In late 2018, a Brooklyn teen-ager named Bashar Jackson experienced his first brush with viral fame. In a video, Jackson is standing in a royal-blue puffer vest, the same color as his BMW, arguing with the police. As the cops attempt to detain him for a reason that is not discernible, a voice out of the frame says, with increasing urgency, “Yo, look what they doin’! Yo, Pop! Yo, Pop!” The clip then shows Jackson—who was eventually crowned the king of New York hip-hop under the name Pop Smoke before being shot and killed, this past February—wriggling out of the grasp of five officers. He dodges and weaves through them like a running back, sailing down the sidewalk as they struggle to catch up.
Shortly after this clip began circulating online, Pop Smoke, who grew up in Canarsie, began to dabble in music. One day, when he was nosing around YouTube in search of beats, what caught his ear was not the monotone, mid-range trap beats that dominated hip-hop at the time but a spare, grim, electrifying beat by an East London producer named 808 Melo. It began with a stretch of melancholy violin notes, followed by a series of deafening low-end bass hits and clicking hi-hats. It had a regal morbidity and an unabashed coldness that seemed appropriate for mythmaking.
The beat felt fresh to Pop Smoke, but its style was commonplace among London street rappers. Bored by grime, the long-standing dominant rap style in the United Kingdom, these rappers had looked to the United States for ideas, drawing inspiration from music that came out of Chicago by artists like Chief Keef and Lil Durk, who, despite a pose of heavy stoicism, had a talent for writing hooks. Like its Chicago antecedents, the U.K.’s emergent scene became known as drill. Often, cross-cultural interpretations of genres can sound like hokey imitations, but London’s drill made for a bracing expression of defiance, as rappers there were under constant surveillance from authorities. In Britain, authorities can place injunctions on controversial lyrics, so musicians are forced to use slang in creative ways.
Jackson was not the first New Yorker to discover these innovative sounds. (A Brooklyn rapper named Sheff G had already used the same 808 Melo beat, in a song called “Panic.”) By the time Jackson released his version, “MPR,” in late 2018, some of his Brooklyn peers were working on their own interpretations of drill music. Together, they marked a bold reclamation of New York gangster rap, which had long been overshadowed in the mainstream by Southern styles. The subgenre was also a rejection of the cartoonish version of New York rap made popular by Tekashi 6ix9ine, a Brooklyn native with rainbow-colored hair, who seemed more concerned with online high jinks than with lived experience. And although Brooklyn drill had strong ties to early-two-thousands stars like 50 Cent and Fabolous, it also represented the future, and the way that influences could ricochet around the globe, gaining new vigor as they did.
Pop Smoke quickly became the figurehead—and the greatest commercial hope—of the scene, owing to his charisma, his magazine-cover looks, and his vocal tone, which was so low, rich, and gruff that his aunt once told him that he sounded like “he could control people.” On “MPR,” when he rapped that he needed “money, power, respect,” it seemed like an inevitability rather than like a wish or a plea. His unflinching cool was broken only by ad-libs: machine-gun trills, guttural “Baow!”s, and ecstatic interjections of “Woo!,” which hinted at a greater vocal elasticity than he usually revealed. Pop Smoke quickly transformed from local street star to radio phenom—rather than translate Brooklyn drill for the masses, he muscled it into the popular imagination.
So many young hip-hop artists have died at the peak of their success—either from drug overdoses or from gun violence—that the posthumous album has become a standard format. In early July, Interscope Records released “Legends Never Die,” a new album from Juice WRLD, a rapper and singer who died in December, of an accidental drug overdose. Juice WRLD can be seen as a by-product of drill. Born in Chicago, he came up under the local drill artist Lil Bibby. Although Juice WRLD adopted some of the genre’s hook-writing tendencies, his music often felt more like a reaction to the scene’s dead-eyed energy. A fan of emo and rock, Juice WRLD turned vulnerability into a virtue. Before he died, he recorded a bit in which he pretends to be streaming on Instagram Live from Heaven. (The clip serves as the album’s coda.)
Juice WRLD was also one of the few artists with the songwriting aptitude to turn idle cross-genre fascinations into groundbreaking pop music. “Legends Never Die” is a fully realized document of this potential. Its centerpiece is “Come and Go,” a pop-rock song produced by the E.D.M. artist Marshmello. It’s a bait and switch, beginning with a dreary, aimless synth line before abruptly shifting into an up-tempo chorus and a burst of electric guitar and hand-clapping. Juice WRLD tells of his desire to preserve an unusually promising romance: “I don’t want to ruin this one,” he sings, buoyant. It’s one of the most effective rap-rock hybrids of the contemporary era.
When Pop Smoke was killed, during a home invasion in Los Angeles, he had made two mixtapes and was making his first proper album. After his murder, his label heads and collaborators, along with 50 Cent—a mentor who executive-produced the record—worked to create a formal début that would introduce him to a global audience.
The result is “Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon.” The record, filled with chart-topping collaborators, is a buffet of ideas rather than a focussed statement, and it favors a generic appeal over regional specificity. One especially silly song, called “West Coast Shit,” produced by DJ Mustard, who has helped shape the sound of the West Coast for the past decade, features Tyga, who’s equal parts rapper and social-media punch line, known for clumsy but effective music. He and Pop Smoke exchange boasts about being in California, one of the album’s many awkward collisions between artists with only star power in common. It’s a stark contrast with the album’s most potent moment, a ferocious and joyous verse by the Brooklyn rapper Rowdy Rebel, recorded over a prison phone.
Though much of the album feels like a concession to mainstream tastes, there are also places where Pop Smoke explores new and energizing impulses. For someone whose rapping voice was a low growl, he could sing unusually well, a talent that is showcased on a number of songs that are nostalgic for an earlier era of New York rap, like “Something Special”—a heartfelt interpretation of Tamia and Fabolous’s swaggering R. & B. duet, from 2003. At times crassly commercial, the record can seem like a betrayal of Pop Smoke’s signature sound. But, more likely, it is the sincere project of a young man exploring all his possibilities. And, like many before him, Pop Smoke has become ubiquitous after his death. All nineteen of the album’s tracks landed on the Hot 100 chart the week of its release.
“Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon” was scheduled for release in mid-June but was then delayed, out of respect for the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted after George Floyd’s murder. Nevertheless, Pop Smoke was a force in absentia, when “Dior,” a single that he released last year, became an unlikely protest anthem. Pop Smoke declares, “Christian Dior, Dior / I’m up in all the stores / When it rains, it pours.” In another time, this might have been a tossed-off line about dropping newly earned wealth in high-end retail establishments. But the lyrics were transformed into a rallying cry for protesters—and for looters, some of whom were actually in such luxury stores. One video captured hundreds of New Yorkers chanting these words outside Trump Plaza. It was at once a tribute to people who had died unjustly and an opportunity to bask in the certainty of Pop Smoke’s voice. ♦
"in" - Google News
July 27, 2020 at 05:02PM
https://ift.tt/3hCLnPp
The Rallying Cry in Pop Smoke’s Posthumous Album - The New Yorker
"in" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2MLa3Y1
https://ift.tt/2YrnuUx
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "The Rallying Cry in Pop Smoke’s Posthumous Album - The New Yorker"
Post a Comment