Mano’s place was a third-story walkup on a quiet stretch of Montrose Avenue, just a few blocks north of the Marcy projects. It was stuffy, barely furnished, and perpetually muggy on account of its lack of air-conditioning, a discomfort outdone only by the actual size of the place—you had to sit sideways on the toilet just to close the bathroom door. This was 2018, a summer marred by bleak headlines and record-breaking heat, but I was happy. I was nineteen, living alone in New York, and spending all my free time in that apartment, writing music with my friends.
We congregated there most weekends, eight of us, coming in from Bed-Stuy and Canarsie and lower Manhattan. I was renting a room on Second Avenue from a septuagenarian Buddhist who periodically tried to scam me for utilities money, and the place on Montrose quickly became my refuge. I found myself looking forward to the train rides over the Williamsburg Bridge, watching the city’s skyline recede through dust-flecked windows. Mano didn’t have a bed frame, let alone any proper recording equipment, but we managed to set up a studio in his room, good enough for producing beats that the guys from Brooklyn—Adrian, Jha, and Obasi—could rap over. We spent countless nights that way, in long, hazy sessions fuelled by Backwoods and bottom-shelf Cognac. Sometimes I would bring my guitar, and we’d rip into a reggae jam, Obasi belting glissando melodies with playful confidence. His younger brother had just started making music, too, he said, though he never brought him around.
Not long ago, I listened back through the only recording I have left from that summer, a lo-fi voice memo of some twangy bossa-nova chords over which Adrian and Jha are arguing about writing credits. There’s a bravado in their voices, a mix of self-assurance and naïveté, that made me nostalgic for those days. Everything was an adventure then, an untapped possibility, and we floated around Brooklyn high on self-belief. No one could touch us; our shit was hot. At one point in that recording, someone says, “We could be the ones to start the revolution, bro!” We believed it, too. But August eventually passed, and by September our collective had disbanded for college. We never made music together again.
The following summer, however, the revolution arrived for real. Pop Smoke, a nineteen-year-old rapper from Canarsie, put out “Welcome to the Party,” a searing, bass-heavy track that quickly became ubiquitous throughout the city, the distinctive shimmer of its sampled strings issuing everywhere from luxe loudspeakers in downtown night clubs to the shuddering subwoofers of blacked-out coupés. The song was a frenetic evolution of Brooklyn drill—the grimy, bone-rattling subgenre of hip-hop popularized by Bobby Shmurda—and its instrumental by the British producer 808Melo gave it a brash East London bounce. But what really set the record apart was Pop’s voice: a cocky, sneering baritone, equally sinister and celebratory. “Baby, welcome to the party,” he snarled in the opening line, and it registered as a self-coronation, clarion trumpets replaced by a knocking sub-bass, a secret that Pop himself was letting us all in on.
I’d returned to the city that summer to play a small tour with my new band, and first heard “Welcome to the Party” before our set in the back room of Freddy’s Bar, a dive in South Slope surrounded by town houses and overpriced cafés. The place was as far as you could get from the atmosphere that Pop’s music evoked, and yet the song still possessed an immediate gravity, its cyclical synths and swaggering aura pulling me straight into its orbit. Brooklyn had a new spokesman, and he was a Canarsie teen-ager with a catharsis-inducing growl.
That winter, Pop was murdered in Los Angeles, shot three times in the torso by home invaders looking for an easy score. He was twenty years old. It was only when I saw the flurry of posts on Obasi’s Instagram that I realized Pop was the sibling he had talked about that heat-ridden summer prior, the same brother who had never made the trip out to our Montrose stomping grounds. The resigned sadness I’d felt when I first heard the news of Pop’s death turned into something corrosive and personal. We never met, of course. Pop’s world was far removed from mine. But there is a universal intimacy derived from the shared struggle of music-making, in undertaking the same thankless endeavor, in dreaming the same dream. Pop, in making his dream a reality, became a hero and a torchbearer. Now he was a martyr, too.
A few weeks after Pop died, the country went into a COVID-induced shutdown. While New York contended with death and disease, Pop’s fame, paradoxically, kept growing. 50 Cent announced that he would executive produce his début album, “Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon,” a nineteen-track, hour-long project Frankensteined from material that Pop had recorded in the weeks before he was killed. It arrived in July, less than four months after his death. Then came his slew of wins at the Billboard Music Awards the following spring—Obasi and his mom were pictured at the ceremony, clutching a collection of gilded trophies on the red carpet—and his nomination for Best Rap Performance at the Grammys. There were eulogies and tributes, homages and accolades. But at the center of it all was an irreversible truth: a desert where a font of potential had once flowed.
When I moved back to New York, in the spring of 2021, there was a palpable restlessness in the air. As I settled into my new home, I discovered communities rallying against the vestigial loneliness of quarantine. They centered on music: rap battles on Brooklyn rooftops, D.I.Y. punk shows deep in abandoned railway tunnels, open-air d.j. sets in outer-borough back yards. One evening, some friends and I ended up at an underground rave in the ballroom of a Chelsea hotel. There were hundreds of revellers on the dance floor that night, cutting shapes under rusting chandeliers, shaking the dust from their rhythm-starved limbs.
The cops arrived hours past midnight, turning on the lights to reveal an army of dazed, squinting faces. An exodus ensued. It was raining, and we sprinted into the cobblestoned street, whooping and whistling. Someone had parked a pickup in the middle of a nearby avenue, its bed filled with a thumping sound system, like one from those stereo-laden war vans in “Mad Max.” A familiar, spectral voice was reverberating through the loudspeakers. “Baby, welcome to the party,” it intoned, booming into the morning. There must have been a hundred of us there, circling the truck, clambering onto its hood, shuffling and shimmying and twerking with abandon. We howled and hugged one another. Others sat down on the sidewalk, taking in the crowd. They held their palms upward to the rain, and wept. ♦
