Yaeji / WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던 / 2020
WAKING UP DOWN
wearily hopeful, suspended between fatigue and gentle encouragement
A looping mantra of daily self-maintenance tasks -- waking, cooking, hydrating, checking off a list -- set against a Korean-language refrain confessing that none of it is easy and that self-blame creeps in when motivation fails. The song turns routine into both comfort and cage, repeating itself until the two languages start to blur into one exhausted, hopeful voice.
self-care as labor mental health and routine bilingual identity collective exhaustion self-blame versus reassurance
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker cataloguing her own small daily accomplishments, addressing herself and, by extension, a wider 'we' who share the same low-grade struggle; the voice is intimate and unguarded rather than performative.
What happens
The song doesn't move through a plot so much as a day, or many days, compressed into a checklist: waking, cooking, hydrating, listening, checking things off. The English verses present these as accomplishments, almost badges, but the repeated Korean passage undercuts that pride by admitting none of it comes easily and that laziness invites self-judgment. By the end the two sections start to interleave and fragment mid-line, as if the speaker's internal monologue and her to-do list are collapsing into each other, exhaustion blurring the boundary between task and thought.
How it's built
Built on a tight two-part loop -- an English list-verse and a Korean confessional refrain -- repeated with almost no variation until the final cycle, where the two sections are spliced together mid-phrase. That late fragmentation functions as the song's only real structural event, visually and sonically enacting a kind of breakdown or dissolving of the neat separation between 'doing' and 'feeling'.
Section by section
Opening verse
“I got waking up down”
The flat, almost deadpan phrasing treats getting out of bed as an item to be checked off, immediately framing survival-level tasks as achievements worth naming.
Korean refrain
This is the emotional hinge of the song: an admission that failure to keep up with these tasks gets internalized as personal fault, exposing the anxiety underneath the checklist's surface calm.
Refrain's closing couplet
The repeated reassurance that it's not too late reads as self-soothing, a quiet rebuttal to the self-blame just voiced, and it's the closest the song comes to offering comfort.
Repeated cycles
The near-identical repetition of both sections across the song mirrors the repetitive, grinding nature of daily self-care routines, where sameness is both stabilizing and numbing.
Final spliced verse
“checking down”
The two languages and sections bleed into each other here, their boundaries breaking down just as the song ends, suggesting the speaker's compartmentalized coping strategies are starting to merge or fray.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated 'I got ___ down' construction turns mundane tasks into a litany, mimicking the rhythm of a checklist and reinforcing the idea of self-monitoring as ritual.
- bilingual code-switching
- Shifting between English achievement-language and Korean self-doubt creates two simultaneous registers of the same experience, suggesting the speaker processes productivity and anxiety in different linguistic and emotional modes.
- refrain as emotional counterweight
- The Korean lines function less as a bridge and more as a recurring undertow, quietly contradicting the confidence of the English list each time it appears.
- structural collapse/splicing
- In the final verse the two separate sections are cut together mid-sentence, formally enacting the fatigue and confusion the lyrics describe rather than just stating it.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a song about the quiet, unglamorous labor of staying functional during a low period -- waking up, eating, drinking water -- recast as accomplishments precisely because they aren't guaranteed. The Korean refrain supplies the psychological subtext the English checklist suppresses: guilt, doubt, and a fragile insistence that it isn't too late to recover. An alternative reading could see the song as more collective or political, given its release amid pandemic-era isolation, with the list functioning as a shared survival script for an audience told to care for themselves while structurally unsupported; the 'we're all so down' line supports this wider resonance without excluding the personal one.
Context
Released on WHAT WE DREW during 2020, a year widely marked by pandemic lockdowns and disrupted routines, the song's fixation on basic self-maintenance tasks plausibly reflects that broader moment, though I can't confirm any direct statement from Yaeji linking the song explicitly to COVID-19. Her established style of blending hushed vocals, Korean and English, and minimalist house production is fully present here, with the repetition functioning almost like a loop-based beat even in the vocal arrangement.
Listen for
- the flattened, almost robotic delivery of the English checklist lines
- the shift in emotional weight when the Korean refrain enters
- how identical the repeated cycles are until the very end
- the moment the two sections start interrupting each other mid-word
- the use of 'we' rather than 'I' in the song's closing lines
About Yaeji
Kathy Yaeji Lee, known professionally as Yaeji, is an American singer, DJ, and producer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her style blends elements of house music and hip hop with mellow, quiet vocals sung in both English and Korean.
b. 1993 / United States
Full biography and catalogue