![]() ![]() There was a brief but super Armand Hammer follow-up, Furtive Movements, in 2014. Over the next few years, Woods released Dour Candy, a full-length collaboration with the veteran underground producer Blockhead a record called Today, I Wrote Nothing, which has garnered its own cult following of sorts and a 2017 album, Known Unknowns, which details (among other things) the night two police officers staked out his performance in Montana. It had nearly heartbreaking accounts of an independent musician’s accounting and threaded psychic baggage into back-to-school clothes. That latter record was huge and discursive, with thunderous beats and ponderous dives into the supernatural. That tape was occasionally arresting, but it took until their debut album as a duo, Race Music (also released 2013) for the collaboration to truly distinguish itself from either solo catalogue. ![]() Woods, fresh off a return to solo work - the prior year’s History Will Absolve Me, his first album in eight years, was a critical darling - was reinvigorated, and Elucid was plunging into the strangest, most rewarding crevices of his style. The first Armand Hammer effort was Half Measures, a mixtape released in 2013. It’s a record that fully utilizes each artist’s greatest strengths, and stands up to any rap album released in 2017. Rome, their newest record, is also their best, a master class in style and form, and a pointed look at the grand and tiny grasps for power people make every day, from private property seizures to nationalist Facebook rants. So while both Woods and Elucid had cut their teeth in New York’s notoriously competitive underground circuit for years, it was when they came together, a half-decade ago, to form the duo Armand Hammer that they reemerged as two of the genre’s most vital voices. (Some of his formative works are available on his Bandcamp.) He, too, was putting out music in the early aughts, although many of the records came out as limited releases or were billed under a variety of collaborative names. Where Woods is often written about as elusive and enigmatic - he never shows his face in photos - reconstructing Elucid’s back catalogue actually requires much more work. None of which is to say that all of Woods’s writing is overtly political - it merely means the power dynamics between a cabdriver and his dispatcher are afforded the proper stakes and context.Įarlier this decade, Woods teamed with another New York rapper, Elucid, to form the duo Armand Hammer. At the end of the ’80s, he and his family moved to America since then he’s lived between here and the D.C. ![]() His writing, stretched out over a career that dates back to the turn of the century, is strewn with references to the former Rhodesia: His father was a political refugee of sorts, and left the country in the 1960s, before returning with his family in the early 1980s, after the country gained independence from Britain. The options for moving forward are morally gray and the machinations grind slower and slower.īilly Woods, the New York–based rapper whose 2012 album, History Will Absolve Me, had as its cover a close-up photo of a young Mugabe’s face, understands this as well as anybody. By the time this story is published, Mugabe will have resigned, finally. ![]() A speech from a major general from the National Army named Sibusiso Moyo plays on loop on television, This is not a coup. Tanks roll in unannounced and then they sort of sit there. The power struggle playing out in Zimbabwe is like so many others: brutal and opaque and a little bit clumsy, with moments of massive upheaval punctuating long stretches of mundanity. There are those who expected the 93-year-old Robert Mugabe would step down in a speech he made on Sunday, and there are those who know the general arc of these things. At the time of this writing, Harare, Zimbabwe, is in limbo. ![]()
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