The 2020s File Feature
Make It Rain
Make It Rain — Pop Smoke Featuring Rowdy Rebel (2020) "Make It Rain" arrived as part of the posthumous flood of Pop Smoke material released after his death i…
01 The Story
Make It Rain — Pop Smoke Featuring Rowdy Rebel (2020)
"Make It Rain" arrived as part of the posthumous flood of Pop Smoke material released after his death in February 2020, a tragic circumstance that shaped the entire reception context for his commercial debut album and its associated singles. Pop Smoke, born Bashar Barakah Jackson, was shot and killed at his rented Hollywood Hills home on February 19, 2020, at the age of twenty years old. He had been one of the fastest-rising figures in rap in the preceding twelve months, and his death cut short a career that was on the verge of mainstream breakthrough on his own terms rather than as a featured artist on someone else's record.
His debut studio album Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon was compiled and released posthumously on July 3, 2020, through Victor Victor Worldwide and Republic Records, with production supervision and curatorial decisions made in collaboration with his estate. The album was executive produced by Steven Victor and 50 Cent, with Rico Beats handling production on "Make It Rain." The involvement of 50 Cent, himself a figure whose commercial instincts had been formed in an earlier era of New York street rap, brought a strategic orientation toward mainstream accessibility that shaped some of the album's choices, including the features and radio-friendly elements present on certain tracks.
Rowdy Rebel, the Brooklyn rapper whose real name is Bobby Pollard, was incarcerated at the time "Make It Rain" was released, having been sentenced following a 2016 arrest. His appearance on the track was recorded before his imprisonment, making the collaboration a document of a specific moment in Brooklyn's rap ecosystem from a period when both artists were building their profiles. Rowdy Rebel, a longtime associate of Bobby Shmurda and a member of the GS9 collective, had established credentials within the New York street rap community that gave the collaboration authenticity and specificity. He was released from prison in December 2020, by which point "Make It Rain" had already accumulated significant streaming numbers.
The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, making Pop Smoke the first rapper to debut at the top of that chart posthumously with his debut studio album. That achievement reflected both the genuine commercial momentum he had built during his lifetime, primarily through the mixtapes Meet the Woo and Meet the Woo 2, and the cultural weight that his death had added to his catalog. The combination of grief, pre-existing momentum, and the marketing machinery of a major label produced first-week equivalent album units of approximately 251,000, a substantial figure for the summer of 2020.
"Make It Rain" charted on the Billboard Hot 100, contributing to the album's overall streaming and sales performance during its chart run. The track received attention from streaming platforms that featured it in hip-hop and rap playlists, and its Brooklyn drill aesthetic connected it to a wave of New York rap that was gaining national and international attention during 2019 and 2020. Pop Smoke's particular contribution to that movement was to bring a voice and presence whose depth and gravitas were unusual for his age, and "Make It Rain" demonstrates those qualities in a track designed for commercial radio appeal as well as streaming culture.
The music video for the track was released to support the single and contributed to its streaming performance on YouTube, where Pop Smoke's catalog had accumulated significant viewership both before and after his death. His videos from the posthumous release period benefited from the same combination of genuine artistic interest and grief-driven consumption that characterized the album's overall commercial performance.
Critical reception to Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon was complicated by the posthumous nature of the release and by debates about how much editorial intervention the finished album represented compared to Pop Smoke's own creative vision. Some reviewers felt that certain production choices, particularly the addition of pop-oriented features and melodic embellishments on some tracks, did not fully serve the raw, stripped-down Brooklyn drill aesthetic that had defined his pre-death releases. "Make It Rain" was generally regarded as more consistent with his established artistic identity than some of the album's more commercially augmented entries.
The song's commercial success in 2020 was part of a broader recognition of Pop Smoke's importance to the evolution of New York drill, a subgenre that borrowed structural elements from UK drill and Chicago drill while developing a distinctly Brooklyn vocal and rhythmic aesthetic. He was widely credited as a central figure in bringing that sound to mainstream American rap audiences, and "Make It Rain" stands as evidence of that crossover capacity: a track rooted in the aesthetics of a specific underground movement that nonetheless found a large mainstream audience during one of the more difficult cultural moments in recent American history.
02 Song Meaning
What "Make It Rain" Is Really About
"Make It Rain" operates in the territory of street celebration and competitive self-assertion that characterized much of Pop Smoke's recorded output. The track's title references a vernacular expression for the conspicuous display of wealth, specifically the practice of throwing large amounts of cash in a celebratory context, and the song deploys this imagery as part of a broader assertion of arrival, of having accumulated the kind of resources and status that allow for public extravagance. For an artist from Canarsie, Brooklyn, who had grown up navigating the economic and social pressures of that neighborhood, these themes carried autobiographical weight.
Pop Smoke's appeal rested on a voice that was genuinely distinctive in contemporary rap, a deep, deliberate baritone that gave his proclamations a gravitational quality unusual in a genre that had moved toward lighter, more melodic deliveries during the late 2010s. On "Make It Rain," that vocal quality serves the thematic content directly: the assertions of wealth and power feel credible in a way that they might not if delivered in a lighter register. His voice made the claims sound like statements of fact rather than aspirations.
Rowdy Rebel's contribution to the track adds a layer of New York authenticity rooted in his own history and associations. His presence places "Make It Rain" within a specific lineage of Brooklyn street rap that pre-dates Pop Smoke's emergence, connecting the younger artist to an existing tradition while simultaneously demonstrating his ability to hold his own alongside a figure with established credibility in that community. The collaboration functions as a kind of generational handshake, with Rebel's verse serving as an implicit endorsement from within the scene that Pop Smoke was partly reinventing.
The thematic content also reflects the particular values of Brooklyn drill as a cultural phenomenon. The subgenre has always emphasized a kind of unflinching realism about life in economically stressed urban neighborhoods, and the celebration of financial success in this context carries a different weight than it might in a more comfortable social setting. For artists in these communities, accumulating money represents not just personal gratification but a specific form of survival and resistance against material deprivation. "Make It Rain" participates in that tradition without necessarily articulating it didactically.
The song gains additional emotional resonance from Pop Smoke's death at age twenty, which transformed every aspect of his catalog from a record of an emerging artist's development into something more fixed and elegiac. "Make It Rain" was conceived as a celebration, but it was received in the context of mourning and memorial. That shift in reception context is impossible to separate from any honest discussion of what the song has come to mean in the years since its release. It became, like much of his posthumous material, both a document of what he was and a reminder of what he did not get to become.
For the Brooklyn drill movement more broadly, "Make It Rain" represents the commercial apex of a sound that had developed in relative obscurity before Pop Smoke brought it to national radio audiences. The track's streaming success in 2020 demonstrated that the aesthetic he had been refining through his mixtape period, heavy 808 patterns, spacious production, deep authoritative delivery, had genuine crossover potential that the mainstream music industry had initially been slow to recognize. His posthumous commercial triumph became a case study in how underground movements generate mainstream moments, sometimes through the tragic amplification of an artist's death rather than the sustained career development that would have been the natural path.
→ More from Pop Smoke Featuring Rowdy Rebel
View all Pop Smoke Featuring Rowdy Rebel hits →
→ More from the 2020s File
View all 2020s hits →
Keep digging