At the end of the title track of Pop Smoke’s posthumous LP “Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon,” there’s a lament that hit different on Fourth of July weekend in 2020.
“Look at them young n — goin’ crazy-crazy, man / them n — too dangerous / We gonna make ’em famous / the beautiful country got stars and bangers.”
The lyric, like many on this valedictory LP, is not Pop Smoke’s: it’s from Migos’ rapper Quavo, one of a dozen guests on the 19-track album. But the 20-year-old Pop Smoke, born Bashar Jackson, was shot and killed in February in a Hollywood Hills home invasion, possibly spurred by social media posts documenting his newfound success. The posthumous record arrives in a summer of seething protests over the murders of Black people by American police.
So it’s telling that it’s often up to the guests to speak in Pop’s absence here. “Rest in peace to the Pop, make me smoke ya,” rues DaBaby on “For the Night,” an elegy for Pop Smoke on his own album.
“Shoot for the Stars,” released Friday at midnight, was supposed to herald a new era of New York rap, one that refracted a hemisphere’s worth of styles through a hard-edged, noirish Brooklyn drill sensibility. Atlanta’s mournful melodies, London’s icy, stuttering drum machines — this was rap fed by the internet yet completely at home on its own Canarsie block.
But now, that grim “beautiful country” is facing up to generation after generation of violence against its Black citizens. “Shoot for the Stars,” an ambitious but scattered expansion of Pop’s sound, is widely expected to top the charts by a long shot next week. But it can’t do much more than fill in the cracks of what his life and career should have been.
Brooklyn drill, like most exciting regional sounds in the age of TikTok, has already been blown up and commercialized: a whistle-stop for stars like Travis Scott and Drake. Just days before its release, “Shoot” prompted grousing from fans who suspected that Virgil Abloh, the fashion designer, had barely even phoned in his hastily Photoshopped artwork for the LP’s cover (the final version was, indeed, much better).
Fame comes fast and hard to young rappers today. But one person who didn’t seem to struggle with a path forward was Pop Smoke. The most interesting moments of “Shoot” are when Pop shows how ready he was to move on from the tightly wound menace of the sound he popularized.
His distinct low whisper, already one of the signature instruments of rap in 2020, still sounds precision-milled. “44 BullDog” is one of the most brutal, ominous tracks in his catalog. Gunplay is omnipresent in Pop’s lyrics — “Tell my shooters call me FaceTime / For all the time we had to face time,” he raps on the hit bonus track “Dior,” but on New York streets during the police violence protests, the song became something of a rallying cry.
As the families and teams of Lil Peep, Juice Wrld, XXXTentacion and Mac Miller know, there’s no guidebook for how to assemble a posthumous record. The creative pace today is so quick, and the deaths so young, that careers are born and die all before an artist has time to refine their voice.”Shoot” was begun as a path forward, and in death it might still be — if not for Pop Smoke then for a generation of rappers who will speak of him in a country still ripping apart from gunshots and chokeholds.
