Yaya Bey : do it afraid
If we may engage in a little bit of wordplay, Yaya Bey is a neo-soul old soul. The Queens musician was born in 1990, in the same moment as that genre and related others. Maybe through osmosis, maybe through the old-school rap pedigree of her father Grand Daddy I.U., her practice and performance portray her as musically wise beyond her years. Her sixth studio LP, do it afraid, commingles elements that surrounded her during her formative period with more current extensions and developments from those.
In addition to this album’s home genre highlighted by the blissed-out “blicky” and the Asian-inflected “real yearners unite,” do it afraid successfully references trip-hop and acid jazz, dance-adjacent genres that traded sonic hallmarks as they also rose to prominence at the start of the 1990s. As a standalone single, the production on “dream girl” might feel better suited for the catalog of The Weeknd, but its sequencing alongside songs like “end of the world” and “aye noche” helps make for a safe, secure time warp.
If there is a quibble to be had with do it afraid, it’s that the sequencing and production also present the work less like a proper album and more like a mixtape. It holds both more sub-2-minute and 3-minute-plus songs than Ten Fold, stuttering its flow. In particular, some of the album’s dancier tracks could be masterworks at 4 minutes but leave me feeling shortchanged at 2. Bey can clearly hold our attention on songs that are radio-friendly, and I’d take an album of 11 or 12 consistently fantastic songs than a rollercoaster of 18.
But yeah, Bey might ultimately wear a neo-soul label but do it afraid has far more breadth—a Rosetta Stone of Black-coded musics. She easily dips in and out of rap on tracks like “cindy rella” and “breakthrough,” and comfortably stretches into hip-house production on “in a circle” and elsewhere. She enlists the aid of Father Philis to turn out soca on “merlot and grigio,” while “spin cycle” is softly dubby. Bey’s album is a happy, fierce roadmap twice over, simultaneously a sonic journey for us and about her journey through multiple facets of identity.
Label: drink sum wtr
Year: 2025
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Yaya Bey : do it afraid
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