Diana

Diana — Pop Smoke Featuring King Combs (2020)

"Diana" was released as part of the posthumous compilation "Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon," the debut studio album from Pop Smoke, the Brooklyn-born rapper whose real name was Bashar Barakah Jackson. The album was released by Victor Victor Worldwide and Republic Records in July 2020, approximately five months after Pop Smoke was fatally shot during a home invasion in Los Angeles in February 2020, at the age of twenty. The album was assembled and produced primarily by 50 Cent, who had established himself as a mentor and collaborator in the final months of Pop Smoke's career, and it was released to massive commercial acclaim that posthumously elevated Pop Smoke to the status of one of hip-hop's most significant voices of his generation.

"Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon" debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, making Pop Smoke one of a small number of artists to achieve their first number-one album posthumously. The album spent multiple weeks in the top position and accumulated streaming numbers that placed it among the most commercially successful hip-hop releases of 2020. The combination of genuine grief at Pop Smoke's death, which had been widely felt within the Brooklyn drill community and far beyond it, and genuine excitement about the quality of his music drove the commercial response into territory that reflected something more than conventional posthumous release mechanics.

"Diana" featured King Combs, the son of Sean Combs and a rapper in his own right who had been building his own career alongside friendships with artists of his generation including Pop Smoke. The track was built around a sample of Diana Ross's classic "I'm Coming Out," the 1980 Motown hit produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic that had itself become a cultural landmark far beyond its original commercial context. The sample choice was aesthetically resonant and commercially savvy, connecting Pop Smoke's Brooklyn drill sound to a tradition of Black American music that carried enormous emotional and cultural weight.

Pop Smoke's voice was his most distinctive artistic asset, a deep, graveled baritone that was unusual in hip-hop's landscape and immediately identifiable. Its resonance within the Brooklyn drill sound, which he had been instrumental in developing and popularizing from its roots in the Canarsie and Flatbush neighborhoods of Brooklyn, gave his recordings a physical presence that set them apart from virtually everything else in commercial rap at the time. That voice, heard posthumously on "Diana" and across the album, carried the additional weight of loss, making every track a reminder of what had been cut short.

The album was executive produced by 50 Cent, who shaped the track listing and supervised the posthumous production work required to complete recordings that were in various stages of finalization at the time of Pop Smoke's death. 50 Cent's involvement brought executive credibility and a veteran's eye for commercial arrangement to a project that was navigating the delicate territory of representing an artist who could no longer speak for himself. The decisions made in assembling the album generated some discussion within the hip-hop community about the ethics and aesthetics of posthumous releases.

King Combs's verse on "Diana" integrated smoothly with the track's overall aesthetic, providing a contemporary perspective that complemented the posthumous nature of Pop Smoke's contribution. The collaboration had been completed before Pop Smoke's death, which gave it an authenticity that purely posthumous recording additions sometimes lack. The track was one of several on the album that featured collaborators who had worked directly with Pop Smoke during his lifetime, a curatorial choice that reinforced the album's character as a document of an actual creative life rather than a constructed posthumous product.

The commercial performance of "Diana" and the surrounding album confirmed that Pop Smoke had been on the verge of mainstream breakthrough at the time of his death. His Brooklyn drill sound, which had already generated significant attention through earlier mixtapes and singles including the widely influential "Welcome to the Party," had been building toward exactly the kind of major-label debut album that "Shoot for the Stars" represented. Republic Records provided the promotional infrastructure to ensure that the album reached the broadest possible audience, and the commercial result exceeded the already-high expectations generated by Pop Smoke's existing momentum.

The album's success initiated a broader mainstream engagement with Brooklyn drill as a genre, with Pop Smoke's recordings cited as the defining introduction to the sound for many listeners who encountered his work for the first time through the posthumous album. "Diana" was among the tracks that demonstrated the range within that sound, its use of the Diana Ross sample creating a melodic and emotional warmth that sat alongside the harder-edged tracks elsewhere on the record.