AP

Pop Smoke's "AP": A Posthumous Monument to Brooklyn Drill

When "AP" was released in February 2021 as part of Pop Smoke's posthumous album Faith, it arrived as both a celebration of the Brooklyn rapper's singular artistic vision and a document of a career cut devastatingly short. Bashar Barakos Jackson, known professionally as Pop Smoke, had been fatally shot in February 2020 at the age of twenty, just as the momentum behind his music had reached a point where global stardom seemed genuinely imminent. The team of producers and collaborators who assembled Faith in the aftermath of his death worked to present his recorded material in a way that honored both his aesthetic and his ambitions, and "AP" stood among the most successful tracks on the album.

The song took its title from Audemars Piguet, the Swiss luxury watchmaker whose timepieces had become central symbols within hip-hop's longstanding engagement with haute horology. The AP Royal Oak, with its distinctive octagonal bezel and integrated bracelet, had been a fixture in rap music's visual and lyrical vocabulary for decades before Pop Smoke referenced it, but the Brooklyn rapper brought a specificity and physicality to his deployment of the image that felt distinctly his own. Where some artists used luxury brand references as shorthand for general wealth, Pop Smoke's delivery made these objects feel immediate and tactile, present in the room rather than aspirational abstractions.

The production on "AP" exemplified the Brooklyn drill sound that Pop Smoke had been central in developing and popularizing in the United States. UK drill, originating in south London's Brixton and Peckham neighborhoods during the early 2010s, had crossed the Atlantic and found fertile ground in New York, where producers including 808Melo and Rico Beats adapted its sliding, half-time rhythms and ominous synthesizer lines to a new context. Pop Smoke's collaboration with these producers created a fusion that retained the atmospheric darkness of the British template while incorporating elements of New York street rap tradition, including the boastful lyrical content and confrontational delivery style that characterized the borough's hip-hop history.

"AP" features production built around a sample that underscores the track's association with opulence and confidence. The sonic environment is characteristic of the drill idiom: slow, deliberate drum patterns punctuated by melodic synthesizer figures that create a sense of menace and grandeur simultaneously. This aesthetic had been central to Pop Smoke's sound since his breakthrough 2019 mixtape Meet the Woo, and it had proven immediately distinctive in an American rap landscape that had been dominated by very different sonic templates. The heaviness of the production served as a vehicle for Pop Smoke's baritone voice, which carried a physical presence unusual in contemporary rap.

The album Faith was executive produced by Steven Victor and Rico Beats and was released in July 2021, more than a year after Pop Smoke's death. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, the second posthumous album in Pop Smoke's catalog to achieve that distinction after Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon reached the same position in 2020. The back-to-back chart-topping posthumous releases confirmed that Pop Smoke's audience had not only remained loyal but had grown substantially in the period following his death, as listeners encountered his music for the first time through the cultural attention that surrounded the tragedy of his passing.

"AP" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 64 during the chart dated March 13, 2021, before dropping to number 99 the following week. The brief chart appearance reflected the album's album-release promotion cycle rather than an extended radio campaign, as was common for tracks that benefited from mass album-purchase and streaming activity immediately following a release but lacked the sustained radio push that would have extended chart longevity. Nevertheless, the track's YouTube performance proved more durable, eventually accumulating tens of millions of views as it became one of the defining tracks from Faith in listeners' memories.

The music video for "AP," assembled from archival footage of Pop Smoke and stylized visual content that matched the song's aesthetic, became an important document for fans seeking connection with the artist they had lost. The management team and label were careful throughout the posthumous release period to present visual content in ways that felt respectful of Pop Smoke's image and artistic vision, and the "AP" video was widely received as successful in that regard.

Pop Smoke had spoken in interviews conducted before his death about his admiration for both the drill music that had shaped his sound and the New York rap traditions he saw himself continuing. He cited rappers including 50 Cent as influences while simultaneously acknowledging the debt he owed to British drill artists who had given his aesthetic its foundational elements. This dual lineage was audible in tracks like "AP," which combined New York rap's particular form of chest-puffed confidence with the more atmospheric and sonically sophisticated approach that UK drill had introduced to the global hip-hop conversation.

The cultural significance of "AP" extended beyond its chart performance, as the track became a centerpiece of the broader reconsideration of Pop Smoke's legacy that the posthumous releases catalyzed. Music critics who had noted his potential during his lifetime used the occasion of Faith's release to reassess what had been lost, and tracks like "AP" served as evidence for arguments that Pop Smoke had been developing a sound distinctive enough to sustain a long and influential career. The song's combination of lyrical clarity, production sophistication, and vocal magnetism was cited repeatedly as exemplifying what made him exceptional rather than merely successful.

The luxury goods references that give the song its title and much of its lyrical content were part of a broader pattern in Pop Smoke's music, where material objects served as markers of achievement and identity within a very specific social context. The AP watch, the designer clothing, the expensive cars, these were not simply displays of wealth but assertions of presence and arrival in a world that had offered limited paths to either. This dimension of the song resonated with listeners who understood the symbolic weight these objects carried in the communities where Pop Smoke had grown up and built his reputation.

Among the tracks that populate the posthumous discography of artists lost too young, "AP" stands as one of the more fully realized, a song that sounds complete rather than provisional, fully inhabited by an artist who knew exactly what he was doing and doing it at the height of his powers. The Brooklyn drill sound it exemplifies continued to influence rap music in the years following Pop Smoke's death, and the track itself remained a reference point for that influence, a document of a style and a voice that arrived with tremendous force and left an outsized impression on the music that followed.