The opening and recurring sample on this track is a beautifully soulful snippet of raw human emotion and expression that sets things off on a reflective and deeply thoughtful pathway.
Yugeezy’s use of the sample here supports his clear and unwavering desire to express the sheer inner turmoil and difficulties of the moment in a passionate and slightly vulnerable way. His addition to the track offers a mellow beat and a vocal delivery that draws your attention for its rawness and its inherent emotional pain.
There’s a hypnotic level of repetition to this track that appears in more ways than one. The sample pours through relentlessly, Yugeezy’s vocals add another layer of ongoing fear and confusion, the beat keeps things moving calmly. Essentially, and quite cleverly, all of this works effectively towards representing the underlying idea of numbness. The overwhelming nature of the sounds, however mellow they appear initially, becomes so chaotic and impossible to ignore, that it results in – much like in real life, when things pile up too heavily or too intensely – a certain level of numbness. You become immune it to it all. You can end up feeling too much and subsequently nothing at all.
At just over two minutes long there’s something very honest and simultaneously fleeting about the whole experience. This repeated idea of not knowing how to feel, the anger, the inability to start things up, to escape, to express things consistently or coherently – all of this seems like an unexpectedly calm explosion of emotional energy. The more times you listen, the more you hear, and the more you connect with the words and the openness and realness that can so clearly be heard in both vocal parts.
It’s a track that leaves its mark. It’s experimental to an extent, but it also feels familiar, and somehow both comforting and unsettling all at once. It will be interesting to hear more from Yugeezy as his creativity continues to reach new heights.
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https://soundcloud.com/yugeezy/numbness
