Image via polo-g-rapstar-daniel-prakopcyk-1
At the beginning of his career, Polo G wrote out everything he wanted to accomplish on a vision board, and one of the first things he listed was a chart-topping hit on the Billboard Hot 100.
“I put a No. 1 song down on the list of goals of mine,” he says, adding, “I’m big on manifesting everything. I’ve damn near manifested my whole life.”
Polo G’s mother and manager Stacia Mac says she’s been watching her son speak things into existence since he was a young child.
”He’s a powerful manifestor,” she points out. “It’s a daily practice. I teach all my children that you have to speak what you want out of life, and the tongue is very, very powerful. I can literally remember him saying his positive affirmations on the daily. He has his journal where he was saying, ‘I’m going to live in LA; I’m going to be a millionaire; I’m going to be a rap star; I’m going to buy my mom a mansion and a car; I’m going to have a son.’ And everything this man has ever said he wanted to do, he has done. I saw it happen in real time.”
This week, the 22-year-old rapper manifested another item on his vision board when his new single “Rapstar” debuted at No. 1 on the Hot 100, becoming his first chart-topping hit. Throughout the song and its accompanying music video, Polo G explains what it’s actually like to be a superstar rapper, acknowledging the exhaustion and insecurities that come with fame.
“It’s about the ups and downs of this lifestyle,” he tells Complex. “You know, you can be winning, and even through all of the good shit that’s happening, you can still have those emotional battles.”
Deciding to rap about being the “chosen one” on a song called “Rapstar,” which ultimately became his first No. 1 hit, was an act of manifestation in itself. Although, according to Polo G, he initially planned to give it a different name.
“I originally wanted to name the song ‘Amiri,’ but I was having clearance issues,” he reveals. “So I ended up just changing it to ‘Rapstar’ because it seemed like that fit the song the most perfectly.”
The song was an immediate success, topping streaming charts and trending No. 1 on YouTube within the first 24 hours. “I’m loving every second of it,” Polo says of his past week. “I’m really just trying to embrace it and soak it in. Even though it was something that I manifested, it’s still damn near hard to believe. Because it ain’t like I stepped outside the box. I just made the same natural music that I always make. It’s just that I’m finally getting the recognition that I deserve.”
He’s right. Polo didn’t need to reinvent himself in order to reach a new level of success. It was only a matter of time until he secured a chart-topping hit like “Rapstar” after all the momentum he had built over the past two and a half years with Die A Legend and The GOAT.
“I feel like it’s definitely a timing thing, where everybody’s seeing the way that I’m going up,” he says. “I’ve been delivering time and time again, and people are ready to anticipate what’s next for me. So when I come with a record like this, when they’re on the edge of their seats, it’s perfect.”
“It ain’t like I stepped outside the box. I just made the same natural music that I always make. It’s just that I’m finally getting the recognition that I deserve.” – Polo G
Like the rest of his career, “Rapstar” didn’t come together overnight. To understand the full story behind the song, you need to go back to 2018. That’s when Polo G met Einer Bankz, a ukulele player with a reputation for making viral acoustic collaborations with rappers (read more about his rise in our 2018 interview here).
At the time, Bankz was trying to be more selective about which artists he would work with, and he admits to feeling skeptical when veteran A&R Caroline “Baroline” Diaz contacted him about an up-and-coming rapper named Polo G. When he listened to then-unreleased songs like “Battle Cry,” though, Bankz knew he had to work with the young Chicago rapper, even though Polo didn’t have a large fanbase yet.
“I had a talk with my team, and I was like, ‘This is just one of these ones,’” Bankz says. “Numbers-wise, I couldn’t explain anything. But when you heard his music, you just knew it was going to go. That was one that I just believed in.”
Polo and Bankz recorded and uploaded an acoustic version of “Battle Cry” in December 2018, a month and a half before the song was formally released. It caught fire right away, getting shared by outlets like WorldstarHipHop. And from there, the pair settled into a habit of making videos together as a part of each album rollout.
“We just started getting in the routine of, whenever it was time for him to drop new music, I would go through and we would knock out a couple of videos,” Bankz says. “I was being included in all the rollouts. And every time, fans asked us to make even more of these videos.”
“That shit strikes gold for us every time,” Polo remarks. “Our videos always go viral, and I’m always going to rock out with Einer. Probably like 10 years into my career, we’re still going to be making videos.”
As the two were developing a rapport with each other, Polo G’s career was taking off. Before long, he was no longer the up-and-coming artist who Bankz was taking a chance on. “When ‘Pop Out’ dropped, it was like, ‘Yo, this shit has changed,’” Bankz reflects. “It went from me going with what I had faith in, to all of a sudden we’ve got a superstar on our hands, and this is undeniable.”
Since the beginning of his career, Bankz had ambitions of producing original songs with artists and never wanted to be pigeonholed as just the “viral ukulele guy.” So he went to work behind the scenes, landing placements with rappers like Fredo Bang, Quando Rondo, and Lil Durk. In late 2018, he even co-produced 21 Savage’s Travis Scott-assisted “out for the night.” But all along, he stayed focused on releasing a song with one of his closest collaborators: Polo G.
“The entire time I’m thinking, ‘Man, we’ve got to get a record. We’ve got to get an actual song,’” he says. “So I was sending him stuff. And Polo and I did make a couple of records, but they never came out. So I just became comfortable with the fact that if we got one, we got one. But if we don’t, we don’t.”
In May 2019, right before The GOAT dropped, an opportunity arrived when Polo and Bankz linked up to record new videos for the album rollout. This was during the early days of quarantine, so they met up at a house to film remote interviews and promotional material.
“It had been a long day,” Bankz remembers. “Polo had just run through a bunch of interviews, and I was playing this melody on my ukulele as the background set design was getting taken down. Polo looked over at me and he goes, ‘What’s that?’ I was like, ‘Just something I’ve been playing.’ And he goes, ‘Oh yeah, let’s do that.’ The way he is, I can play a melody, and he’ll just one-take something on it. So he came in and just crushed it, one take.”
The song they recorded, as you might have guessed, was the original version of “Rapstar.” Right away, they knew they had something special, so Polo shared it with fans after uploading another video they shot that day for “33.” His instinct was spot-on. It was an instant hit on social media.
“All of a sudden on TikTok, somebody took the sound and it had like 40,000 videos to it. All of the videos were like, ‘If this song doesn’t drop, I’m going to lose my mind.’” – Einer Bankz
“The whole album rollout happened, and fans kept coming back to that unreleased acoustic song, saying, ‘Yo, what is this? Drop this. Drop this,’” Bankz says. “And I’m sitting there like, I mean, we can’t drop it because this is the only version of it. It’s not even a real song yet.”
As Stacia Mac puts it, sharing these unreleased acoustic songs with Bankz has been a way for her son to test out new material on fans.
“A lot of times, he does it because he wants to see if they’re rocking with the lyrics, and if they’re living with it before he actually puts it out,” she says. “He’s really good at knowing his fan base. So he’ll tease it with Einer just to ensure that they’re rocking with it, without actually having to fully drop it.”
The people were definitely rocking with it. Even though Polo had just released an entire album of new music, fans became so obsessed with the acoustic snippet that they wouldn’t stop hounding him to drop the full version. Some of them even ripped the audio and made it go viral on TikTok.
“All of a sudden on TikTok, somebody took the sound and it had like 40,000 videos to it,” Bankz remembers. “All of the videos were like, ‘If this song doesn’t drop, I’m going to lose my mind. Polo needs to do this song.’ When that picked up, I must have been getting 20 DMs a day, like, ‘Bro, you better drop this next.’ I make a lot of these videos, but I’ve never had people so adamant about us dropping the full song. I’ve never had my people harassing me this much.’”
At that point, Polo decided it was finally time to make a full song. So he hit up Bankz, who re-recorded his ukulele part and contacted fellow Bay Area producer Synco to help flesh out a studio version.
The pressure was on. On YouTube, fan uploads like “I Put A Beat Over Polo G’s Unreleased Acoustic Song” were getting millions of plays, and everyone had different expectations for what the final song should sound like.
“It’s not really a situation I’ve been in before,” Synco admits. “There’s a lot of pressure. Fans want it to be the best thing ever, and Polo G’s one of the hottest artists out, so I didn’t want to disappoint. I’m trying my best to not do too much on the beat, but also do enough to where it gives the song some more depth. And of course, I wanted to give my own take on it, as opposed to just throwing some drums over the ukulele. So I went in and I added some chords, some little counter-melodies on piano, some pads, and some vocal chops.”
After trying out a few versions of the beat, Synco settled on the one we hear today. Then he added his producer tag (which is voiced by Bay Area rapper LikyBo) and sent it back to Bankz.
When the song finally made it back to Polo, he loved it. In fact, he believed in “Rapstar” so much that he changed the entire rollout for his next album (Hall of Fame) so he could release it next.
“We had a very solid plan, then just out of nowhere, something hit him,” says Polo’s co-manager Steven “Steve-O” Carless. “He said, ‘No. Listen. I’m telling you guys. This is the record. We have to disrupt our entire plan, and we’ve got to pay attention to what the fans are saying.’”
“He knows his fan base,” Stacia Mac points out. “He’s very in tune with them. We had this amazing plan and he went with his gut.”
At first, Polo’s idea to flip the script and make “Rapstar” the next single wasn’t received very well amongst the team. “That opinion was not popular,” Carless reveals. “It shows a lot of courage, bravery, and guts on his side to just stand on that position and continue forward with what he believes in. He even had to take Stacia and I off our square with it. But when we look at it now, we’re really proud of that decision he made. Because man, he totally changed the trajectory of where this is going, and now we can really stage him as the superstar artist that we know him to be.”
Once everyone was onboard with the new plan, the team got to work on the music video.
“We were looking up the best cameraman, and met with Arrad,” Polo G says. “I had him slide on me at the studio and gave him, like, 50 ideas of how I wanted to shoot the video. He came back with a treatment and we went from there.”
Arrad, a director who has over a decade of experience making music videos with artists like Tyga, Nicki Minaj, and Chris Brown, remembers Polo G reaching out through DMs in March 2020 and inviting him to the studio. “Literally from the day I heard it, I was like, ‘This is going platinum,” he says. “There was no doubt in anybody’s mind at the studio that this was going to be a hit.”
That night, they started coming up with the concepts for the video. “When he played the record, he said he wanted to really bring the lyrics to life,” Arrad recalls. “He told me he wanted to highlight some of the things that come with being a superstar. It’s not always about the good. There’s also a lot of dark things that can come with it, too. That night, we had a very brief convo and he allowed me to take the song with me, and I listened to it more. I wanted to create something that was very linear and brought the lyrics to life, but also highlighted multiple aspects of what it means to be a rap star.”
Working with production company Riveting Entertainment, Arrad planned out a two-day shoot that revolved around a bunch of custom-built sets for each scene.
“The sky is really the limit. I did this with a ukulele. F*ck. You can’t really tell me sh*t about what I can’t do.” – Einer Bankz
One scene, in particular, attracted attention from fans (and rap blogs) when photos surfaced online before the video arrived. During the part of the song where Polo raps the line, “They say I’m Pac rebirth, never put out a weak verse,” he is dressed as the legendary rapper, wearing a denim jacket with a white bandana tied around his head. Of course, any young artist who compares themselves to Tupac will receive some blowback from fans, but Stacia Mac points out the late rapper has long been a source of inspiration for her son.
“When he looks at Tupac, he looks at someone who is multifaceted,” she says. “Tupac was a great actor and a great artist. He was also in tune with political and social issues. He was somebody that anyone in our community would look to. In a lot of ways, Tupac was a blueprint when it was not OK to speak out on social issues and when it was not OK to talk about what we experience now with the overwhelming surge of police brutality and so on. Tupac was aware and conscious of those social issues, and he used his platform to speak as much, even if it was not popular at the time. So yes, he’s someone that [Polo] looks to for inspiration on many levels.”
Remembering Polo’s initial vision for the video, Stacia adds, “He knew that he wanted a lot of opulence. And one thing about Polo G, he’s going to put his family in those videos. So he knew that he was going to put his son in it.”
Arrad says the scene with Polo’s son was the most difficult to shoot, but “it definitely paid off.” Besides that, though, he will remember the “Rapstar” video for how easily it was executed. “Honestly, this was probably the smoothest shoot I’ve ever had in my career,” he says. “We wrapped early both days. Working with him was so easy. He was timely, professional, and he did whatever it would take to get the shot. That really stands out, because I work with a lot of difficult artists who are often late and filled with drama. But with him, it was like, ‘Let’s do whatever it takes. I just want the best video possible.’”
When “Rapstar” arrived on April 8, it was an instant success. The single earned the second-best debut week of the year on streaming, behind only Olivia Rodrigo (and beating Drake).
Stacia Mac credits her son’s honest songwriting as the reason “Rapstar” is resonating with fans so much. “He’s being transparent,” she says. “He’s being vulnerable. You see all the glitz and the glamor, but behind it all, he’s still such a humble being. He’s so relatable because he doesn’t put on a facade that he’s not a normal everyday human being. Some people think that you reach a certain level and you’re not affected by what other people are affected by every day. But you are. There are times that he is insecure about things that he second guesses himself on, but he keeps on moving. He faces that adversity and turns it into strategy and triumph. Because he can say those things out loud, it encourages others, and I think that relatability is what makes fans connect with him so much.”
Right now, those in Polo G’s inner circle are allowing themselves a moment to appreciate the milestone. “My daughter was talking to Siri and she’s like, ‘What’s the No. 1 song in the world?’” Stacia Mac says with a laugh. “And they started playing ‘Rapstar.’ This is everything that he worked for, and nothing was given to him. He stayed true to who he was, to his craft, and he was intentional about everything that he did. Now he’s seeing the fruits of it.”
For Synco, who had been making a name for himself in California over the past few years collaborating with artists like Blueface, SOB x RBE, and Shoreline Mafia, it’s an opportunity to level up and show his range.
“It’s still unreal,” he admits. “I think this song already has streamed better than the rest of my entire catalog on its own. I wasn’t really too involved with industry stuff before and now that’s starting to come around. I’m just trying to make the right moves and show people what else I can do, because I feel like I haven’t gotten to show people what I can really do yet. Even though this record is going No. 1 and all that, I feel like there’s much more for me to do.”
This has been a defining moment in the career of Einer Bankz, too. For years, he’s been working on building up his résumé as a producer, but many of the songs still haven’t been formally released. He knows that getting a No. 1 hit with a longtime collaborator like Polo G is the kind of turning point that will help legitimize his song-making abilities to the rest of the rap world.
“Nothing would have been more natural for my first big hit than something that’s been built over time with an artist like Polo,” he says. “It validates everything I started, and the dream I had coming into this five years ago.”
Bankz is already seeing a shift in how his pursuits as a producer are being viewed by friends, family, and collaborators. Now, he pictures more rollouts like “Rapstar,” pointing out that it might become somewhat of a blueprint in the future. “The videos aren’t going to stop, but it’s just going to be on a new level. If you see me doing a video and posting it on Instagram, there’s a high likelihood it can turn into a song that I produce, too. That’s the change I want to see.”
He was just working on a new song in the studio with Polo G the other night, and he says there are “a lot of songs that exist with a lot of the artists that you see on my page.” Now, Bankz has plans to release another album of his own and continue to build up a team of producers behind him. “The sky is really the limit,” he says. “I did this with a ukulele. Fuck. You can’t really tell me shit about what I can’t do.”
And for Polo G, of course, all the success of “Rapstar” will only build more hype for his third studio album. “Hall of Fame is the name of my next album, so I just wanted to put out a real subliminal of what’s to come,” he says, referring to the hall of fame imagery he included in the “Rapstar” video.
“On the next album, they can expect a star-studded feature list and a lot of versatility,” he adds. “I’ve got a lot of different types of music on it. I’ve got something that somebody from any type or facet of life could pull from on this project. If you don’t like the standard pain, melodic rap, I’ve got something that’s going to turn you up, too. I’ve got all types of shit for somebody to fuck with.”