The 2020s File Feature
Zoo York
Lil Tjay, Fivio Foreign, and Pop Smoke's "Zoo York": A Brooklyn Anthem and a Posthumous Monument Lil Tjay's "Zoo York," featuring Fivio Foreign and Pop Smoke…
01 The Story
Lil Tjay, Fivio Foreign, and Pop Smoke's "Zoo York": A Brooklyn Anthem and a Posthumous Monument
Lil Tjay's "Zoo York," featuring Fivio Foreign and Pop Smoke, entered the Billboard Hot 100 on May 23, 2020, debuting and peaking at position 65. The song appeared on Lil Tjay's debut studio album, True 2 Myself, but the version that garnered the most attention and chart activity was associated with the wave of interest in Pop Smoke's catalog following his death on February 19, 2020. The song became a document of a specific moment in New York City's rap scene, uniting three of the borough's most prominent young voices at a period when Brooklyn drill was establishing itself as a nationally recognized force.
Lil Tjay, born Tione Jayden Merritt on April 30, 2001, in the Bronx, New York, had first attracted serious attention with his melodic approach to rap, which distinguished him from many of his contemporaries by incorporating more overtly sung passages into his verse structure. His debut album, True 2 Myself, was released in October 2019 through Columbia Records and demonstrated commercial promise that positioned him as one of New York City's most promising young artists.
Fivio Foreign, born Maxie Lee Ryles III on July 29, 1990, in Brooklyn, New York, was one of the central figures in the Brooklyn drill movement alongside Pop Smoke. His early mixtape work and the breakout track "Big Drip" had established him as an artist with genuine momentum, and his association with the broader Brooklyn drill scene gave "Zoo York" a dimension of geographic authenticity that went beyond simple name-dropping.
Pop Smoke, born Bashar Barakah Jackson on July 20, 1999, also in Brooklyn, New York, was at the time of "Zoo York"'s recording among the most exciting new voices in American rap. His debut mixtape Meet the Woo (2019) had announced his arrival in emphatic terms, with his distinctive baritone voice and aggressive delivery making him immediately recognizable. The follow-up Meet the Woo 2 had further consolidated his position just weeks before his death at age 20.
Pop Smoke's murder in the Hollywood Hills on February 19, 2020, sent shockwaves through the hip-hop community and the broader popular culture. He was shot during a home invasion robbery, and his death deprived the genre of one of its most compelling emerging talents. The outpouring of grief was enormous and sustained, and the subsequent posthumous release of his album Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon in July 2020 demonstrated both the depth of affection for him and the commercial strength of the catalog he had built in a very short time. That album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200.
"Zoo York" thus gained an additional layer of significance in the months following its chart appearance. A song featuring three vital young New York artists had become, for one of them, a record of what was lost. Pop Smoke's verse on the track, delivered in his inimitable deep-voiced, aggressive style, stands as one of the documents of his creative capability at its most vibrant. The song's reference to "Zoo York," the streetwear brand and broader cultural shorthand for the particular energy of New York City's underground, gave the collaboration a geographic and cultural grounding that made it feel like a genuine artistic statement rather than simply a commercial pairing.
The Brooklyn drill sound that defined Pop Smoke's and Fivio Foreign's contributions to the track drew on UK drill production aesthetics, particularly the dark, minor-key synth lines and the aggressive rhythmic patterns associated with the London drill scene, adapted to the New York context with local melodic and lyrical sensibilities. This transatlantic exchange had been building for several years and had reached a point of genuine creative synthesis by 2019 and 2020, with artists from both cities collaborating and influencing each other's work.
The song's chart performance of 65 on the Hot 100 represented significant commercial achievement for Lil Tjay's debut album cycle, and the collaboration with two of Brooklyn's most recognized drill figures enhanced his credibility within the New York rap community. His melodic style contrasted effectively with the harder delivery of both Pop Smoke and Fivio Foreign, giving the track a dynamic range that a single-style song would have lacked.
Lil Tjay went on to build a substantial career following "Zoo York" and True 2 Myself, with subsequent singles and albums continuing to chart well. He survived a serious shooting incident in 2022 that required emergency surgery, a reminder of the real-world dangers that shadow the careers of many of the artists who produce this music. His recovery and continued output demonstrated a resilience consistent with the survival themes that run through much of his creative work.
New York City's Rap Renaissance in 2019 to 2020
The period around "Zoo York"'s release was one in which New York City rap was experiencing a genuine revitalization, with Brooklyn drill artists leading a return to national prominence for the city after a period dominated by Southern and West Coast acts. Pop Smoke's work was central to this moment, and "Zoo York" documents the collaborative spirit that characterized the scene at its peak. The song's combination of the Bronx (Lil Tjay), Brooklyn (Pop Smoke and Fivio Foreign), and the broader New York cultural reference of the Zoo York brand made it a genuinely pan-boroughs statement of city pride.
02 Song Meaning
Borough Pride, Street Identity, and Loss: The Meaning of "Zoo York"
Lil Tjay's "Zoo York," featuring Fivio Foreign and Pop Smoke, operates as a declaration of New York City identity rendered in the musical vocabulary of Brooklyn drill, a genre that had arrived in the United States by way of UK drill's influence on American producers and artists willing to adapt its aggressive sonic aesthetics to their own local context. The song's title references the Zoo York brand, a skateboarding and streetwear label that had become a cultural touchstone for a certain kind of New York street identity, tough, creative, locally rooted, and contemptuous of outsider impositions.
Geographic identity is the song's central thematic preoccupation. All three artists use their verses to assert their New York origins as the source of their artistic authority and as the frame through which their experiences of success, struggle, and survival should be understood. This kind of geographic pride is a consistent feature of rap in general, where the location of an artist's formation is treated as inseparable from the quality and character of their voice. In "Zoo York," that pride is amplified by the particular weight that New York carries in hip-hop's cultural mythology as the genre's birthplace and original home.
The song's three voices produce three slightly different versions of what New York identity means. Lil Tjay, from the Bronx, brings the borough's historical connection to rap's origins alongside a melodic softness that functions as a counterpoint to the harder deliveries around him. Fivio Foreign, from Brooklyn, represents the specifically drill-influenced iteration of contemporary New York street rap, aggressive and sonically dense. Pop Smoke, also from Brooklyn, brings the deepest and most physically imposing vocal presence, a voice that sounds like it was formed by the city's concrete and its history.
Pop Smoke's participation in the song carries an additional layer of meaning that the original recording could not have anticipated. Heard after his murder in February 2020, his verse on "Zoo York" functions as a kind of testament, evidence of what the culture lost when he was killed at twenty years old. The verse is delivered with a confidence and vitality that makes its premature finality all the more affecting. The song became, involuntarily, a memorial as well as a celebration.
The Zoo York reference in the title deserves closer attention as a cultural signifier. Zoo York as a brand emerged from the New York skateboarding scene of the 1990s and carried connotations of creative edge, downtown attitude, and a rejection of polished, sanitized representations of urban life in favor of something rawer and more authentic. Invoking the name in a 2020 rap context is a way of connecting the current generation's work to a longer tradition of New York creative culture that values authenticity and local knowledge over manufactured appeal.
The Brooklyn drill aesthetic that structures much of the song's sonic world connects to a transatlantic conversation about what drill means as a genre and a cultural stance. UK drill, which emerged from south London's housing estates as a form of documentation of economically marginal existence, found its New York equivalent in artists who recognized the parallels between their own urban contexts and those of their British counterparts. The exchange between these two traditions produced something genuinely new, a form that carried British sonic innovation and American lyrical tradition in productive combination.
The song's treatment of survival and danger is implicit rather than explicit, present in the delivery and production aesthetic rather than stated directly in lyrical content. The aggressive energy of drill production, the hardness of the drum patterns, the minor-key melodic lines, all communicate that the world being described is one in which threat is a constant background condition. This is a function that the production performs rather than the lyrics alone, a collaboration between music and words that characterizes the most effective drill tracks.
Lil Tjay's melodic approach introduces a note of yearning or vulnerability that complicates the track's otherwise aggressive posture. His vocal style suggests that even within a world defined by hardness and competitive intensity, there is emotional life, longing, and the desire for something beyond mere survival. This emotional dimension, introduced by Tjay and then contrasted with the harder styles of his collaborators, gives "Zoo York" a range of affect that a more uniformly aggressive track would lack.
The cultural impact of "Zoo York" extends beyond its chart performance to its role as a document of a specific creative and geographic moment in hip-hop's ongoing history. It captures three New York artists at different stages of their careers, all connected to the city's enduring claim on the genre's imagination, producing something that reflects both the continuity of that tradition and its contemporary reinvention through new sounds and new voices.
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