It's time to get on the billy woods bandwagon

When Tolkien said not all those who wander are lost, he was talking specifically about billy woods. Across two decades worth of wonky, wordy music, wandering has informed much of the rapper's best writing. His excellent new album with Kenny Segal, Maps, wrings insights out of transitory moments. Not just the idle time spent between one place and another, though that is accounted for; it is also the itinerant lessons learned touring, the wayfaring around a foreign place seeking something, the things the road reveals about home and the things you discover about yourself in unfamiliar territory. For woods, every fleeting experience, every in-between place, has something to offer.

When he considers his years spent living in Zimbabwe as a kid, in the wake of revolution, woods had no trouble seeing his father's birthplace as a second home, even as he felt and witnessed ostracism and craved American creature comforts. "There was not a lot of interpersonal violence, but there was state violence. There was no pizza. I would spend my Christmases in New York and I would dream in 2018. "Overall, there was good and bad everywhere I've ever been." This is how he appraises every space he enters, and the way he writes: with clear, open eyes. Later, he evokes another great writer, Cormac McCarthy, and the idea of paths chosen — questioning "a reality other than the reality that is," and if such a reality existing even matters. Wandering inspires such considerations, about routes pursued and ignored, alternate journeys that manifest different versions of ourselves living different lives, even if the other you is simply eating a bagel with cream cheese every day. But woods also understands that moving forward on the path you're on is paramount.