EVERY VICTORY VAMPYRIC

A critikal-poetikal response to billy woods’ “Misery”

1.

On “Remorseless,” woods, in a moment of weakness, talked of how “these rappers’ watches look tempting,” as we’re all falterers, backsliders, each susceptible to the snazz and pelf of wealth. Too, you might be tempted to take woods’ pinching of lines from “Gas Drawls” on “Misery” as a prompt to pull quote from Das Kapital, where Marx remarx how “the vampire will not lose its hold…‘so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited.’” It’s tempting to go there¹, but don’t. One could concoct a sloppy woods commentary on the posthumous price-growth flow of the DOOM persona, but don’t. The vintage DOOM lines, simply, are the impetus for woods to exorcise the “bad dreams” and “screams” of a woeful relation. You can hear it in his disordered state—his unfixed, free-flowing rendition of the DOOM lines: his gaseous drawl, if you will. Where DOOM went ahead with “bag[ging] up screams in fifties,” drug-slanging slang to restock your oneirological inventory, woods pursues a more straightforward pathos—his “bad dream” somnolence—though he should find assurance from Shogun Assassins, knowing full well that “bad dreams are only dreams.”²

2.

woods is the “number one fan like Misery” on “Misery,” but, in practice, he’s Kathy Bates and James Caan—the fan and the famous writer; Annie Wilkes and Paul Sheldon—in Rob Reiner’s Stephen King adaptation (1990). He can be both—perp and victim—seeing as how “misery love[s] company”: no shortage of Selves.³ Resultingly, “Misery” is funky ’n’ fluxy. Mostly, though, woods finds himself on the miserable side, hobbled by a 4x4 block of cedar lumber. The object of his obsession winds up and crushes the calcanei and cuboids—all dem bones—with the swing of a sledgehammer. To use a cognate, she slays—additives for a queen & queer sense. In Misery, Sheldon is forced to write what she wants him to write. On “Misery,” woods is forced to write what she puts him through. Either way, the subject & the seductress—or the subject & the duress of subject matter—are in company with one another.

3.

Crudely, “with them titties,” she’s “never unaccompanied.” Fawning hangers-on accompany her as do personified swollen mammaries (“...before the moment’s stolen,” as Buck 65 once said). He omits the titties on the last chorus both because he’s blushing—chagrined by the initial use of the word—and feeling self-censorious after becoming too comfortable with the listeners. This happened with the chorus on “Pollo Rico,” too, where he replaced the regrettable “hoes in paradise” with “love in paradise.” The use of titties is so bawdy, so puerile, so salacious—like Too $hort or 2 Live Crew with Brother Marquis going on about big booties and big ol’ titties—it’s just too much. Between the potential “tight squeeze” in the Very Necessary pumpkin like Spinderella, to the Mapplethorpian “thumbing” for a ride, to the kink-beg of “please believe,” the whole chorus [whorus] scans sado-masochistically with flashes of Kathy Bates’ bosoms just for bonus points.

4.

“She got a lover and a husband,” we learn, and “she got a summons for sex in public.” This ain’t the only summons, though—the exhibitionist one. This is also woods’ subject summoned by her, and woods summoning us at the start of the verse. Through the SVS,⁴ we’re privy to his secret affairs. Just as there are multiple summonses or summonings, “Misery” gets inter[s/t]extual (it loves company; the Latinate com-, “with,” of a peculiar polycule; the company flowing). The anaphoric “she got a lover” and “she got a summons” invoke Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It (1986).

Lee’s debut had to have the Zora Neale Hurston title card, talking of the dreams of Man “mocked to death by time.” For Women, “[t]he dream is the truth”—as such, they “act and do things accordingly.” Nola Darling, the lead role of Lee’s film,⁵ dreams that the girlfriends of her three male suitors—some real Bitches of Eastwick, some real Weïrd Sisters—strike a match to her bed linens. One encourages, “Let’s set the bitch on fire!” When Nola wakes in fright, Jamie Overstreet—one of her partners—soothes her. “It was a bad dream, sweetheart,” he says, “a nightmare—that’s all.” Only dreams…

“All men want freaks,” Mars Blackmon, another beau, says in the film, and Whodini had already established two years earlier that the freaks come out at night. Greer Childs (Nola’s third bae) refers to Jamie, Mars, and himself as “one organism” that Nola feeds upon. “We let her create a three-headed, six-armed, six-legged, three-penis monster,” he says, sketching the sight like some intricate sigil. She’s gotta have some Scaramanga or slaughtered Lamb seven-eyes and seven-horns situation, Nola does. She’s just gotta. “Nola hurt me to the core,” Jamie concedes, “but she’s gotta have it.”

5.

woods hears the sex-in-public story, and the stories add up, framing one another, like Scheherazade (or like “Scheherazade,” a song wherein woods plays himself as Mars Blackmon). Like his overlord lady on “Suzerain” (or scissoring, as woods slurs it), “Misery’s” chick⁶ “kept a record of everything that happened” and tells her tales in “exacting fashion.” But unlike Suzerain’s insistence, the woman in “Misery” is somebody’s muse, as we witness through the song’s existence. The woman in “Misery” laughs as she tells her story, “laugh[s] from her stomach,” and woods’ subject can’t get enough—he “love[s] it.” He’s jocular, jocking her and how she is “covering her mouth.” For the duration of the song—despite its dangers posed—he’s barely keeping it together. Like the laugh he lets loose on “Rapper Weed,” the looseness of woods’ delivery on “Misery”—how he raps with ease and a five in the morning nonchalance—makes the song sound like it’s made from a self-assured scratch vocal. Only a matter of time before woods cuts a cackle that tracks with the cacchination heard at the start of Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires (1981). That opening laugh, as “The Voodoo Curse” starts spinning, curdles blood. The album cover, if you look beyond the soundsystem-freq’d fanboat, depicts a Voodoo Woman waving a skull staff and her breasts as she runs swampward. She’s not exactly “dainty like she in a painting” like the “Misery” chick, though she is in a painting. The “Misery” chick mocks woods with her laugh like Goya’s mural of masturbation, Mujeres riendo (ca. 1820-23), hanging derisively in the halls of the Museo del Prado.

6.

One story [b]leads into the next. The summons saga segues into a daydream sequence where woods⁷ imagines her “nails raking” over his skin while under a fabled “full moon.” “She came to me already wet with sex,” in estrus, he says. She moans Melvin Blissfully like the beat for “O.P.P.” because she’s of the naughtiest nature. Already, woods has seen a vision and version of her in the form of the Woman in the Pines on “Cossack Wedding.” “She came when I’m sleeping,” he rapped there, with her “breasts leaking [and] pussy unkempt.” Much like the Woman in Red watching Treach on the boob tube in the “Hip Hop Hooray” music video, so inclined to remove her leopard-print panties, soak ’em in the sink, and wring ’em out for one’s arousal.

In so many ways, the sex has already happened. In the story. In the daydream. In the song. For a particular sex scene in She’s Gotta Have It, Spike increases the tempo of the drums and the overhead cuts quicken as Greer Childs and Nola romp together in bed—that’s the pace and patterning of “Misery.” The simultaneity of scenes happening [happening scenes] and fantasies unraveling in real time.

Much of “Misery’s” lyrics are fantasies, daydreams, and desires. From her “number one fan” to the girlfriend who’s “no fan of [woods],” the illusory obsession inspired by fanaticism, from fanaticus—he’s madly, enthusiastically, excessively infatuated with her. The phantasia is the “bad dreams” woods keeps re-upping on, and they are infinite. He exposes himself and shelters, exposes and shelters, hiding behind a concatenation of concealments: the “covering” of her mouth; the “canopy” under which he hopes to cozy up; the “tangled sheets” he believes will protect him from scorn and spurn. The song is brief, but we feel the exhaustion of hiding, screening, suppressing.

7.

woods wakes the “next day” having fallen asleep with his “head on the desk.” Dead tired, he says, suggesting the {sleep|death} cousin consanguinity. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), in a diary entry dated “11 August, 3 a. m.,” Mina Murray writes, “No sleep now, so I may as well write.” And she writes of an “agonizing experience.” She writes of how Lucy Westenra, her closest companion who has taken ill and to sleepwalking, wandered off in the night to a churchyard. Mina followed and found her friend. “There was a bright full moon, with heavy black, driving clouds,” she writes, “which threw the whole scene into a fleeting diorama of light and shade.” Mina sees Lucy at a distance, “something dark” bent over her “white figure.” Alike with woods’ full moon fantasy, but Mina fears something more than “nails raking.” woods’ “bite marks on the breast” is the pitch she’s playing to. In Spike Lee’s joint, we can watch the slow, nigh-silhouetted descent of Mars Blackmon’s mouth toward Nola’s breast. But “Misery” is more curséd, more reverséd, with woods desirous to cop a feel like Klaus Kinski in Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) with Popol Vuh propulsive throbastics. He spends his night in the “Graveyard Chamber” prowling with the Grym Reaper’s rhymes rolling over his tongue: “I’m dark and damp, enough to rust amps, / With the jaws of a vamp or a rusty clamp.”

8.

The prefix mis-, as indicative of all that is wrong or unfavorable with the affair, proves “Misery” as a corollary to Mos Def’s “Ms. Fat Booty”—the memorable Aretha sample supplanted by Beloved shouting for Sethe. The accompanying titties correspond to the “ass so fat that [Mos] can see it from the front.” His lady’s in a “Catwoman stance,” penciled by Bob Kane for comic pages, not dainty like in a painting. woods, at times, feels like his Misery chick is “trying to play him for the herb.” “She’s got all the right weaponry,” Mos Def says—further riffing on what she’s got, and—inevitably—what he, or they, do not.⁸ Where “Ms. Fat Booty” is full of dialogue, woods’ song has none—we’re within the weary world of his consciousness, his subjectivity, his narration. Mos Def reframes the limits of libido and loins, too, running a fever and desperately need[ing] her. The song ends with the extremely late ’90s reveal that the object of his affections is playing “lay it down and lick me up” with “some bangin’-ass Asian,” overtly queering his text whereas woods is covert with his shit—leaving only lipstick traces, hints, and haziness for his ’2-5 rendition.

9.

Before long, woods finds himself back in reverie, detailing what it is he wants. “I wanna lay together, passing weed, tangled legs, arms, feet, / Tangled sheets, rings and bangles, whispered: ‘Strangle me.’” During the opening scene of She’s Gotta Have It, Nola Darling tosses and turns in her bed, the epicenter of her many bonds and bends. It wouldn’t be hard to embellish woods’ fantasy with touches from Mos Def—maybe the Misery chick touches on his eyelids as the room falls silent. Maybe he cocks her knees up after disentangling those “legs, arms, feet.” But tangled is very much the definitive state of “Misery.” Tangled suggests the floating/flowing nature of Time and Gender within the song.

In “Misery,” time fluctuates with the same past | present | future tense madness as Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up In Blue” (1975). Dylan’s speaker, too, woos a woman who “was married when [they] first met,” and gender bends with the same genuine dexterity as a Garielle Lutz fiction, a quality the Village Voice once referred to as “slippery-gendered.” “Misery” is a story in the worst way, as Lutz would say—knotty and playfully plaited with “verbal spikes” that “evoke emotional complexity.” These complexities encourage us to “keep on tangling with [the] wires,” to paraphrase Robert Johnson’s licentious “Terraplane Blues” (1936). We’ve gotta “get deep down in this connection.”

10.

Unlike “Tangled Up In Blue,” the narrative of “Misery” is fixed, linear—though woods fails to provide guidance as structured as Mos Def announcing scene changes on “Ms. Fat Booty” (“Scene two!”). Still, “Misery” is susceptible to perceptionist twists through the accordance of dream time and real time. But we’re mainly tangling with shifting identities and players, costumed in this disguise and that persona. We want to ask: Who are these people? Who are they really? But so does our speaker. We settle for the mystery, the misery. Because, like something Mars Blackmon says, these identities are as “dependable as a ripped diaphragm.” The subject, the speaker, of “Misery” is and isn’t billy woods—our narrator is multiple. Under the alias of billy woods, each “I” is [an]other, to bring it back to Rimbaud. The characters within “Misery” blur & shift, morph & mirror—identities become tangled. We’re no better off understanding the song’s authorship than woods is when it comes to understanding the Misery chick. We traverse this anomic world with him.

11.

Hallucinatory visions of slinking under “big trees.” woods and the Misery chick “spoon in the canopy” of Cannabis sativa the size of which Jack Spriggins might surmount—her “green room”—where he’s “candidly making small talk” in a THC drowse. The fairytale canopy bed vanishes and he awakens in the putrid green of the green room [another green world] where tumult and torpor get equal billing. woods stayed out of the green room if it was “too lit” on “Soundcheck,” but here he finds himself in more of a “FaceTime” scenario where he stills and steels himself the same way he did against the “dubstep drift[ing] in the window” from the “party outside”—all those revelers “going off during Playboi Carti set.” “Misery” is the authenticated vamp anthem; “Misery” is woods’ vampire empire.

The Misery chick’s “girlfriend’s in the band and she’s not a fan of [woods/’subject].” Nola Darling is pursued by a woman, Opal, who soliloquizes, “You’re not born lesbian or heterosexual: both traits are within us.” “We all have the potential to go either way,” she contends. woods “get[s] it,” seeing as how there’s “only so many days in a week, weeknights in a month. People, public sexers or not, can’t afford to waste time hung up on peccadilloes. For woods, his Miss Misery is “the plug” that everyone is “tryna get next to.” The stuff she’s got to offer is addictive. “I am no addict,” Nola says to a therapist when she’s accused of humping to the point of compulsion. The analysis reads her as “the type of girl giving out the fake cellphone and name,” as Mos Def describes. “Big fame,” he calls her. Overexerting herself, “out all night and don’t leave before dusk,” woods raps—the graphic overlaps of desk, dusk, and dark throughout the song read as devastation.

12.

The “dark turtleneck on the bassist” keeps the girlfriend’s bite marks concealed; “the husband keep[s] his collar turned up” for the same reason. These shroudings shout the loudest: EVERY VICTORY VAMPYRIC. The subtitle for “Misery” is Love in the Time of Collar-Up. woods’ fixation is sick. He dulls his senses by soundclashing more Scientist—“Blood On His Lips” or, even better, “Your Teeth In My Neck.” Kenny Segal gives Count Bass D meets Count Dracula brass [cosmic] blasts [s/o: Captain Rock]. “Ragged holes in my throat,” woods raps, admitting an achievement that feels like an anemic-level loss. “But I love to see those lips shiny with blood,” he confesses, skipping off and straitjacket-squatting while singing like Poppa Large: I’m Blackula—a better man than Dracula.

On “Misery,” there’s so much at stake, far afield from the silliness shared between André 3000 and Kelis on Outkast’s “Dracula’s Wedding.” And while Whodini had Dracula “killing those Bloody Marys” in the haunted house, woods finds “the emotional affair was the best—intoxicating” as Jamaican rum on “Smith + Cross.” He wouldn’t want to ruin it with sex. woods’ subverts the precept of the vampire as a menacing male figure. On “Ghetto Vampire,” Chino was a “creature of the night, unliving yet living off blood,” with his mind a “jungle full of cobwebs and tangled vines.” Those scandent stems the closest he comes to woods’ gender [dis]entanglements.

13.

“Misery’s” something-like-a-phenomenal run on /u/ and /n/ phonemes applies a pivot to the song—an oscillation of ardor and order wherein [ardor = /u/] and [order = /n/] turn (and turn, and turn…) the song pivotal. To note,

lover | public | stomach

The sounds suggest a blundering—woods’ subject dumbstruck, lock-jawed, left looking loserish with lower mandible dangling. Still, many of the /u/ phonemes partner with the /n/ ones.

pumpkin | thumbing | husband | company | accompanied | summons

The predominance of the /n/ pattern, though, suggests a wincing pain, a fang-ache, that supersedes any foolishness.

dainty | painting | tangled | bangles | strangle | candidly | band | fan | many

We might even absorb Mos Def’s “skankin’” from “Ms. Fat Booty” into this sequence, especially considering how skank’s multi-meanings ring out from sleaze to rocksteady upstrokes.

The pattern pivots back to /u/ with “month,” “plug,” and “blood,” but eventually these respective runs combine in the phrase “those lips shiny with blood.” By that point, woods’ subject is numbified and dummied out and the Misery chick is bringing the pain. The sounds mostly, substantially, come from the gut on “Misery,” which is why woods’ guess at whether she’s “taking [him] home” or bestowing him with a “platonic hug and kiss” is such a singular moment within the song. Platonic overreaches, conspires to conquer, to plod over. Linking the phoneme patterns, “platonic” actually predetermines the relationship—their Platonic Triad falls short. woods has got the truth; the Misery chick’s got the beauty, but they both lack the rectitude. Ardor and order never get congressional. woods might close with the “ragged holes in [his] throat,” but it’s the kiss “burn[ing] [his] cheek” that tells it accurate. The affair must be—gotta be—stopped. Perhaps “all eight” stops on the A-C-E will slow the wreck.

14.

And so I save this for the end. A slave ship arrives in St. Domingo. All human cargo dies, with the youngest of them, a boy—a “sable brat”—killed by his purchaser, a planter called Mr. Personne. His corpse thrown into the sea, the supposedly dead boy swims back with a complexion “dead black.” Dead tired, woods was when he fell asleep on his desk reading Uriah Derick D’Arcy’s The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St. Domingo (1819). Repeated murder attempts by Mr. Personne fail, and—flustered and floundering—Mr. Personne settles on burning the boy upon a pyre. The boy, though, “pops” Mr. Personne onto that very blaze, and the planter is summarily incinerated but, remarkably, still survives.

Mr. Personne, having “been made a holocaust…served up like a broiled and peppered chicken,” soon after expires at the news of his infant child’s death—the unfortunate victim of some supernatural “exsiccation,” “precociously sucked” while in its cradle.

Years later, Mr. Personne’s widow is wooed by a Black prince. She marries him (making that her fourth husband), and he brings her to her family’s burial ground to excavate her previous two spouses. She loses consciousness and, “at the midnight hour,” finds herself beside the grave of Mr. Personne, realizing that “her breast was stained with blood.” She has become a vampyre, but she is thrilled to reunite with Mr. Personne, summoned back from the dead. Her other two husbands rise as well, but the Black Prince “fixe[s] them to the sod,” driving stakes through their hearts “with a large sledgehammer.” Having been “fairly nailed,” the two corpse-men “lay motionless and breathless—a horrible pair of spectacles of sin and misery!”

The Black Prince who orchestrated these rituals, transformations, and perma-deaths was, of course, the “sable brat” from the beginning of the story. At the end of She’s Gotta Have It, Nola Darling pries melted aphrodisiac candle wax with a steak knife from her handcrafted headboard (a shoddy frame, really), leaving only the nails that the candles were impaled upon to project out from the unfinished pine. Nola’s unvarnished headboard join[t]s with the Black Prince’s stakes and with Annie Wilkes’ cedar hobbling block. “Misery” embodies many different “woods,” so to speak.

1. The Dumile estate has established (the coincidentally named) “GasDrawls.com,” which calls itself “the official and only direct marketplace” for DOOM merch: t-shirts, hoodies, crewnecks, snapbacks, sticker packs, enamel pins, aprons, cereal bowls, mugs, totes, slides, socks, skate decks, faux-metal masks, et cetera—purchases that do go to the dead man’s family, but add to the deluge of DOOM products flooding your feeds, mucking up the musical legacy—a morass of widgets and excess waste. Something I once called “the Jean-Michel Basquiatification of MF DOOM.”

2. He does know this, of course. See: track 6 on Maps.

3. We can add more company. James Caan, father to Scott Caan, who asked you to put your handz up with a seriously pre-Haram Alchemist for the Whooliganz—coming straight outta Beverly Hills—both attended high school alongside Adam Weissman. Through Beverly Hills High, Weissman ran a public access hip-hop radio/TV program. Alchemist hosted the aircheck. Weissman would later become Real Bad Man and feature woods alongside Lukah for “The Initiates Piece” (2024).

4. SVS = single-verse song.

5. Two years after Prince’s “Darling Nikki” (I guess you could say she was a sex fiend…), but many years before billy woods would say, “I was never anybody’s darling,” in an interview. “I know that darling Death’s on the loose,” FIELDED sings on “Suzerain,” which we’ll get to momentarily.

6. Yes, darling, it’s from Daria, “The Misery Chick,” Season 1, Episode 13 (1997).

7. Or his subject. I’m gonna keep switching and eventually get around to making a point as to why.

8. Mos even sings some Ed O.G. to feel through his frustrations: “Sweetheart, I got to have it!”