The 2020s File Feature
Something Special
Something Special: Pop Smoke's Posthumous Legacy and the Weight of an Unfinished Life "Something Special" by Pop Smoke occupies a singular and painful positi…
01 The Story
Something Special: Pop Smoke's Posthumous Legacy and the Weight of an Unfinished Life
"Something Special" by Pop Smoke occupies a singular and painful position in popular music, existing as part of the posthumous body of work assembled after the artist's death and released as evidence of a creative talent that was violently cut short before it could fully develop. The track appeared on Pop Smoke's debut studio album Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon, released in July 2020, approximately five months after Pop Smoke was shot and killed during a home invasion in Los Angeles on February 19, 2020. He was twenty years old at the time of his death.
Born Bashar Barakah Jackson in Canarsie, Brooklyn, New York, in 1999, Pop Smoke had compressed an extraordinary amount of artistic development into an extremely short active career. He had released his first significant music in late 2018 and by early 2020 was widely recognized as one of the most exciting and distinctive new voices in hip-hop, the primary architect of the Brooklyn drill movement that had emerged from the UK drill template and was in the process of establishing itself as one of the dominant sounds in American rap.
"Something Special" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 41 in the chart dated July 18, 2020, the week of the album's release, before declining in subsequent weeks and spending a total of seven weeks on the chart. That seven-week run for an album cut rather than a promoted single reflected the enormous commercial enthusiasm that surrounded the album's release and the genuine grief that Pop Smoke's death had generated among hip-hop fans and within the broader music community.
Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 251,000 album-equivalent units in its first week, a remarkable achievement for a posthumous debut that was assembled by his team, including producers 808Melo and Rico Beats along with executive producer Steven Victor, from recorded material that Pop Smoke had completed or was in the process of completing at the time of his death. The album's massive commercial success was simultaneously a tribute to his talent and a reflection of the public grief that surrounded his passing.
The track accumulated approximately 57 million YouTube views, consistent with the broader streaming performance of the album, which drove enormous playlist additions and organic listening as audiences sought to understand who Pop Smoke had been and what his music represented. That sustained streaming engagement, which extended across months and years following the album's initial release, reflects the depth of the connection listeners formed with his material after his death.
Pop Smoke's artistic approach on "Something Special" demonstrates the melodic dimension of his work that distinguished him from many of his drill contemporaries. Brooklyn drill as a genre is primarily associated with menacing, low-register vocal performances delivered over dark, aggressive production, and while Pop Smoke's signature voice, a deep, sonorous baritone that was striking in its authority, operated within this tradition, he also had a capacity for melodic expression and emotional vulnerability that gave his music a broader appeal than strictly genre-defined work typically achieves.
The production environment of the track reflects the sonic world that Pop Smoke had been developing with his core production team, drawing on both the UK drill influences that had initially shaped his approach and the American trap production traditions of his Brooklyn upbringing. The result is a sound that felt genuinely new, not merely derivative of existing templates but a synthesis that represented its own creative position.
The posthumous release raised questions that have become increasingly common in an era when artists' recorded archives can extend their public presence long after their deaths. The album was executive produced with considerable care, with decisions made about sequencing, features, and presentation that attempted to honor Pop Smoke's creative intentions while making the material commercially viable. The involvement of established figures from the hip-hop community in the album's completion reflected the genuine respect that his peers had for his talent and the serious effort to treat his legacy with appropriate care.
Numerous artists and industry figures have cited Pop Smoke's influence on subsequent Brooklyn and New York drill music, acknowledging that the sound he developed in collaboration with his producers has had a lasting impact on how the genre evolved after his death. "Something Special," as part of the album that introduced this sound to its largest audience, is an artifact of that influence, a document of a creative vision at a crucial moment in its development.
Pop Smoke's Place in Brooklyn Drill History
The Brooklyn drill movement that Pop Smoke helped establish drew on UK drill's production approach while developing a distinctly American lyrical content and a vocal style suited to the specific cultural context of New York. His collaborations with producers 808Melo and Rico Beats created a template that numerous subsequent artists have worked within, and the commercial success of Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon demonstrated that this template was capable of generating mainstream pop success. "Something Special" is one piece of that larger contribution.
02 Song Meaning
Tenderness, Aspiration, and the Vulnerability Beneath the Drill Exterior in "Something Special"
"Something Special" by Pop Smoke is a track that reveals a dimension of his artistry that the hard exterior of Brooklyn drill does not always make visible: a capacity for genuine tenderness and emotional openness that coexists with the aggression and bravado more commonly associated with the genre. The song represents one of the clearest expressions of the romantic and aspirational impulses that ran beneath the surface of Pop Smoke's catalog, and its particular poignance, understood in retrospect, comes from what it reveals about the emotional life of an artist who did not survive long enough to explore it fully.
The phrase "something special" operates as both description and aspiration, describing the person being addressed and the nature of the relationship being sought. It is a declaration that the singer recognizes exceptional quality, that the person before him exceeds the ordinary in ways that warrant special attention and special treatment. This recognition, delivered with the characteristic directness of Pop Smoke's approach, has the quality of genuine feeling rather than calculated compliment.
Pop Smoke's vocal approach on "Something Special" demonstrates his range within his own established sound. The deep, authoritative baritone that made his drill tracks so distinctive is deployed here in a melodic mode, producing the sensation of a powerful voice choosing to speak softly rather than being incapable of power. This tonal control, the ability to scale emotional intensity to the demands of the moment, is one of the marks of a genuinely versatile vocal performer, and its presence in a relatively brief career suggests the range of material Pop Smoke might have produced had his life continued.
The relationship between toughness and tenderness in hip-hop has always been negotiated in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. The genre's rhetorical traditions include both the celebration of invulnerability and the expression of genuine emotional need, and artists who can credibly inhabit both modes without appearing inconsistent are relatively rare. Pop Smoke navigated this tension with an ease that was remarkable for his age and experience, and "Something Special" is evidence of his ability to express vulnerability without undermining the authority that distinguished his persona.
The aspirational quality of the song extends beyond the romantic dimension. The title phrase carries connotations of reaching for something beyond the ordinary, of refusing to be satisfied with what is merely good enough when something exceptional is available. In the context of Pop Smoke's biography, a young man from Canarsie who had compressed extraordinary achievement into a very short life, this aspiration reads as characteristic. He was, by all accounts, someone who consistently reached beyond what the circumstances of his upbringing might have suggested was available.
The posthumous context in which the song was released adds layers of meaning that were not present in the recording itself. Heard after Pop Smoke's death, the track becomes partly a document of what was lost, a demonstration of the emotional range and creative versatility that would not be developed further. The tenderness of "Something Special" is inseparable, for listeners who know his story, from the tragedy of its being a late entry in a catalog that should have extended across decades.
The production environment of the track contributes to its emotional openness by creating sonic space that does not crowd the vocal performance. The production team that worked with Pop Smoke understood that his voice was the primary instrument and that its effective deployment required room to breathe rather than constant sonic competition. This spatial generosity is part of what makes the emotional content of the track land effectively.
The broader cultural conversation about young Black men from urban contexts, the narratives that are constructed around them and the limits those narratives impose on how their complexity is recognized, is implicated in "Something Special" without being explicitly addressed. The track simply demonstrates, without argument, that the person making it was capable of tenderness and aspiration and genuine feeling. In this sense the song performs a quietly political act, refusing the reduction that popular culture too often applies to young artists from Pop Smoke's background.
As a piece of posthumous music, "Something Special" carries the specific weight of all unfinished things: the awareness that what we have is not the whole story, that the creative intelligence behind it was still in the process of discovering what it could do. The millions of listeners who connected with this track in the months and years after Pop Smoke's death were responding not only to the music itself but to this dimension of incompleteness, to the presence of genuine talent in a recording that stands as evidence of both what was achieved and what remained possible. That combination of achievement and potential is the deepest meaning the song carries.
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