Losing someone close to you can feel like a rift in time. How can the sun keep rising? How can the world keep moving? The disorientation of radical alteration in sadness motivates Yaya Bey's transcendent new album, Ten Double. “My nigga left the world and the world ain't stopping,” he raps quietly on “yvette's cooking show.” The Queens-raised artist recorded the album the year after the death of her father, Ayub Bey — emcee and producer Grand Daddy IU, who was a member of the pioneering hip-hop collective Juice Crew and a towering figure in Bey's life. Funeral expenses forced her to continue working, and over the course of a year, she made music without any fixed plan. The results, whittled down to 16 tracks, are snapshots of an artist working through loss as she navigates the financial and emotional precariousness and vicissitudes of romance. It is a detailed portrait of grief that also celebrates the fullness of life.
The ripples of Yaya Bey's everyday life are small, but in her sensitive hands they are impressively resonant. Ten Double he rarely dwells in the past, choosing instead to mark the passage of time by capturing the emotions that arose along the way—sorrow, defiance, joy, frustration, pride, love. Masterful sequencing and economical writing (most songs are under three minutes) allow Bey to be as nimble as ever. After announcing the grief that “weighs” on her, she quickly wipes away her tears to celebrate her flowering in the pocket disco song “chrysanthemums.” She finds “fly shit” at the thrift store in “east coast mami” to project the confidence she needs to make power moves. Relationships wax and wane. The rent remains very high. Collectively, the album sounds like a black woman trying to make ends meet.
According to her 2022 album, Remember your North Star, Bey draws from the warmest colors of a black musical palette—Soulquarians-esque neo-soul, upbeat funk, house, and boom bap. The production, assisted by Corey Fonville of the genre-blending jazz-hop group Butcher Brown, is comfortable and relaxing. It embraces familiarity, but resists complacency. The album begins with the melancholy of “crying through my teeth”, which like its spiritual ancestor “Didn't Cha Know”, carries a world of emotion with the simplest of phrases. Where songs like “nobody knows” are released. north STAR described vivid characters and scenes, Ten DoubleHis stories are abstract, unfolding like an extended inner monologue. The spare house beat of “sir princess bad bitch” sounds like a demo, and its looping chorus (“The beautiful thing about me/Is every little beautiful thing/Is in its way to me”) sounds like the kind of made-up song that you sing to stay alive. The inward direction of affirmations allows Bey to deftly bypass platitudes: feelings emerge spontaneously and unstoppably from across the emotional spectrum. Even songs that explicitly refer to other people feel isolated, like the blossoming romance of “slow dance in the kitchen.” The sunny reggae cut has the most charming quality of a reverie or a gaze turned towards a lover.
