"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
"And it’s crazy that people can be so into their ideology that they just refuse to look at reality. It can’t all just be “America’s fault.” People in Zimbabwe are just regular people like you and me, and they’re not better than anyone or worse. Their leaders do bad things and are corrupt, just like anywhere else. In what country in the world does one party remain in power for thirty, forty years and not become corrupt? And it’s interesting to me how easily people are still able to call on the boogeyman of the West and say, “Oh, yeah. Now forget all of the things that are going wrong. America did everything.” America does lots of things wrong. America has its own problems, and America spreads its problems around the world.
I have people that still tell me that the West caused the situation in Ukraine. And I’m like, but [Vladimir Putin] has done this in Crimea. He did this in Georgia; he did this in Chechnya. So America just did all of these? America is the reason that Russia took Abkhazia and Ossetia? They took Crimea; they took Donbas."