Christine

Some songs announce their subject in the title and then spend three minutes refusing to deliver it. "Christine" is one of them. The name suggests a person, or perhaps a famous killer car from a horror paperback. What billy woods actually builds is stranger: a slow, slinking piece of noir in which automobiles, coffins, and inherited superstition all occupy the same seat.

It sits at the center of a record that already thrives on misdirection. Anyone approaching it expecting a straightforward story will find a puzzle with the pieces deliberately mixed between boxes.

Where the song lives

"Christine" is the seventh of thirteen tracks on *Aethiopes*, which Backwoodz Studioz released on April 8, 2022, with Preservation producing the whole album.^[2] It runs just over three minutes and features the rapper and producer Mike Ladd, and it falls between "NYNEX" and "Heavy Water."^[2] Reviewers singled it out almost immediately. Beats Per Minute called it a highlight, describing a slithering acoustic groove on which Ladd matches woods for density of obscure references, both men delivering their lines in a low, seductive, almost conspiratorial register.^[4]

That description matters because it tells you how the song feels before you decode a single idea. The mood is hushed. The menace comes from restraint rather than volume. In a genre that often equates intensity with force, this track gets its chill from sounding like someone leaning close to tell you something you will not be able to forget.

Preservation, for his part, called it a beautiful, visual track that transports the listener somewhere.^[1] woods agreed that it is very cinematic, and added that its calm stretches are balanced by chaotic ones.^[1] That push and pull is the best single-sentence summary of the song's design: a surface of composure with disorder running underneath.

The album around it

To understand why a song about cars belongs here, it helps to know what the album is about. The title is an ancient Greek term for the people of Africa, and the cover reproduces a Rembrandt painting of two Black men from the seventeenth century.^[2] woods has described the project as an examination of Blackness and Africa as both an idea and a lived reality, along with the diaspora and the notion of "the other."^[1] He has tied that interest to his own mixed background and to the way Europeans defined what Blackness was supposed to mean.^[1]

That background is not incidental. woods was born in Washington, D.C., to a Jamaican-born mother who taught English literature and a Zimbabwean father who was a Marxist intellectual.^[3] The family relocated to Zimbabwe in 1980, where his father joined the government, and after his father died in the late 1980s he and his mother returned to Washington.^[3] He also spent parts of his childhood in Jamaica.^[3] A person who grew up between those places has every reason to think about migration, inheritance, and the stories that travel with families across oceans.

Reviewers heard the same thing in the music. Beats Per Minute reads the album as a larger narrative about slavery, historical immigration, and the diaspora, with ships recurring as images of cold human behavior, and with death and violence present throughout but handled without glamour.^[4] Within that frame, "Christine" works as a kind of vehicle in the literal sense: a way of carrying the album's heavier cargo into a space that feels intimate and domestic.

The chorus and the coffin

The most revealing thing woods has said about the song concerns its chorus. In conversation with The Fader, he was asked about the track's repeated quotation, which the interviewer identified as the most obvious lyrical reference on the whole record.^[1] The source, he explained, is not a film or a novel. It is a story about a coffin that rode around Jamaica bringing misfortune wherever it went, and he connected that story to duppies, the malevolent spirits of Jamaican folklore.^[1]

The chorus, in other words, is a borrowed piece of oral tradition. woods said he has always loved it, and that it gave him a way to tie the cars in the song, which on the surface relate to vehicles that have mattered in his life or in the lives of people around him, to the album's wider concerns.^[1] He also noted that reading the cars as coffins "kind of also works."^[1]

That one remark opens the song up. A car is a private room that moves. It is where families argue, where people are taken away, where accidents happen, where journeys begin and end. A coffin is also a vehicle, the last one anyone rides in. Put the two images together and the song becomes a meditation on transport as fate: who gets carried where, by what, and at whose expense.

The title adds another layer. Most listeners will hear the echo of the famous story about a possessed automobile with a name and a will of its own. woods did not cite that source, and his stated inspiration is Jamaican, but the resonance is hard to avoid. A haunted car and a wandering coffin are cousins. Both turn an object we trust into something with intentions.

Cars, memory, and the personal

woods says the cars on the surface of the song come from his own life and the lives of people near him.^[1] That detail is worth underlining, because it explains the song's peculiar tone. It is not a horror story told from a safe distance. It reads as autobiography filtered through folklore, so that ordinary memories of rides and wrecks acquire the weight of omens.

This is a technique woods uses across his catalog. He tends to work in glimpses rather than complete scenes, offering the detail that feels too specific to be invented and then moving on before the listener can settle. The effect resembles memory itself, which rarely arrives as a tidy narrative. A color, a sound, a bad feeling in a back seat: those are the units, and the song assembles them without explaining how they connect.

Ladd's presence strengthens that approach. Beats Per Minute noted that he matches woods in sheer density of reference, so the track becomes a duet between two writers who pack their lines with allusion.^[4] Neither voice simplifies the other. The listener is left to decide how much to chase and how much to simply absorb.

Sound as storytelling

The production deserves its own attention. According to Preservation, the beats for the album took shape as woods shared the concept and the title, and he drew samples from sources as far-flung as Bali and Ethiopia.^[1] woods has described the working process as a symbiotic feedback loop, with dialogue samples drawn from a single source he had saved for a long time, and with post-production touches that built on ideas from the sessions themselves.^[1]

Reviewers repeatedly noted that the producer tied the music tightly to the writer's ideas, which gives the record one consistent tone even as guests come and go.^[4] On "Christine," that unity is audible. The acoustic feel keeps the track grounded, almost like a story told at close range, while the cinematic quality both artists mention pulls it toward something larger. Quiet and spacious sounds can carry dread more efficiently than aggression can, and this track proves it.

Other ways to hear it

Because woods has been so open about the chorus, the folklore reading is the firmest ground. Still, the song resists being nailed down, and a few alternative interpretations are reasonable.

One reads the track as a study of superstition as a form of memory. Duppy stories are how communities explain misfortune, and they often carry real histories of loss inside a supernatural wrapper. On that reading, the coffin that wanders Jamaica stands for every disaster that was given a name so that people could talk about it.

Another reads the song in the context of the diaspora. If *Aethiopes* concerns movement across oceans and borders, then vehicles of every kind become symbols of displacement, from slave ships to family cars. The coffin on wheels is simply the most compressed version of the album's argument that travel and death have long been entangled for Black people.

A third interpretation is more modest and arguably more honest: that the song is partly an exercise in tone. woods himself framed the chorus as a connective device and said he loved it, which suggests that some of its power lies in pure sound and mood rather than a decodable message.^[1] Not every layer needs a key.

Why it resonates

The critical response to the album was strongly positive. Metacritic lists a weighted average of 81 out of 100, and the record placed on several year-end lists in 2022, including the second spot at Gorilla vs. Bear and the third at The Ringer.^[2] Pitchfork gave it an 8.0.^[2] Within that praise, "Christine" tends to be remembered for atmosphere more than argument.

That is part of what makes it durable. Plenty of songs about death are loud about it. This one is quiet, patient, and a little amused, and it trusts the listener to feel the temperature drop. woods has built a career on that trust. He began releasing music in the late 1990s and founded Backwoodz Studioz in 2002, and the label's reputation grew after the cult success of his 2012 album *History Will Absolve Me*.^[3] By the time *Aethiopes* arrived, he had spent decades refining a voice that sounds unhurried because it has nothing left to prove.

A closing image

Think of the song as a drive taken at night with the windows up. The road is familiar, the passengers are people you love, and something in the dark seems to be keeping pace with the car. Nobody mentions it. The radio plays low.

That is the feeling woods and Preservation capture here, and it is why the track lingers after more explicit songs have faded. A car, a coffin, a name borrowed from fear: all of them carry us somewhere, and none of them ask where we would prefer to go. The song does not resolve that unease. It lets you ride along with it, which, as the whole album suggests, is how history works too.