The 2020s File Feature
Yea Yea
Yea Yea — Pop Smoke Pop Smoke recorded "Yea Yea" during the frantic creative period that defined the last months of his short life, a stretch in which he and…
01 The Story
Yea Yea — Pop Smoke
Pop Smoke recorded "Yea Yea" during the frantic creative period that defined the last months of his short life, a stretch in which he and his collaborators assembled an enormous catalog of material in New York studios. The track appeared on his posthumous debut studio album Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon, released on July 3, 2020, roughly five months after the Brooklyn rapper was killed at a rented home in Los Angeles on February 19, 2020. His death at age twenty prompted an outpouring of grief from the New York drill community and beyond, and it also triggered enormous commercial interest in his recorded work.
The album was assembled and executive-produced by 50 Cent, who worked alongside Pop Smoke's manager and family to shape the posthumous release. Steven Victor, the head of Victor Victor Worldwide, the imprint that had signed Pop Smoke, was central to shepherding the project to completion. The production on "Yea Yea" carries the signature weight of Brooklyn drill, that sub-genre of UK-influenced trap music that Pop Smoke had done more than perhaps anyone else to popularize in the United States beginning with his 2019 debut mixtape Meet the Woo.
Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 upon release, an achievement driven by staggering streaming numbers and the emotional gravity of a young artist's posthumous farewell. The album's first-week figures represented one of the strongest posthumous debut performances in recent memory, placing Pop Smoke in a conversation alongside Juice WRLD and XXXTentacion as young artists whose catalogs exploded in commercial reach following their deaths.
"Yea Yea" was among the album tracks that circulated on streaming platforms and helped the project maintain sustained chart momentum through the summer and fall of 2020. The Billboard Hot 100 tracked multiple songs from the album simultaneously, reflecting how thoroughly Pop Smoke had captured the attention of the streaming audience. Songs like "Dior," "Welcome to the Party," and "What You Know Bout Love" served as the album's commercial flagships, but deeper cuts including "Yea Yea" added to the project's overall streaming weight and kept it in conversations about the most-played releases of that year.
The production aesthetic on "Yea Yea" sits comfortably within the Brooklyn drill template: cavernous, menacing bass; layered percussion that owes a debt to the UK producers who pioneered the original sound; and a sense of slow, deliberate menace that contrasted with the faster tempos of Atlanta trap. Pop Smoke had worked with producers including 808Melo and Yamaica, who were instrumental in building the sonic identity of the Brooklyn drill wave, and the sound on tracks across the album reflected those foundational creative relationships.
The cultural context surrounding the album's release was charged with both celebration and sorrow. Pop Smoke had been on the verge of mainstream breakthrough, with the "Dior" instrumental already a viral sensation and his cameo appearances on other artists' records demonstrating his crossover appeal. "Yea Yea" represented the kind of track that filled out the picture of who Pop Smoke was as an artist: someone who could maintain intensity and personality across an extended body of work, not just on marquee singles.
Critics who reviewed the posthumous album noted the album's unevenness, an inevitable consequence of being assembled without the artist's guiding hand, but they largely praised the core performances. Pop Smoke's distinctive baritone, his ability to command space with minimal melodic variation, and his New York regional specificity were all present on tracks like "Yea Yea." The album sold more than one million equivalent album units within weeks of its release in the United States alone, according to reports from Victor Victor Worldwide and Republic Records.
The legacy of Pop Smoke's catalog, including "Yea Yea," extended well into 2021 and beyond. A deluxe edition of the album added more tracks and more collaborators, and the Brooklyn drill sound he had championed continued to spread globally. Artists across the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and West Africa incorporated the drill cadences and production techniques that Pop Smoke had done so much to amplify. "Yea Yea" thus sits within one of the more consequential posthumous releases in contemporary hip-hop history, a record that both mourned a loss and introduced a fully realized artist to the widest possible audience.
02 Song Meaning
What "Yea Yea" Means
"Yea Yea" operates in the emotional register that defined Pop Smoke's recorded persona: an atmosphere of total self-assurance, territorial pride, and an implicit awareness of danger that runs beneath every phrase. The song functions as a declaration of identity from an artist who had grown up in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn, a community with its own codes, hierarchies, and loyalties, and who wore those origins openly on every track he made.
The lyrical content circles around themes of street credibility and unapologetic ambition. Pop Smoke uses the track to assert his position, to catalog what he has and what he has earned, and to signal awareness of those who might resent his rise. This was a recurring structure in his music, not because it was formulaic, but because it reflected a genuine worldview. The bravado in his delivery is never detached or performative; it carries the weight of someone who has navigated real circumstances and arrived at a place of hard-won confidence.
What distinguishes "Yea Yea" within Pop Smoke's catalog is the way his vocal performance interacts with the production. His deep baritone drops into the low end of the mix, almost competing with the bass frequencies rather than floating over them. This was a technique that set him apart from most of his contemporaries, who typically rode higher in the sonic register to maintain clarity. Pop Smoke seemed to understand that his voice was itself an instrument of intimidation and intimacy in equal measure, and "Yea Yea" showcases that quality.
The title phrase functions as a rhythmic tic and a philosophical position simultaneously. The repetition of affirmation, the casual doubling of agreement, suggests a speaker who is so certain of what he is saying that elaboration feels unnecessary. It is the verbal equivalent of a shrug from someone who has already won the argument before it starts. This confidence, rendered in compressed, declarative language, was Pop Smoke's signature rhetorical move across his catalog.
In the context of the posthumous album as a whole, "Yea Yea" contributes to the portrait of an artist who was articulating a very specific New York experience at a moment when that experience was being heard for the first time by a global audience. The Brooklyn drill movement he helped build gave a generation of young artists from that borough a sonic identity as distinctive as the Atlanta trap that had dominated hip-hop for the previous decade. Songs like "Yea Yea" were part of that establishment of a new regional voice, one rooted in the relationship between Brooklyn and London and the shared aesthetic of drill music.
The emotional weight of the track is amplified, inevitably, by the circumstances of its release. Listening to Pop Smoke's voice on a posthumous record produces a different kind of engagement than listening to a living artist. Every assertion of strength and permanence becomes tinged with the knowledge of what followed. Yet the track does not feel like a document of loss so much as a record of vitality. The energy Pop Smoke brought to "Yea Yea" is forward-facing, competitive, and alive, which is precisely why the song endures as a meaningful piece of his legacy rather than simply a curio from an unfinished catalog.
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