Is that stylistic shift for the best? That’s tough to say - I like Maps, but it’s probably the least compelling woods has sounded to me, at least within the last five years. Is that because this album is one of the rapper’s most palatable and least challenging listens, or is it because of something else entirely? On paper, I like the idea of getting to hear him relent a little bit from the near-constant angst and anxiety that typifies most of his work, and Segal, one of the most talented (as well as underrated) producers working today, seems like the right guy to help facilitate that shift. But in practice, I feel that Maps sounds somewhat like billy woods fighting a lot of his natural creative instincts simply because he knows he can’t remake Aethiopes or Hiding Places and continue to be on the cutting edge of where hip hop is moving.

Single ‘FaceTime’ with Sam T. Herring underlines Woods as one of rap’s great storytellers. On it, he grumbles through a hotel lobby, thinking of home. Spoilt rich-kid festival-goers spill out of the hallways while he waits for his phone to ping. Then there’s ‘Hangman’, a painting of dread that digs into what stops him from getting comfortable with success: “any day could be the day they frog-march you in manacles.”Later in college, he was reintroduced to vinyl. “There were kids who’d get a turntable and steal their parents’ records. There were these older kids, and I used to go smoke weed in their room and they had reggae, roots and dub records”. Although Company Flow’s Funcrusher Plus was a hugely formative album for me too, I’m going to say this release because we’re talking about vinyl. I first encountered this record in college when I met this kid from New York, who was into underground hip hop and was one of the first people I knew who really had rap vinyl. I’d never heard of them and when it was played for me, I was just blown away. I had some exposure to the underground hip-hop scene after coming to New York, but I wasn’t plugged in at all and they didn’t have a scene like that where I was coming from. Siguen y no paran. Cada álbum que lanza billy woods me hace pensar que es el mejor rapero de la década de los 20's. Aethiopes, Haram, Church, WBDTS y Maps son álbumes notables, ninguno baja del 7, este tipo puede ser para gente 'edgy' o al tipo de persona que le gusta el hip hop abstracto con diferentes significados pero sinceramente, se quedan cortos los adjetivos para calificar los trabajos de este hombre, rapero de culto, producción excelente, rimas contundentes y mucho significado literario y lírico, que mas le vas a pedir?

Around that time, someone had the single “Must Be Bobby” on vinyl. It also had the instrumental version, and it was really dope. I just would put that on and write to it–putting in my 10,000 hours or whatever. Eventually, that led to me copping the album. With The Records That Made Me, VF uncovers the vinyl releases that have influenced and shaped our favourite musicians, DJs and artists.It bridged the era of underground hip hop I was first introduced to in 1996 when I heard “Clear Blue Skies”. Meeting Vordul and knowing someone who rapped and was an incredible prodigy – suddenly five years later it had all come together. It made it all real that I could try to do this. Maps is the new album from NYC rapper billy woods and LA producer Kenny Segal, their first full collaboration since 2019’s Hiding Places. Four years after that landmark record, the duo have reunited with a vengeance. Maps is a story of the road, or roads, taken and untaken; of living the dream and dreaming of another life. It is an album about trying to find your way home, after making your home wherever you lay your head. On his own, Woods is relentless. ‘The Layover’ riffs on Anthony Bourdain and grave-robbing while sneaking in his album titles (“Before History I made fire in a cave”). You can feel your synapses firing with each uncovered connection. Maps es uno de los álbumes mas sólidos y notables dentro de un año raro y poco extenso para el hip hop, la dupla de Kenny Segal y billy woods se siguen complementando mejor y están a unos lanzamientos de ser la mejor de esta época, como no, sonido existencial, inmersivo bastante alejado del boom bap, arreglos elegantes y mucha mística en cuánto a la producción. Líricamente no analizare mucho el álbum ya que no me gusta tener que entender una lírica tan compleja y mixta como la de Billy Woods (en Aethiopes era mucho más directa), he valorado sobretodo como fluye Billy en los beats de Kenny y los beats. Maps is a giant transitional space for Billy and Kenny. Envisioned more or less like a travel log of thoughts and experiences from tours and trips and you know, this album seems like a big collection of vignettes at first. Kenny is giving Billy some surprisingly normal yet intensely detailed and textured jazzy production to hop on, and then he does just that, in his usual fashion. Yet, something is different here, no? Billy is in conversational mode on here, way more than he usually is, and it is, indeed, about the uncomfortable sensations around transitional spaces. As he weaves together his usual snappy bars, he is putting himself way more out in the open, quite in the vein of Church, but as that album looked inwards, Maps looks more outside of that. It's an album about questioning yourself, asking yourself what your humanity even means to other people, how much expectations can poison your mind, how you reflect upon change in yourself while asking if this is where you wanted to go. How much your home feels like your home after you've been gone for so long, especially if the next trip is right ahead of you, the airport gates you spent hours sitting in watching other people going through the same transitional spaces as you. You all want to get there, but you are not there yet.

Babylon By Bus es probablemente mi tema favorito del álbum, un tema de boom bap rudo que tiene una evolución en el beat cabrona, que pedazo de instrumental de Kenny Segal, primero vemos esta atmósfera tétrica con una batería sucia donde Woods te hipnotiza con su delivery monótono y luego llegamos al mejor feat del proyecto, ShrapKnel, escupe las barras de una manera directa y conduntente, por último evoluciona a un beat mas grandioso y celestial, brutal tema. The person who had found “Clear Blue Skies” in school was the same person who played me MF DOOM. I knew Zev Love X and KMD’s music and was probably 13 when “Peach Fuzz” came out. Years later, I’m in school and the dude has a couple of singles on Fondle ‘Em [Records]. The first one that hit me was “Hey!” and the B-side of that maybe was “Doomsday”. The lyrics and the vibe and approach were just totally different. In that era, there were many people just doing shit, but it was different from the rest of the underground scene. woods’ record selections predominantly reflect a transformative era in underground hip-hop which influenced his artistic growth, ranging from the initial inspiration of The Juggaknots to the euphoria of hearing his friend in Cannibal Ox on vinyl. Even to this day, he continues to derive joy from the vinyl releases of his own music. “Before you even hear your record, it’s amazing just holding it in your hands and being like ‘wow’,” he enthuses. He recalls meeting photographer and collaborator Alexander Richter thanks to mutual love of a record. “He was listening to Jeru The Damaja’s “Come Clean” single on vinyl with his window open on campus,” woods says. Exchanges like this with friends shaped many of his early vinyl experiences. “I don’t think there’s a single record on this list that I had first”.The other disc was Company Flow. That side of the record was cool too and had a song called “Simple” that starts with “the day my watch got stolen” and I’ll always remember it. It was the moment when someone I knew was really doing this. EL-P had started his own label. My good friend is involved and this music they’re making sounds crazy. This was the era when everyone didn’t have home recording systems, so I hadn’t done a lot of actual recording. I would go over to theirs almost every day on some boot camp shift and just write, listen to beats, write, smoke weed, write and record little demo things to cassette tapes. It was the first time I was really hearing my own voice. I still have a strong place in my heart for the original one. Although the Sub Verse one is what I think of when I think about the album, my heart is with the original Operation: Doomsday record. It was groundbreaking. It just upended how I thought about rap, and that was when I was pretty set that I was going to do music.

There’s a song called “Lived In The Projects” where he’s basically listing things in between repeating the words “you never lived in the projects”. It made me realise you can just you can do what you want to do. You can break rules, you can cut loose, you can talk your shit. The production was just some raucous shit. It was funny, acerbic and ridiculous, but so in your face that it also had to be taken seriously. This was another that I heard at Bond’s crib. Man, Matthew is crazy. It’s the rawest, in all senses of the word, Kool Keith album. I think it’s mostly self-produced, and he’s just going off and ranting with an unhinged rawness. It was great to listen to, and it was like alright, so you can just write and make your own rules. It’s familiar territory for an artist who’s ridiculed tasteless wealth and rap gentrification his whole career ( “I don’t wanna go see Nas with an orchestra at Carnegie Hall,” went one chorus from Hiding Places ) . His default mode is world-wise, worn out, and untrusting. But there’s greater clarity to the despair on Maps that makes it an ideal entry point for a complete newcomer.

Recommendations

Others, like “Year Zero,” which features a stunning Danny Brown verse, are spartan voids of creaky percussion and eerie synths that play up woods’ wry prophesizing. The globetrotting beats of Maps might initially scan as more conservative than the abrasive and experimental soundscape of Hiding Places, but the variety is forward-thinking. Segal understands that woods, who has gained a reputation as a doomsayer, is at his core an explorer. His beats push woods into new sonic and narrative spaces.