Paul Thompson goes hard like Old Testament God. Billy woods never shows his face. Understandably, it can be easy to forget that the enigmatic rapper has been a fixture in underground hip-hop for more than fifteen years now. Woods has not only an encyclopedic knowledge of politics and world history, but a knack for putting both in immediate, personal terms. The record is as visceral as it is cerebral.
When I spoke with Woods over the holidays, he was in Oregon in search of beats for his next project. He opened up about a childhood split between Africa and America, the early days of Cannibal Ox, and what really happened between him and Privilege. You spent some time as a child in Zimbabwe, correct? Was that during the revolution that led to Robert Mugabe taking power? My father was pretty much in exile during.
He had come here as somewhat of a political refugee. Zimbabweβit was called Rhodesia at the timeβwas ruled by a white minority. It was almost exactly like South Africa, the difference being that unlike South Africa, where that white minority was made up of the descendants of Dutch settlers, these were the descendents of British settlers. The British East India Company, run by Cecil Rhodes, showed up [in the s], signing contracts to exploit some of the material resources of the land.
Eventually this leads to a conflict in which the native people lose in spectacular fashion, and from that point [the native population is] pretty much subjugated. What happened then was, in the s, the United Kingdom kind of made it known that they were divesting themselves of some of their colonial possessions, and in so doing they were probably going to allow black people to vote on the course of the country.
So then the white settlers, appalled at that possibility, unilaterally declared independence from Britain. But obviously, you know, if you have an election, the whites represent ten percent of the country and are going to lose. Ultimately, South Africa brought pressure on the whites in Zimbabwe to accept a settlement, and Robert Mugabe is pressured from the other side to go to the negotiation table.
