Tunes From The Whip: Billy Woods & Moor Mother "Brass" (2020)
Music is always better in the whip. While I have long considered CDs dead I found myself with a bind full of joints itching to be listened too. Upon picking up a commute for work I found myself really digesting these random tunes and even going back into time and burning new ones. Enter my review series Tunes From the Whip.
I’m not sure when I first heard of either Woods or Moor, their energy just seemed to seep into my consciousness and it’s easy to hear why. I’d put them up there next to any of the “great writers” of our time - or any time. No disrespect to the young lady who spoke at Biden’s inauguration, but these two should have been there. Poet laureates in my estimation, they don’t speak with ease or the plan of placating anyone. No, this is a message with depth and weight. Words delivered to cut through all the pretense and political correctness our mass market world demands, words crafted to make you feel the pain and struggles prevalent in these strange days.
The reality is that they have both been doing this for quite some time. Their consistency, patience and determination is what has forced their presence to be taken note of. I suspect I first heard their names via the always great and ahead of the curve Passion of the Weiss site. I know that the first project of Moor Mother’s I heard was Fetish Bones - a record filled with noise and soundscapes few would classify as “music” and I think I played it once and scratched my head curious as to what the hype was about. But I was tuning out at the time, consumed by my own demons and unconcerned with anyone but myself.
Woods has been crafting stellar rhymes with his partner Elucid in Armand Hammer, basically doing for the grown Juxies what Griselda is doing for the child raising boom bap set. Armand Hammer was a little easier for me to digest in my self piteous state but I still wasn’t actually trying to listen. I’d bump their latest project once, nod my head, say “hell yeah” and go back to my obligatory escape. There was no way I was actually consuming their music, just skimming through it, fooling myself that I didn’t have my own problems because I’d listened to something deep.
Alas, that was an unsustainable state and as I shifted into a focused change there they were, still making music, good music, that screamed at me to actually pay attention to as I climbed my way back into a life worth living. So I copped Fetish Bones to support on a Bandcamp Friday and got lost in the tapestries that are Irreversible Entanglements albums. Social music has been a big part of this new chapter of my life - specifically records that speak to the hiphop head in me via a sense of rhythm only inspired by those who grew up on MPC bangers. Given this direction my ears have taken these last couple years, I’ve been a little slower to dive back into Armand Hammer. It took them connecting with Alchemist to actually pull me back into their realm.
Enter Brass. The prospect of Moor Mother making a more straight up rap album was exciting. But this album is so much more than that. Sure, the vocals are delivered in the rapping tradition. But this is why genre has long been a concept I battle with. Musically this album is something else entirely. The drums knock. There’s samples and loops and sound effects. But there is truth. There is depth. There is a sense of sacredness, a channeling of lost souls, stories told from the edge that could easily be ignored, forgotten or absorbed into a clinical study to never actually be shared with anyone. This album is haunting. It feels alive and relevant as we trudge a path into a new way of living.
Numb fumblin Fats Walker
Feel like a little girl lookin up at the system
Damn, your feets too big
Reptillian heads circlin’ around the sun
New school, like eh dun, your gang sign’s weak
R.I.P. to the beat down (For the homies, right?)
I guess I’m throwing up 80 East now (That’s what they say, right?)
For the homies
-Moor Mother, “Gang For a Day”
Poured the whole bottle on the ground
Still woozy off the beat down
Grey meat inside the C-town
Quarter ki in the lost and found
‘Long with a thousand umbrellas
A hundred mismatched gloves
One solitary shoe
Peter Sellers in the club, my black face the elephant in the room
They wanna be gang for a day
We on that wire when you get waved
It’s all just talk ‘til you get paid
And even then, is what Elucid say, said
Don’t mind me, I be hearin’ the voices in your head
Don’t mind me, I be hearin’ the voices in your head
-Billy Woods, “Gang For a Day”
The list of co-creators on this album is amazing. And you hear it. There is an undertone of connection threaded through these tracks. Songs are connected by screaming and wandering horns, whimsical loops, static and chants. Gospel like harmonies ease the suffering and bridge the pain of reality with the joy of what can come if we allow art to speak for the voiceless. There are no words to capture the essence of this record, probably why I haven’t really talked about the album in this piece, but there is spirit here that transcends our simple space time continuum and can open our minds to brutal realities we so easily desire to ignore.
As I departed that Fred Meyer parking lot, prayers and blessings sent for my anonymous offenders, this album played like the sound of reason and purpose. Music saved my life. Music showed me why the state I was in wasn’t sustainable. And it’s for music like this that I strive to maintain this change. Because the world is fucked up but I don’t have to give up. I don’t have to allow the ease of hopelessness to be a reason to say peace to participating. This album is a demonstration of how music can capture the pain we all feel at times - that pain that leads us to torture ourselves into submission to masters we shall never meet. This is music to remind our forecestors that through it all we never gave up, we persevered, for the culture. Give thanks, bredren.
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