overall miasma of a poisoned world, a Sunken Place…there’s a UBIKuitous entropy rotting away at things across both records: the cold fryer full of grease on “Doldrums,” the ruins of ancient civilizations, crumbling house and the breasts full of rancid milk on “Haarlem”…I let things fall apart, motorcars rusting in the garage…the coal-fired stove and the weeds overgrown on “Artichoke,” the cold stove of “Fever Grass,” granny’s Raid-smelling apartment with no hot water on “All Jokes Aside.” I let things fall apart, motorcars rustin’ in the garage. And everywhere, poison: we was raised on Paraquat — a poisonous herbicide the US sprayed on Mexican cannabis fields in the ’70s.
Pruitt-Igoe
Another woods type beat interlude: Pruitt-Igoe was a St. Louis housing project designed in two segregated towers, but the white people never moved in. By the ’60s, it was notorious as an impoverished, broken and deteriorated ruin, collapsing under neglect and policies of inhumanity. It was dynamited live on national TV; you’ll remember the iconic footage from Koyaanisqatsi depending on how high you were when you watched it. (You kids still get high and watch Koyaanisqatsi, right?) You should read the long version of this story over on Protean.
But in the ’50s and ’60s, the Army secretly sprayed chemicals into and around the complex to simulate and study how nuclear fallout would spread — and lied and covered up what was in those clouds. Radium? Flourescent particles? Zinc and cadmium? They used buildings full of Black people as laboratories to predict the effects of the Cold War going hot. Mapping a future of apocalyptic death in their imaginations, on graph paper. Architecture in gaseous form.
In 2001, in a Department of Defense storage unit, were found envelopes full of thousands and thousands of baby teeth. Maybe collected for those atomic fallout studies. Maybe collected to study Strontium 90 moving through the food chain. There’s another hidden history for you, like all the other genocides and experiments and atrocities woods buries in his work. And there’s those teeth again, more secret trophies. Whitey hit Hiroshima, then he doubled back.
The year after Pruitt-Igoe was demolished on film, Soylent Green was released, spinning that real madness of poisoned concrete invisible prisons and secret scientific government conspiracies into an imagined future. It’s the third of Charlton Heston’s “Last Angry White Man” trilogy, sci-fi nightmares from the late ’60s subconscious: Planet of the Apes (aka Fear of a Black Planet) The Omega Man (what if everyone died except one righteous white guy and the Manson Family), and this one, which is basically All The President’s Cannibals overlaid with the Future Shock overpopulation fear obsession of the era (because…all those Indians, Chinese and Africans having too many babies. The ravenous hordes from houses of hunger.) So, everything white America was afraid of: civil rights, hippies, and the non-white rising nations of the rest of the world.
Soylent Green takes place in New York City, so overcrowded families are living in cars, lining up for food and water distribution. Climate change has made it sweltering hot all year round. The power goes in and out and nothing works. The rich live in guarded towers in Chelsea with fresh food (and uh…live-in hookers). The ocean’s dying, the plankton’s dying. This film takes place in the far-off future year of…2022.
No need for cannibal tours, Soylent Green’s delivered on Tuesdays. Crackers made out of crackers. (You think the government wouldn’t? They’ll spray you with toxic clouds to beta-test nuclear war then ask for your children’s teeth.)
Some of its key scenes take place in a church, which is a crammed homeless shelter, no longer a place of worship. The priest is sweaty, glassy-eyed: one of the higher-ups who’s put the Soylent Green program in motion made his confession, and he’s haunted insane by what he knows:
Priest: I can’t help you. Forgive me. It’s destroying me.
Charlton Heston: What is?
Priest: The truth.
Cop Heston: The truth Simonson told you?
Priest: All truth.
It’s a grimy, sweaty, hopeless, collapsing world where the Holocaust’s been repurposed as a SNAP program. For all its rep as a Twilight Zone-twist film, it’s sad and mournful for our lost, poisoned planet. It’s a woods world with Moses himself running around in circles in it. Chasing the truth that’ll kill him. All truth. Not just the one.
But: there is a small moment of beauty, of solace and happiness, which is also a real woods type beat. Heston loots some booty from the dead rich guy’s apartment and brings it home, rare and priceless treasures: a bottle of whiskey. An onion, a tomato, a celery stalk. An apple. A piece of steak. They make a feast of it. It’s one of the most moving meals ever put to film. It’s Pollo Rico in the hospital room.
Ex Voto
The songs on Church are ex voto paintings — sketches; moments, of grace and miracles. Marechera said: The lives of small men are like spiders’ webs; they are studded with minute skeletons of greatness. There’s love and pain; swamps and backwoods; as much driving as there is horseriding the desert in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, and as much loss, emptiness and wandering.
There’s more and many car crashes, circling once again around his father’s death; those that dig deep find “Once they broke open the safe / A newspaper dated March 15, ’88 / Few CD-Rs, couple pictures where I ain’t cover my face” — it’s bringing back a moment on “Toothy” off Hiding Places: “How bad you wanna know, like a box of unmarked VHS tapes / In your dad’s storage space — nobody knew about ’til he passed, they called, the payment was late / The rust flaked off when you raised the gate.” So many cars full of ghosts, HOV lane.
woods has always had bars and verses about relationships, but now he’s stretching them into entire joints across these albums which are straight-up blues songs in underground rap form: “Smith + Cross,” his verse on “Classical Music”…my baby done left me type beats. And “Cossack Wedding?” It’s “Chernobyl Blues.” It’s [extremely Rodney Dangerfield voice]: People talk about toxic relationships, lemme tell ya! She put me in the friend zone like I was radioactive! And his album-closing verse on “Magdalene” merges lanes of the blues and death by car crash. Endlessly circling these themes like that slowest-ever car chase in Godard’s Alphaville.
“Frankie,” though, is both a blues song, an auto-fiction and hitting on what woods does best of all: moments of life, moments of beauty, embedded in unique and rich detail. It’s so sharply observed, sketched in just the most essential — roll jays on Amharic Bible that she found on 113th — but that ending though:
Italian ices, Marinos
Left out til slightly unfrozen
Tiny window
Waiting for that moment
It’s those frozen icebox plums in Morningside Heights, with Dick Gregory on vinyl. For me, it’s a mad madeleine moment: nothing hotter than a New York summer, and nothing better than a Marinos lemon ice for it. And you had to wait for it to melt, just a little bit, to get the flavor. But not too much for it to turn into slush and syrup.
Just waiting for it with Frankie, and all is good. The anticipation, for that ice, for that kiss, for the rest of the summer. Goddamn son. That’s how you write.
And “Pollo Rico” has got to be one of woods’ past-and-future classic joints — sliding between the same leitmotifs of fractured blues, cryptic car accidents, failed revolutions and piles of burning corpses. We don’t know who it is in the hospital bed. We don’t know what they’re dying from. But when he drops that chorus:
Hospital vending machine
D2 is the Cheetos
New Year’s Eve, snuck in the Clicquot
…it’s his sharpest, most evocative line since “fucking with the joystick / pretending I was really playing.” You can feel the moment, smell it, taste it, touch it with orange-dusted fingertips. He shows you fear in a handful of Cheeto dust.
It’s that ability to sketch a moment in time and place in just a few words which puts woods up there with miniaturists like Chekhov or Isaac Babel, like off “Remorseless”:
Spare me the Hallmark Karl Marx
I was in the Dollar Tree break room playing cards for quarters
Stop loss posters on the wall, brick and mortar
There’s often beauty is found in these tiny moments; or at least, life as it’s lived. But as always the spectre of death moves on the face of woods’ waters — like the old men lining up for the barber’s lotion in Frank Stanford’s “Everybody Who Is Dead.” He’s made so many songs which are farewells and codas; “All Jokes Aside” mirrors “Good Night” off Today I Wrote Nothing — FUCK LAST CALL, PUT MY SONG ON — it’s like he’s always making preparations for the next life; every song, every album could be the last. I guess that’s the lesson of sudden death by car crash. And the title of that forthcoming memoir is Let the Dead Bury the Dead.
There’s a du’a for the dead which goes:
Allah, be generous to him and cause his entrance to be wide and wash him with water and snow and hail. Cleanse him of his sins as white cloth is cleansed of stains.
Or as Roc Marci said: Fresh dressed from head to toe — in fine funeral raiments. On with the show, we used to play the corner for dough. Rain…hail…snow.
Hope it’s nothing but hoes in paradise. Hope it’s nothing but love in paradise.
During a particularly good interview on Nobells, woods pulls a quote from James Baldwin:
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death — ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.
So we need to push D2 and enjoy those Cheetos. In a hospital room full of flowers, I plucked the best one.
This past June, in a Johannesburg shebeen, twenty one teenagers celebrating the end of exams mysteriously died. They weren’t killed or poisoned or crushed apparently. They just…died. The party had been promoted as a ‘kuzofiwa,’ slang for ‘it’s going to be a great time,’ but has a literal isiXhosa translation of ‘there’s going to be death.’
Six months on, it’s still not clear what killed them. The Minister of Police said:
They died as they danced. They danced and fell and died, literally. And they were pushed to the side and others kept dancing.
