Yung Icey: Hip-hop producer from Rock Hill, SC is bringing spotlight to his hometown
Isaiah Devoe holds his iPhone in his right hand and a bluetooth speaker in his left.
“Here, I’ll play it for you,” Devoe says. His eyes don’t leave his iPhone screen. It’s a Tuesday afternoon in May, and rain is hitting the roof of his parents’ house in York, S.C., while Devoe is working to find and play the song he hopes will make him a guest at the January 2021 Grammy awards ceremony.
Devoe is a 23-year-old hip-hop producer from Rock Hill. Someday he hopes his name will be as familiar as the star football players his hometown has produced.
But on this day, he’s sitting on a couch. He’s wearing ripped blue jeans, white Nikes, a freshly-white hoodie and a fitted cap positioned on his head backwards to show off the embroidered letters above his brow that bear his stage name, “Yung Icey.”
After a few moments of searching, Yung Icey hits play. “Pray for a Key” begins.
The song starts simply: Some static and harmonic notes layer over a soft singing voice. But soon, the beat builds and transforms into the bass-heavy party song that it is, and Future rhymes about the prayers that God has answered for him so he can live the opulent lifestyle he does.
Yung Icey smiles and bobs his head.
Yung Icey helped produce “Pray for a Key.” It’s one of the most popular songs on Billboard’s once-No. 1 hip-hop album, “High Off Life.” The album is the latest project by world-famous rapper, Future, who was one of the 20 top-earning hip-hop performers in 2019 according to Forbes. The album went “gold,” or sold more than 500,000 copies, within 30 minutes of publication.
“I’m gonna put my plaque right there,” Yung Icey says with a smile. He points to a sliver of wall in the corner of the living room, underneath his college diploma from the University of South Carolina, where he majored in mass communications.
When he hangs the plaque he’ll receive for going gold, it’ll likely be the only one of its kind in the area.
“A lot of people from here feel like to do something big, from where we’re from, you gotta play football, or you gotta be good at some type of sport,” he said. “I just want people to know that, while there’s nothing wrong with that, you don’t have to do sports to do something positive, to do something big, where we’re from. …
“I want kids to be able to look at me and be like, ‘Well, if Icey can do it — get a platinum record, and be working with Future and all these artists — and he’s from the same place as me? I can do it too.’”
Yung Icey’s milestone
Yung Icey’s role on Future’s latest album is promising for the young producer for a variety of reasons.
Most notably, it expands his network into the upper echelon of the genre’s performers.
“Everyone strives for their first plaque, and a lot of producers, once they get their first major placement that does receive them a gold or platinum plaque, it usually is the start of something really big,” said Joey Walker, who’s known Yung Icey for years. “For a lot of people like myself, we’ve been hip to (Yung Icey) for years. But this would be his first introduction to millions and millions of people.”
Walker’s job is working as part of the artist and repertoire (A&R) section for Alamo Records. Yung Icey, who is an independent contractor, has previously collaborated with the talent at Alamo. Walker also is the editor for a hip-hop news site Yung Icey wrote for when he was in college.
Casual listeners to Future’s album won’t dig through the credits and read Yung Icey’s name. They might not research his other published work on free music sharing apps like SoundCloud, where his beats have been streamed over 17 million times. They won’t know that his team and lawyer are currently working diligently with Freebandz’s umbrella company, Epic Records, to figure out the business dealings of this new release.
Casual rap fans won’t necessarily see the name “Yung Icey” and see a budding star.
But they should, Walker said. And others in the industry already have.
“As much as this is a great situation, and that it’s going to open many doors and that it’s cool to get this recognition finally, I don’t see this as his biggest accomplishment,” Walker said. “I think this kid’s done so much more for so many things. He’s been working with artists. He’s breaking a lot of artists. …
“What makes Icey great is Icey. Not just this Future placement, you know?”
Isaiah Devoe to Yung Icey
On “Pray For a Key,” Devoe joins established producers TM88 and Dope Boi. And on the entire album, Yung Icey is one of 21 producers — many of whom are famous in the mainstream, like Southside, Tay Keith, Wheezy and ATL Jacob.
But Yung Icey has been associated with other prominent hip-hop names — even back when he was a tech-savvy underclassman at Rock Hill’s Northwestern High School from a musical family, sneaking time on his family-shared computer.
His parents supported him chasing his dreams, he said. They purchased his first laptop. His mother, Sandra King, works at York County Natural Gas. And his father, Pierre King, made national news and was honored by U.S. Representative Ralph Norman after saving a man’s life last year.
“All I heard was just loud music,” Sandra King said, chuckling, while reminiscing on the nights her son was chasing his dream. “It never occurred to me that I never heard words or lyrics. All I heard was loud music. And I was like, ‘I need you to turn that down. I gotta go to work in the morning!’”
Yung Icey said one of the first artists he ever worked with was Denzel Curry, a rapper from South Florida. Yung Icey expanded his South Florida network in the next few years and into college at USC. He worked with performers like Yung Semi and Shy Glizzy. He produced Yung Bans’s “Right Through You,” a breakthrough hit, which has over 5.6 million plays on SoundCloud. He started getting invited to prestigious music events, like the world’s largest hip-hop festival, “Rolling Loud.”
He heard his songs on MTV Jams. He saw his name in national hip-hop publications XXL Magazine and Complex.
He balanced managing rappers and helping them get signed to large music labels, like NGeeYL from Spartanburg, S.C., while still going to class and graduating on time.
“In certain classes that were hard or with the classes I knew I might have trouble in,” he said, “I would have to go to the professors at the beginning of the semester and be like, ‘I’m going to be missing some days, sometimes traveling to take meetings in different states. … But I don’t want to drop out of school. Can you work with me?’”
By the time Devoe graduated college in 2019, Yung Icey had a vast network from South Florida, to Atlanta, to New York.
Yung Icey and beyond
In the weeks since Future’s “High Off Life” dropped, Yung Icey said he’s been working with other artists on Future’s music label and looks to continue growing his relationship with them. He has nearly 11,000 followers on Twitter and hundreds of songs streamed millions of times across several music platforms.
He’s still constantly searching for a new sound and trying to stay on the industry’s cutting edge. He’s deeply interested in the economics of the hip-hop music industry: how the internet affects music consumption; how rap music is what he calls a “new art” that not everyone understands; how different artists find ways to fit into the hip-hop culture.
And he’s also introspective about his unique path — from the Rock Hill area to Columbia to Atlanta, where he now works.
From Isaiah Devoe to Yung Icey.
“You gotta understand, bro: I’ve been working seven to eight years for that Friday to happen,” he said, referencing the Friday Future’s album dropped last month. “You feel me? I worked seven to eight years for one day.”
He then listed times he thought he’d have to choose between school and music. When he struggled to get anyone outside his closest friends to listen to his beats. When no one knew about the dreams this kid from Rock Hill had.
“That’s what that takes me back to,” he said. “And there’s no going back to that.”
This story was originally published June 3, 2020 at 11:02 AM.
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