West Coast Shit

West Coast Sh*t — Pop Smoke Featuring Tyga and Quavo

The track featuring Pop Smoke alongside Tyga and Quavo arrived in 2020 as part of the posthumous release process that followed Pop Smoke's murder in February of that year, when the Brooklyn drill star was shot and killed during a home invasion in Los Angeles at the age of twenty. Born Bashar Barakah Jackson in Canarsie, Brooklyn, he had emerged as one of the most exciting new voices in American hip-hop in 2019 and early 2020, developing a sound that merged Brooklyn's own drill tradition with influences from UK drill in ways that felt genuinely novel in the American commercial landscape. His death cut short a career that had barely begun to reveal its commercial potential.

The posthumous album Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon, released in July 2020 on Victor Victor Worldwide / Republic Records, was assembled by producer Rico Beats and executive produced by 50 Cent from material that Pop Smoke had recorded before his death. The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, an extraordinary commercial achievement for any artist and a particularly remarkable one for a posthumous debut album from a rapper who had not yet released a proper major-label full-length during his lifetime. The album's success reflected both the genuine quality of Pop Smoke's recorded output and the grief-driven streaming surge that followed his death.

The track featuring Tyga and Quavo connected Pop Smoke's Brooklyn drill aesthetic with two of West Coast and trap hip-hop's more commercially established voices. Tyga, born Micheal Ray Stevenson in Compton, California, brought a West Coast sensibility to the collaboration, while Quavo, a founding member of the Migos from Lawrenceville, Georgia, added the Atlanta trap energy that had been pervasive in mainstream hip-hop across the preceding decade. The combination of three distinct regional perspectives on a track titled for a geographic identity created a deliberately pan-geographic statement about hip-hop's interconnected commercial ecosystem in the streaming era.

Pop Smoke's vocal style, characterized by his distinctive deep baritone and the UK drill-inflected cadences he had absorbed from British artists including Headie One and Unknown T, made him immediately recognizable in a commercial landscape full of voices competing for distinction. His ability to sound simultaneously threatening and melodic, to carry hooks with his speaking voice rather than requiring a conventional singing approach, was central to the commercial appeal that had made "Welcome to the Party" and "Dior" into genuine streaming hits before his death. These qualities were preserved in the posthumously released material and contributed to the commercial success of the album on which this track appeared.

The choice to pair Pop Smoke with West Coast artists on this particular track reflected curatorial decisions about how to present him to a mainstream audience that might have known him primarily through his Brooklyn identity. The song's title gestures explicitly toward West Coast hip-hop's geographic mythology while Pop Smoke's vocal presence grounds it in his own Brooklyn-inflected sound. The result is a track that functions as both a celebration of regional hip-hop traditions and a demonstration that those traditions could coexist productively on a single recording.

The commercial performance of tracks from Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon on the Billboard Hot 100 confirmed the extraordinary commercial impact of the posthumous album. Multiple tracks from the project charted simultaneously, a rare feat that demonstrated the depth of audience engagement with the project rather than merely with individual standout singles. The album spent multiple weeks at number one on the Billboard 200, and the sustained chart presence of its tracks over the months following release transformed Pop Smoke from a promising emerging artist into one of the most commercially significant figures in the hip-hop landscape of 2020.

Quavo and Tyga both brought significant streaming audiences of their own to the collaboration. Quavo's presence in particular, as part of the Migos collective that had been among the most commercially dominant groups in hip-hop since 2017, guaranteed substantial exposure to the track's streaming numbers. The collaboration dynamic worked in both directions, with Pop Smoke's posthumous momentum lending cultural weight to his collaborators' appearances while their established audiences amplified the track's reach.

The track and its parent album contributed to a broader conversation about the ethics and aesthetics of posthumous music releases in the streaming era. Critics and fans debated the extent to which the production choices made by Rico Beats and 50 Cent accurately reflected the direction Pop Smoke would have taken his music, but the commercial results suggested that the audience for his work was not primarily concerned with these questions. The grief response, the need to hear more from an artist taken too young, overwhelmed more critical considerations and made the posthumous album one of the defining commercial events of 2020 in hip-hop.