Pop Smoke

Bashar Barakah Jackson was born on the twentieth of July 1999 at Brooklyn, New York, the son of Greg Jackson — an African American Brooklyn local political organiser — and Audrey Jackson, a Panamanian-born homemaker. The Jackson household was working-class Black-Panamanian in the Canarsie district of southeast Brooklyn. He attended the Rockville Centre Junior-Senior High School at Long Island and dropped out in the eighth grade. He returned to Brooklyn at sixteen.

He took up rapping at nineteen in 2018 at the Brooklyn 211 East New York and Canarsie corridor under the new Brooklyn drill subgenre — the variant of UK drill production that the Brooklyn producer 808 Melo had brought across the Atlantic in late 2018. The 808 Melo production aesthetic — built on the rolling 808 bass and the half-time hi-hat patterns of UK drill — combined with the Pop Smoke vocal register of a sustained low-baritone gravel produced one of the most distinctive sonic signatures of late-2010s American hip-hop.

He recorded the single Welcome to the Party at the Brooklyn 808 Melo home studio in April 2019 and released it through the small Victor Victor Worldwide label. The single reached number forty-three on the Billboard Hot 100 and produced his decisive commercial breakthrough across the summer of 2019.

He released the mixtapes Meet the Woo (July 2019) and Meet the Woo 2 (February 2020) — the latter twelve days before his death. Meet the Woo 2 debuted at number seven on the Billboard 200 album chart.

He was shot four times in a Hollywood Hills residence at 2033 Hercules Drive in the early morning of the nineteenth of February 2020 in the course of an armed home-invasion robbery. He was pronounced dead at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center less than two hours later. He was twenty.

His posthumous album Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon — completed by the producer 50 Cent across the four months following his death — was released on the third of July 2020. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 — the only debut album of his career and the third posthumous hip-hop number-one debut album after Tupac Shakur (placed in this archive) and the Notorious B.I.G. (placed in this archive).

He is honored here as the principal voice of Brooklyn drill.