Billy Woods - Gollywog

I heard an old projector spinning at the end of a reel, the tail of a finished film going round and round, slapping rhythmically. As I entered the room to see why the machine had been left unattended, I found a little boy sleeping in his bed—sweaty, restless—his face half illuminated by white light beaming from the projector lamp. I wanted to help him, but I hesitated, unsure whether you're supposed to wake someone from a nightmare or let them find their way out on their own. In an attempt to comfort him, I took his clammy hand, and as our palms touched, I was pulled into his bad dream.

"Ragdoll playing dead, rabid dog in the yard, car won’t start, it’s bees in your head." With directness and clarity, Woods threads the film back onto the reel and places us at the threshold of a boyhood steeped in neglect, noise, and danger. The home movie plays on—disorienting and vivid—with sounds and samples overlapping like double exposures. The impulse is to protect the child who brought us here, but there’s so much imagery layered together—in sound, sample, and lyric—that the boy is half-hidden by light and shadow, submerged in chaos. By the fourth track, "BLK XMAS," Woods recounts sifting through the belongings of evicted neighbors with conflicted shame: "Dolls with their heads missing, wild-eyed rocking horse, mouth carved into a frown, family photos scattered on the ground, but they not in that family, I put 'em down."

From nightmare to dystopia, the boy’s bad dream has now become my own, blurring the boundary between observer and subject—the listener becomes a witness. By the time the mother sheds tears on a repeating loop in "Waterproof Mascara," I question whether they are mine or hers. Do I have the right to cry for an experience that doesn’t belong to me? Just as I ask, the little boy reemerges from the shadows, now grown taller than me, slapping me out of my commiseration with the back of his hand and answering with a firm, "No." The grief he carries—having wished his father dead, and then watching it happen—is not a space for my catharsis. I recognize that my access to this world is through the music, not the shared experience. I cannot claim the boy’s pain as my own, but I can listen quietly—feeling the warmth rise beneath my skin, like faint metal stirring in my blood, moved by the weight of his sorrow. I can resist the urge to universalize pain that isn’t mine, and instead stay present with what the album is trying to illuminate: the harsh conditions of growing up "improperly and in poverty," and the psychic weight that accompanies it.

Woods explains how the boy received no sympathy from his mother—her tears weren’t for a child’s loss of a parent; they were for her own despair over being born into an inescapable curse. "Who else deserved these tears? I know you wasn’t thinking it was you." It is not a question—it is a correction. A cold chill washes through my body as I doubt whether I should be here at all. I was bearing witness, in sympathy; now I see this child being evicted from his own mother’s heart—an exile beyond criminal.

At the end of track five, a Japanese phrase floats through the haze: "All the things that used to be inside of me, now they’re outside, but the inside of me is empty." This expression of full resignation and withdrawal is so vulnerable it must be wrapped in the delicate gauze of this particular foreign language. A boy exiled from his mother’s heart has little chance at a normal life. And yet Woods shows us the systems at play here—the tools his mother never had, the structures that failed everyone in the story. The haunting of this album is not just personal. It scales up—from a single child’s home to a whole society’s negligence. The soundscape is the echo of his life, his family, his neighbors, all the way up in scope to societal poverty and racism. All of this magnified into the form of a little Black ragdoll called a Gollywog—once a children’s storybook character, later a British jam company mascot, now a cultural artifact of casual racism. Woods reclaims this figure as a symbol of generational curse: a seemingly harmless doll that actually stalks dreams. His use of it is not nostalgic—it’s forensic.

Just as the album expands outward—from a boy’s room to an entire social landscape—it deepens inward, pulling the listener into their own conscience. "Gollywog" doesn’t offer easy answers; it doesn’t ask for sympathy. It demands accountability. But even that word is tricky. What does accountability mean for someone like me, far removed from these specific lived realities? Maybe, in this case, it means listening without defensiveness. Feeling uncomfortable without rushing to resolve it. Acknowledging that the nightmare isn’t metaphorical for some—it’s memory, and ongoing life.

Woods turns personal history into collective confrontation. The first step in addressing systemic injustice might not be sweeping action. It might be witnessing—truly, deeply—and letting what we hear unsettle us. That’s what this album does. It doesn’t let you sleep through someone else’s pain, no matter how beautifully it’s delivered. And maybe that’s the real offering here: a record not just to enjoy, but to reckon with. Billy Woods has turned the bees in his head into a wave of dazzling sound that the rest of us are now fortunate enough to hear.