"NYC-based rapper billy woods is a cornerstone figure in contemporary underground hip-hop. Over the past decade, his albums consistently land on year-end best lists — with his last record, Maps, featured in Pitchfork’s “Best Albums of the 2020s So Far.”
Born in the United States to an exiled Zimbabwean Marxist intellectual and a Jamaican literature professor, billy spent part of his childhood in Zimbabwe in the immediate aftermath of the Rhodesian Bush War, otherwise known as the Zimbabwe War of Independence. Having witnessed the first decade after independence — initially filled with hopes but ultimately culminating in Robert Mugabe’s ruthless dictatorship — he is brutally honest both in his personal reflections and political observations. His music uniquely conveys feelings of insecurity, dissatisfaction, and dissociation in an age where all revolutionary politics seems to have failed.
Armen Aramyan sat down with billy woods following Armand Hammer’s performance at the Le Guess Who? festival in Utrecht."
https://jacobin.com/2025/02/billy-woods-rap-zimbabwe-colonialism/
#Zimbabwe #Colonialism
#history
"In the 1970s, ostensibly leftist movements were in power in many parts of the Middle East and also were the dominant groups fighting for revolution and liberation in Palestine. And here we are now. The failure of those governments, the rise of political Islam, and the failures of the secular state in the Middle East have profoundly changed the whole dynamic. Now if you’re talking about the Middle East and resistance movements, you’re almost always talking about movements that are religious in nature. And you see the rise of political Islam and the sidelining of socialism.
Some of that is also the failure of ostensibly socialist states that just became kleptocracies and dictatorships. There’s nothing wrong with wanting and desiring revolution. But [there should be] some level of recognition that in any revolution you’re letting a tiger out of the cage. What’s going to happen after that is hard to say."