Earl Sweatshirt once coined the phrase “mirror raps” to describe the ego-boosting rhymes he’d say to himself before leaving home. Where prayers and mantras are aspirational and assuaging, mirror raps are declarative, statements of fact. “Look in the mirror and what do I see?/Only the nigga I wanted to be,” he raps with brio on the Samiyam song “Mirror.” Yaya Bey asserts the same quiet confidence in spurts on her sixth album, a set of alternatingly cocksure and searching tracks on which she fights through her woes. “It’s a recession, they don’t say it but shit I know it is/This shit depression, I don’t say it but shit I know it is,” she reveals on the opener, weary but determined. Her mirror raps prod and nudge rather than flatter, but the bluntness is galvanizing—she still makes it out the house.
do it afraid chronicles the labor of finding and holding onto joy, swinging from cheery dance cuts to yearning R&B to slick raps. The Queens-born, Brooklyn-based singer, rapper, and producer has long straddled emotions and genres, but this record is consciously sprawling and liquid, the flux matching her wavering resolve. Prioritizing atmosphere over narrative, Yaya spends the album pushing herself to overcome her fears and hang-ups. Wherever love can be found, she wants to be there, singing its praises, enraging her haters, and “throwing that ass around,” as she purrs on “in a circle.”
Yaya helms the bulk of the production, assisted by BADBADNOTGOOD, Nigel Hall, and various members of Virginia jazz fusion band Butcher Brown. The arrangements cycle through keys, strings, and horns, with percussion that patters and sways more often than it knocks. On the dance tracks, which span lovers rock, soca, and house, the drums gain some heft and the basslines acquire a little thump, but the mood remains leisurely. While do it afraid doesn’t have the snap and verve of the more structured Ten Fold, there’s a charming coziness to its loose sound. These open-aired songs evoke backyards and block parties, the rhythms gentle as breezes.
Playing on that easygoing mood, the lyrics are often hopeful and dreamy. Her broken heart becomes a bottomless well on “raisins,” a fuzzy neo-soul joint. “Fill it up, fill it up/With everything I dreamed of,” she implores, her voice melting into the piano chords. On “real yearners unite,” she showers a lover with praise, floating over what sounds like a sample of a zither or guzheng. “As the sun sets on your skin, I can’t think of a single place I’ve been/That’s better than right now,” she swoons. These songs celebrate romance’s simplest forms: an adjacent body, a flattering glance, cuddles.
With the exception of the misfire “dream girl,” a drowsy synth-pop track, Yaya avoids the escapism that often accompanies journeys to the dancefloor. “Rent is too high, wages too low,” she chants over the tinny house beat of “bella noches pt. 1,” no amount of ass shaking sufficient to make her forget her account balance. Even when she goes home, the Man follows: “They stealing all my nights with you, but/Nothing is sweeter than your face, yeah/In the morning time,” she coos in her airy upper register on “spin cycle,” overworked but steadfast in her devotion. For Yaya, love is less a refuge and more a resource she has to work fiercely to protect.
In the past, Yaya would rap to project bravado and sing to convey vulnerability, but here she’s less binary. “I wasn’t born yesterday/Old bitches winning/I been cooking in the kitchen/Take this food for thought/Keep them wheels spinning,” she raps on “breakthrough,” her dollops of melody making her flexes bouncier. She does the opposite on “cindy rella,” the opening rap verse pleading and wounded. “The other shoe, it always drop/Why it don’t fucking give?/A bitch a break, a bitch a chance,” she says with exhaustion. In her Cinderella story, the glass slipper is as villainous as the evil stepmom.
This new fluidity pays off by the album’s end, when Yaya’s ready to take off her dancing shoes and look into the mirror. Rapping in a whisper over faint chords, she admits she’s mad at her God for the death of her father, but still chooses to trust Him, a choice she’d implicitly been afraid to make. Once she’s decided, the drums kick in and her voice shifts to a feathery croon. She’s ready to face her fears.
