The 2020s File Feature
Hello
Hello: Pop Smoke, A Boogie Wit da Hoodie, and a Posthumous Chart Legacy Pop Smoke, born Bashar Barakah Jackson on July 20, 1999, in Brooklyn, New York, emerg…
01 The Story
Hello: Pop Smoke, A Boogie Wit da Hoodie, and a Posthumous Chart Legacy
Pop Smoke, born Bashar Barakah Jackson on July 20, 1999, in Brooklyn, New York, emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in New York drill music before his death on February 19, 2020, at the age of twenty. In the roughly eighteen months between his first major releases and his murder, he had transformed the sonic landscape of New York hip-hop, reviving a hard-edged, bass-heavy drill aesthetic that drew on both the Chicago drill tradition and the grime sounds of London, where he had spent time developing his sound. His posthumous commercial impact proved to be enormous, as his managers and label worked with his estate to release material recorded before his death.
"Hello" was released as part of the posthumous project Faith, Pop Smoke's second posthumous studio album, which arrived on July 16, 2021. The album was executively produced by 50 Cent and Steven Victor, with a variety of production and guest contributions assembled from material recorded during Pop Smoke's brief but prolific recording career. The album debuted at number 1 on the Billboard 200 in the week of August 7, 2021, selling approximately 88,000 album-equivalent units in its first tracking week, which demonstrated the sustained commercial force of the artist's brand even more than a year after his death.
"Hello" featured A Boogie Wit da Hoodie, whose real name is Artist Dubose, born December 6, 1995, in the Highbridge neighborhood of the Bronx. A Boogie had himself established a strong commercial presence in the late 2010s, with his melodic trap style and emotionally resonant lyrics connecting with audiences on streaming platforms. The pairing of the two Bronx and Brooklyn artists on a posthumous track carried a geographic and cultural weight that reinforced the song's New York credentials.
The song debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 during the chart week of March 6, 2021, at position 97, climbing over subsequent weeks to achieve a peak position of 83 during the chart week of May 29, 2021. This peak represented a milestone in the posthumous performance of Pop Smoke's catalog, as "Hello" charted alongside several other tracks from his posthumous releases that simultaneously populated the Hot 100. The song's 11-week chart run demonstrated the sustained audience interest in Pop Smoke's music in the months following his death.
The production on "Hello" was consistent with the atmospheric, bass-heavy aesthetic that had defined Pop Smoke's sound. The instrumental featured the kind of sliding 808 bass patterns and dark, dense layering that had become the signature of the Brooklyn drill sound he helped popularize. A Boogie's melodic contributions provided a contrasting texture that softened the track's aggressive production edges without undermining the sonic identity that listeners associated with Pop Smoke.
Pop Smoke's posthumous commercial trajectory was remarkable by any measure. His first posthumous album, Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon, released in July 2020, had been even more commercially dominant, debuting at number 1 on the Billboard 200 and generating multiple Hot 100 entries including several top-10 placements. Pop Smoke became one of the best-selling posthumous artists of the 2020s within months of his death, a trajectory that reflected both the genuine affection listeners had for his music and the effective management of his catalog by his estate.
The music video for "Hello," which accumulated over 212 million views on YouTube, contributed significantly to the track's extended commercial life. The video assembled archival footage and new visual material to create a tribute that resonated emotionally with fans who had mourned Pop Smoke's death and continued to engage with his music as a form of collective grief and celebration. This emotional dimension of the music video's reception helps explain viewership numbers that exceeded what the song's chart peak alone might predict.
A Boogie Wit da Hoodie's participation in the track also brought his own substantial fanbase to the song. He had previously appeared on the Hot 100 with songs including "Drowning" and "Look Back At It," and his presence as a featured artist added commercial guarantee to what was already a strong posthumous Pop Smoke release. The geographic connection between the two New York artists gave the collaboration an authenticity that extended beyond commercial calculation.
Posthumous Release Ethics and Industry Context
The release of "Hello" and the broader Faith album occurred in a context of ongoing public conversation about the ethics of posthumous music releases. Some critics questioned whether the assembled albums truly reflected Pop Smoke's artistic intentions, while supporters argued that the material was genuine studio work by the artist and that releasing it honored his legacy. The commercial success of both posthumous albums suggested that audiences were largely supportive of the releases, engaging with them as genuine Pop Smoke recordings regardless of the unusual circumstances of their production and distribution. The cumulative streaming numbers for Pop Smoke's posthumous catalog placed him among the most-streamed deceased artists of the early 2020s, a commercial and cultural reality that ensured his voice would continue to reach new listeners for years after his death.
02 Song Meaning
Reaching Out and Looking Back: The Meaning of "Hello" by Pop Smoke Featuring A Boogie Wit da Hoodie
"Hello" arrives with a weight that cannot be separated from the biographical circumstances of its release. When a song is recorded by a living artist, performed with passion and intention, and then reaches its audience only after the artist's death, every element of the recording takes on additional resonance. The word "hello" itself, as a greeting, becomes something more complicated in this context: it is an attempt at connection, at crossing a distance, that cannot be reciprocated in the ordinary way. This layer of meaning, imposed by circumstance rather than by lyrical intention, shapes how the song is received by listeners who know Pop Smoke's story.
On its lyrical surface, "Hello" operates within the conventions of New York drill, a genre that communicates themes of street-level resilience, neighborhood loyalty, and the dangers and rewards of life in the urban environments that shaped its practitioners. Pop Smoke's delivery on the track carries the characteristic combination of menace and melancholy that distinguished his best work, a quality that made his music feel simultaneously threatening and emotionally accessible. The deep, gravelly quality of his voice, a physical attribute as much as a performance choice, gave his proclamations a gravity that younger rappers with higher, softer voices could not easily replicate.
A Boogie Wit da Hoodie's contribution shifts the song's emotional register toward something more nakedly vulnerable. Where Pop Smoke projects strength and directness, A Boogie brings a melodic, plaintive quality to his sections that exposes the emotional undercurrents beneath the track's harder surfaces. This contrast between the two artists' approaches creates a dynamic tension within the song that makes it more emotionally complex than either artist might have produced alone. The interplay between toughness and tenderness is a recurring structural feature of New York drill at its most sophisticated, and "Hello" exemplifies this quality.
The song's themes connect to the experience of longing for connection across impossible distances. Whether that distance is geographic, as in the separation of street life from the kind of ordinary social existence it forecloses, or temporal, as in the loss of people who are no longer present, the desire to reach out and make contact despite obstacles is central to the emotional content. For listeners who heard "Hello" after Pop Smoke's death, the theme of reaching across distance acquired an additional, tragic valence that transformed the song's meaning without altering its words.
Culturally, "Hello" belongs to a tradition of New York rap that has always engaged with the realities of violence and premature death while refusing to reduce those realities to simple moral lessons. The song does not moralize about the circumstances that lead young men into dangerous situations; it simply presents a speaker who exists within those circumstances and who is attempting, with whatever tools he has, to maintain meaningful connections with the people who matter to him. This refusal to editorialize is one of the hallmarks of the drill aesthetic, and it gives "Hello" an emotional honesty that more overtly message-driven music sometimes lacks.
The geographic specificity of the song also carries thematic weight. New York, and Brooklyn specifically, is not merely a setting in Pop Smoke's music but a source of identity and pride. References to specific neighborhoods, streets, and social networks function as a kind of anchor, connecting the speaker's aspirational content to a specific, real world that he came from and remained loyal to. This rootedness is one of the qualities that distinguished Pop Smoke from artists who adopted drill aesthetics without the biographical connection to the communities those aesthetics describe.
For A Boogie Wit da Hoodie, whose own music frequently explores themes of love, loyalty, and the emotional costs of street life, "Hello" represents a natural thematic fit. His sections of the song extend the reach metaphor in the title, suggesting that the desire for connection persists even when circumstances make it difficult or dangerous. The Bronx-Brooklyn axis that the two artists represent also carries cultural meaning, as both boroughs have been central to the development of New York hip-hop across its history, and their collaboration can be read as an expression of that shared tradition.
The 212 million YouTube views accumulated by the track's video are partly a function of the genuine quality of the recording and partly a reflection of the communal grief and ongoing veneration that fans of Pop Smoke have directed toward his posthumous releases as a way of processing his loss. Each view is, in some sense, another iteration of the greeting the title promises, another instance of reaching across the distance that death imposes to make contact with an artist whose physical presence can no longer be experienced. In this way, the song's thematic content and its reception history have become intertwined in a way that makes the listening experience inseparable from the biographical knowledge of its creator's fate.
→ More from the 2020s File
View all 2020s hits →
Keep digging