catching up on the albums i missed this year so i can throw together a favorites of 2023 list, like i used to do back in college. to the surprise of no one who’s been paying attention to him, billy woods’s album with kenny segal producing is killer, the closest woods likely will ever get to an accessible feel-good record.
i think any writer working nowadays who isn’t paying attention to rap music is missing out on what’s the most interesting development in language arts since, i don’t know, the modernists? since amiri baraka? you could argue that amiri baraka’s poetry is kind of proto-rap. anyway, if a writer isn’t paying attention to rap music they’re also probably racist.
trying to incorporate the influence of rap into literature is something i’ve always vaguely been interested in. sometimes as an exercise i’ll do a kind of automatic writing where i follow the flow/rhythm/rhyme of the words without much concern for intelligibility, coherence, etc. like i’m writing ghostface killa bars, basically. i also often fantasize about producing and recording rap albums that strive for a literary quality. billy woods is bar none the most talented and literary rapper going right now, maybe ever. off the top of my head i can remember allusions to aleksandr solzhenitsyn, william burroughs, DFW, and cormac mccarthy. a quick google search is telling me that at least one person has made the argument that billy woods is the best american writer of his generation, which i think is my generation too? all of which is to say i think deliberately drawing on him as influence will help breathe some fresh life into my writing when i’m feeling stuck, or like i’m getting lost in ideas when i need to foreground language. other rappers to think about: MF DOOM, the aforementioned ghostface, fellow wu-tanger GZA, vince staples, earl sweatshirt (who also put out a great record this year), danny brown, biggie, schoolboy q.
tangentially, listening to a lot of hip hop always makes me want to smoke weed. it’s been about 5 months since i last smoked. this year i had some weird experiences that i’ve written about elsewhere. why weed made me semi-psychotic i don’t know, and since then every time i’ve smoked it’s been hard to not be on guard, and therefore back in it, against that happening again. and while i definitely smoked way too much weed for a long time, i do miss having it as a part of my life. being stoned makes it easier to entertain unconventional ideas, it makes music food and sex more enjoyable, it helps me focus when i’m producing hip hop beats. but will i ever regularly use it again? should i ever use it at all again?
maybe i ought to try growing my own. the legal weed they sell at the dispensaries is too damn strong.
anyway i think since i’ve fucked up my newsletter so bad lately i’ll shoot to have the next one be a 2023 album list.
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