billy woods is an artist who defies easy categorization. He claims Washington, D.C. as his hometown but has spent nearly all his adult life in New York City. He was born in the U.S. but spent much of his childhood in Africa and the West Indies as the second child of a Jamaican intellectual and a would-be Marxist revolutionary. On the mic, woods is no less a conundrum, possessed of versatile flows and not only an ability to tackle topics other artists wouldn’t imagine, but bring unique perspectives to the familiar ones.