Shoot for the stars aim for the moon6/3/2023 ![]() It’s harder to get past the density of high-profile featured artists, who generally exist as empty calories filling out otherwise half-finished Pop Smoke demos. It’s easy to laugh away Virgil Abloh’s wildly unpopular album cover, or even the fact that “Dior” has now appeared on all three of Pop’s releases. It’s unclear how much Pop’s personal interests aligned with the commercial interests of Shoot for the Stars, which decenter his voice and ultimately cheapen the project. Posthumous albums are, by their nature, knotty undertakings. These songs tug at the heartstrings, not simply because Pop plays a convincing romantic, but also because they gesture towards his untapped potential, his eagerness to develop artistic range, even though he didn’t need to. “You ain’t know I could sing?” Pop chirps flirtatiously at the outset of “Mood Swings.” It is endearing to hear him lower his guard, soften his rasp, trade his boundless swagger for tenderness, and offer the mushy overtures of a kid who loves cuddling nearly as much as sex. ![]() ![]() The stretch of R&B-inflected songs from “Enjoy Yourself” to “Diana” evokes 50 Cent, too - the hardened gangster occasionally chastened by love - but 50, an inveterate fuckboy, could never sound this sincere. Listening to it feels like walking on hallowed ground. In the crushing final 30 seconds of “Got It on Me,” the beat drops out, and Pop the bluesman’s bare voice revisits the hook from 50’s “Many Men.” Many, many, many, many men/Wish death ‘pon me. The conversational, laid-back melodicism Pop explores throughout the album is a plain reference to 50. Pop has elicited frequent comparisons to 50, due mainly to similarities in their vocal timbres and cadences, but until now, he’d never explicitly paid tribute. The album also takes many of its cues from mainstream R&B and rap of the late Nineties and early 2000s, with samples and interpolations of Playa’s “Cheers 2 U” (“Diana”), Too Short’s “Shake That Monkey” (“West Coast Shit”), Tamia’s “So Into You” (“Something Special”), and Ginuwine’s “Differences” (“What You Know Bout Love”).Īs Shoot for the Stars refracts Brooklyn drill through various commercial styles that have, in turn, dominated the Hot 97 airwaves during the last two decades, it also reframes Pop Smoke as a direct disciple of 50 Cent, who executive produced the album. ![]() While Stars features a handful of hell-raisers in the vein of the Woo tapes, it also works to merge drill’s swooping rhythms with the kind of austere Atlanta trap that Migos and Zaytoven mastered mid-decade (“For the Night,” “Snitching”), as well as the arpeggiated guitar lines that ornament the music of A Boogie, Gunna, and other melody-minded rappers (“The Woo,” “Enjoy Yourself”). 808 Melo, who produced about two-thirds of Pop’s music to date, is less of a defining presence here. By contrast, Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon, Pop’s 19-track posthumous debut album, marks a dramatic expansion - and dilution - of his signature sound. ![]() This triangulation of hyper-regional rap elements gave Woo 1 and 2 a narrow focus. On his two mixtapes, last year’s Meet the Woo 1 and 2, Pop filtered New York City’s tradition of raucous, streetwise melodramas through the militant spirit of Chicago drill and the woozy, haunting production of London drill. ![]()
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