The producer Preservation’s beat for one of the album’s centerpieces, “Waterproof Mascara,” is little more than a bass line, wordless singing and a looped, trembling sob. Woods begins his verse describing a traumatic family scene: “Watched my mother cry from the top of the stairs, scared / When it came through the walls, I covered my ears / Half-hoping You-Know-Who would die, then he did.”
Woods lost his father when he was 11, and his family memories are complicated. “I grew up in a house with a lot of dualities, good and bad in all of the people,” he said. “I grew up with corporal punishment, which on a very basic level, the purpose of it is for children to comply or learn through fear.”
Still, “there was a lot of love in my childhood,” he said. Books figured prominently. From his mother, a writer and academic from Jamaica, it was Shakespeare, James Baldwin, the Brontës, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Bram Stoker. His father read Marx, Mao, the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney. His older sister shared Stephen King books with him — not a writer his parents would have appreciated — and Woods enjoyed the adult content (including sex scenes) they contained.
He’s currently working on a book of his own, a memoir that will not include his life as an artist. And unlike his music, it will not be independently released; he is working with a publishing house. “As of right now, there isn’t one thing written about rapping,” he said.
Growing up in a household where intense political discussion was the norm — against the violent backdrop of colonialism, liberation and, later, dictatorship — has given Woods a unique vantage on the world. The horror stories on his new album often deal with the products of history: old regimes, old wars, old racist caricatures that won’t stay buried. Historic fears take on new forms in the 21st century.
“As soon as they start to say ‘These people don’t get due process,’ eventually it comes knocking at your door,” he said. As a Black American, he added, “I’ve always felt that I and my children are vulnerable.”
