The 2020s File Feature
Bad Bitch From Tokyo (Intro)
"Bad Bitch From Tokyo (Intro)" — Pop Smoke A Voice That Did Not Get to Hear Its Own Legacy The summer of 2020 arrived in the middle of grief. Pop Smoke, born…
01 The Story
"Bad Bitch From Tokyo (Intro)" — Pop Smoke
A Voice That Did Not Get to Hear Its Own Legacy
The summer of 2020 arrived in the middle of grief. Pop Smoke, born Bashar Barakah Jackson in Brooklyn, New York, had been shot and killed in February of that year at the age of 20, before his debut studio album had been completed and released. His death made his posthumous record Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon something more than a commercial release. It became a document of potential interrupted, an attempt by collaborators and his label to give shape to work that had been left unfinished. When the album arrived in July 2020, it debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, a position that reflected both the genuine commercial power Pop Smoke had developed in two years of recording and the cultural moment around his death.
Pop Smoke had emerged from Brooklyn drill, a darker and harder variant of the Chicago drill sound that itself had been filtered through South London influences. His voice was an extraordinary instrument: unusually deep for a 20-year-old, authoritative, and immediately recognizable on any track it appeared on. He had turned that voice into a calling card across a series of mixtapes and singles that established him as one of the most exciting presences in New York rap in years.
Opening the Album
"Bad Bitch From Tokyo (Intro)" functioned as the opening track of Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon, serving as a scene-setter and mood-establisher for the project that followed. As an intro, it carried the weight of first impressions: the album's handlers needed something that would immediately recall what made Pop Smoke's music feel distinct and vital. The track accomplished that through the combination of atmospheric production and the presence of his voice, which, even on a brief intro piece, communicated the same magnetic authority that had defined his best work.
The album was executive produced by Steven Victor and Rico Beats, with 50 Cent also serving in an executive capacity. The posthumous production of the album involved decisions about sequencing, mixing, and completion that the artist himself had no input on, and "Bad Bitch From Tokyo (Intro)" as the opening statement represented one of those key editorial decisions. Placing it first was a choice to begin with atmosphere and attitude rather than immediate commercial accessibility.
Charting on the Hot 100
The track debuted at number 55 on the Billboard Hot 100 on July 18, 2020, spending one week on the chart. Its single-week appearance reflected the nature of album-debut chart performances in the streaming era, where multiple tracks from a single project enter the rankings simultaneously and the less commercially oriented tracks tend to cycle out quickly while the more hook-driven songs sustain longer runs. For an album intro track, a Hot 100 debut at 55 was a strong showing, driven by the massive streaming performance of the full album in its release week.
The track's 6.1 million YouTube views positioned it as one of the more watched tracks from the album, a testament to the way fans consumed the project in full, treating even its intro as a meaningful piece of the experience.
Brooklyn Drill Meets Cinematic Ambition
The production on the track leaned into textures that positioned Pop Smoke's voice against a backdrop with cinematic pretensions. The title's reference to Tokyo gave the intro a sense of geographic expansiveness that contrasted interestingly with the very specifically Brooklyn sound of his work. This kind of geographic name-dropping in rap often functions as aspiration, the music reaching out beyond the neighborhood that made it to claim space in the wider world. For Pop Smoke, who had spoken in various contexts about his ambitions for global reach, it was an appropriate opening gesture.
The Brooklyn drill scene that Pop Smoke helped popularize had drawn on a specific sonic palette: sliding bass lines, UK-influenced percussion patterns, and a vocal delivery style that traded the melodic hooks of some contemporary trap for raw presence. "Bad Bitch From Tokyo (Intro)" placed those elements in an opening context that immediately signaled the album's aspirations.
The Weight of Posthumous Release
Every decision involved in Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon's production carried a weight that normal album releases do not bear. The album's handlers were attempting to represent an artist who could not make the final calls, to complete something that the artist's own death had interrupted. Critics and fans engaged with the album through that lens, and the intro track's function as an opening frame was understood in the context of an absence that defined everything around it.
Press play, and the opening moments deliver the feeling of a curtain being drawn back on something that should have had many more acts. The voice that comes through is one of the most distinctive in recent rap history, and it is impossible to hear it without thinking about the music that never got made.
"Bad Bitch From Tokyo (Intro)" — Pop Smoke's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
"Bad Bitch From Tokyo (Intro)" — Themes and Legacy
Aspiration and Global Reach
The geographic imagination of the track's title is the first thing that registers: Tokyo, a city that in American rap functions as a shorthand for a specific kind of aspirational cosmopolitanism. When artists reach beyond their local context to invoke distant cities, they are making a claim about the scale of their world, the breadth of their ambition. For Pop Smoke, who had spent his brief career making music that was deeply rooted in Brooklyn's sonic traditions, the Tokyo reference was a signal of outward orientation, a desire to claim territory in the wider global imagination even as the music itself remained grounded in a very specific cultural geography.
The tension between local and global has always been one of hip-hop's most productive dynamics. The genre's power comes in large part from its specificity; the details of place, community, and lived experience that make individual tracks feel irreducibly real. But ambition requires expansion, and the most commercially successful artists in rap have consistently been those who could hold that local specificity while simultaneously projecting into a global frame. Pop Smoke was developing that capacity when his career was cut short.
Confidence, Presence, and the Vocal as Argument
The themes of the track are delivered as much through sound as through explicit lyrical content. Pop Smoke's voice was itself the argument on any record it appeared on, a deep, authoritative instrument that communicated confidence and presence even before specific words registered. The track's intro function in the album meant that this voice needed to set a tone immediately, to establish the emotional register in which everything that followed would be heard. It accomplished that through sheer sonic personality rather than through elaborate lyrical construction.
The themes of desire, status, and self-assertion that run through the track were conventional enough in the landscape of 2020 rap, but the delivery made them feel fresh. Conventional material elevated by extraordinary execution is one of the oldest tricks in popular music, and it was the one Pop Smoke deployed most consistently.
The Cultural Context of Posthumous Art
Engaging with "Bad Bitch From Tokyo (Intro)" as a listener in 2020 and beyond required navigating the uncomfortable knowledge of the artist's death before its release. Posthumous albums reshape the emotional experience of listening in ways that no one fully controls. The voice becomes inflected with loss; statements about confidence and ambition become bittersweet; casual references to the future acquire a tragic irony. The track's function as an opening piece meant that it bore the full weight of that reframing, introducing an album that the artist never got to call finished.
The Brooklyn drill sound that Pop Smoke embodied continued to develop after his death, with a range of artists building on the sonic template he had helped define. His influence on New York rap in the years following Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon was substantial and documented, and "Bad Bitch From Tokyo (Intro)" as the opening gesture of his posthumous debut was the first thing new listeners encountered on their way into that influence.
Why It Resonated
The track resonated because it delivered the essential Pop Smoke experience in concentrated form: the voice, the production aesthetic, the attitude, the sense of a very specific kind of New York cool filtered through influences that ranged far beyond the city's borders. For fans who had followed his career from its earliest days, it was a confirmation that the album which followed would honor what they had loved about his work. For new listeners discovering him through the posthumous release, it was an introduction to an artist they would immediately want to know better, which made the context of his death that much more painful to absorb.
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