Billy Woods (stylized billy woods) is an American alternative hip hop artist based in New York City. The founder of the record label Backwoodz Studioz and one half of duo Armand Hammer, Woods does not show his face in press photos or videos unless it’s obscured by a mask or by digitized fuzz.

Genius.com makes me very sad about the state of reading comprehension in the US. Sometimes I want to tell them: “This song is about a date I went on, not the devastating toll of capitalism and racism.” They come in with preconceived ideas and the belief that a song can only mean one thing, which is the strangest way to approach my music.

– billy woods, The Guardian

Born in Washington D.C., his mother is a Jamaican professor and feminist writer while his father, a writer and an intellectual, was a political refugee from Zimbabwe who was involved in the country’s independence movement while it was still known as Rhodesia. In 1980, after peace negotiations began, the family moved to Africa and soon after his father became a member of the government who ruled the country in the 80s. In 1989, after Woods’s father passed away the previous year, they returned to Washington.

Woods began making music in the late 1990s after moving to New York to attend college and meeting Vordul Mega of seminal underground rap duo Cannibal Ox, who encouraged him to start writing and rapping. During the 2000s he was member of duo Super Chron Flight Brothers (with another rapper, Priviledge) and collective The Reavers, as well as active as a solo artist.

I don’t make music to make people feel comfortable or reaffirm all the things that they already thought. If you listen to a whole album and never had to question one of your beliefs or your opinions about the world, or yourself, then you weren’t really listening. I want to make the true believers as uncomfortable as the hardened cynics because both of them are doing the same thing: Trying to protect themselves from the true nature of this world, in its staggering beauty and its infinite horrors. I am here to plunge a knife into the gaps in that makeshift armor, so you can feel it, see the blood and know that there is no protection.

– billy woods, Brooklyn Magazine