It’s complicated. Also find Yaya Bey. And always has been. Their last album DO IT AFRAID was about the duality of joy and sadness, and on FIDELITY the song “Forty Days” reads out the mission statement of this album: We always imagine love in an ideal way, wishing it to be an easy, carefree undertaking. But the opposite is true: “love is complicated”.
Soul and R’n’B have always been based on this dilemma, and Yaya Bey now asks whether art markets the misery of an entire community as a consumer product, whether black suffering has become a commodity. The 35-year-old New Yorker explores this thesis on FIDELITY: She addresses the death of her father, the rapper Grand Daddy IU, who died in 2022, and why too many black artists only get the recognition they deserve after their death; she reports on the gentrification of New York, which is radically changing primarily traditionally black neighborhoods; and intervenes in the increasingly uncompromising debates of the Black Diaspora.
Bey contrasts the heaviness of the content with the most elegant arrangements in which she quotes the history of black music confidently and with attention to detail. It takes us to the smoky jazz cellar, but also to the hip-hop block party; Mariah Carey memorial coloraturas are just as natural as a reggae beat or dry raps. This eclecticism is familiar from Yaya Bey, but never did it fit so organically into the overall sound and thus serve the cause, which is, as we all know, complicated.
