Pop Smoke
1999 — 2020 · Brooklyn rapper; principal voice of the Brooklyn drill-music subgenre of the late 2010s; killed by gunfire in Los Angeles on the nineteenth of February 2020
Bashar Barakah Jackson was born on the twentieth of July 1999 in Brooklyn, New York City, the son of Greg Jackson, a father of Panamanian heritage, and Audrey Jackson, a mother of Jamaican heritage. Raised largely in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, he grew up carrying the mingled inheritance of the Caribbean and Central America within the fabric of a Black American childhood.
He rose swiftly to prominence in 2019 as the principal voice of Brooklyn drill, a subgenre he shaped by pairing the darker, minimal, aggressive instrumentation of British drill producers with the cadence and swagger of New York. His breakthrough singles "Welcome to the Party" and "Dior," together with his debut mixtape Meet the Woo, announced a distinctive baritone growl and an unmistakable command of the city's sound.
His ascent was cut short. On the nineteenth of February 2020, Pop Smoke was killed by gunfire during a home invasion in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. He was twenty years old. His second mixtape, Meet the Woo 2, had been released only weeks earlier.
His posthumous debut album, Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon, guided into being by fellow New Yorker 50 Cent, debuted atop the Billboard 200, with all of its tracks entering the Hot 100. Though his life was brief, his voice defined a movement and continues to echo through the streets that raised him. May he be remembered with honor.
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