A one take session and a mixtape called Get It Off.
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Seven minutes in a studio in Philadelphia, mostly rapping. The tape is a recording session rather than an interview: the person behind the camera talks between takes, and Yasukay does the work. It opens with the room half set up, somebody hunting for a friend named Isaac and saying “I’m about to make the Ice Producer tag”, and then the booth.
The first verse is the one the video is named for. “Days I don’t rap and there’s days I don’t talk”, he says, and around it the writing is money, surveillance and the cost of living: “You enslaved by devices. Raise the gas prices for the righteous. Food staying short while my taxes go to ISIS.” The image he keeps returning to is a head that will not go quiet. “There’s a verse inside my head when I’m running through my thoughts.”
Between takes the filmer asks how he usually works. “One take.” Told he seems afraid of the camera, he shrugs it off, and the filmer says he is not trying to direct: “I’m not trying to influence you. Let you do your thing.” A second pass through the same hook ends on the line that places it, “That’s me going live in Philadelphia.”
Asked what recording it feels like, he gives the plainest answer on the tape. “recording this, lowkey just flowing through me, and I like it. It’s therapy.” He has been away from it a while, so “this is kind of like weight” coming off, and that is where the project name comes from: “That’s why the whole mixtape is called Get It Off, because I’m just I like that.”
The last stretch is two more verses and no talking. “Reaganomics got me looking for economy” runs into “I’m trying to spit a verse, trying to fix my mental”, and then the most direct thing he says all session: “I’m just happy I’ve been rapping. I’m trying to see why I can’t open up. Probably from the things that I done seen when I was growing up.” What follows is a household, quickly drawn. “Granny knocking bottles. Granddad got some models. I’m trying to find a role model.” He closes on a joke about diet and faith, “Assalamualaikum, stay away from the bacon. I keep it turkey, you heard me”, and the filmer repeats the line back to him. That is the whole video, and it ends there.
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