Plenty has been said about Bashar Jackson, the person—his family life, his teenage dreams of basketball stardom, his legal issues. A lot more has also been shared about Pop Smoke, rap icon: his fashion sense, his takeover of the hip-hop world, his lasting influence, even the minutiae of creating a debut album after his death.
But what was Pop like when he was creating? What was it like to be in the studio with him as he laid down a track like “Dior” or “Shake the Room?” It’s one of the aspects we wanted to explore when, six years ago, we started covering the young star from Canarsie, Brooklyn, who first made his mark on the scene with “Welcome to the Party.”
We at Complex were lucky enough to chronicle the Brooklyn rapper in depth. There was his appearance on Sneaker Shopping, one of his final interviews, an examination of a pivotal day in his career, a look at his time at Paris Fashion Week, a podcast series tracing his life hosted by fellow Canarsie native DJ Pvnch, and an exhaustive oral history of his first posthumous album Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon.
Wednesday, February 19, marks five years since Pop Smoke's tragic murder in Los Angeles. To honor his legacy, we decided to dig into the vault and pull out any Pop-related material. While reviewing our archives, we discovered interviews with several people who can offer valuable insight into Pop Smoke as a recording artist. They break down his creative process, quirks, and share some memorable stories along the way.
Pop Smoke’s mode, going off the top
Corey “Cutz” Nutile is a recording engineer and producer who worked closely with Pop during the final eight or so months of the rapper’s life. He recorded, by his estimate, somewhere between 50-70 songs. They were introduced in the summer of 2019 through Pop’s manager, Rico Beats.
“Great energy, real happy to be here, just real excited,” Corey remembered of Pop in that first meeting, when we spoke to him back in 2020. “I was like, wow, this guy’s got great genuine energy. We hit it off right away.”
Within just one or two studio sessions together, Pop had finished “Hawk Em,” which would pop up on Meet the Woo. The pair went on to work together steadily, with Nutile quickly becoming the Woo rapper’s go-to engineer, even on occasion traveling with him.
Corey recalled that Pop Smoke sessions could often turn into celebrations, with a mix of friends from his Canarsie neighborhood and music industry types.
“He came in on party time,” the engineer explained. “Pop always liked to have a good time in the studio. There wouldn’t be any more than, like, 20 people.”
Like a lot of rappers nowadays, the songwriting process was very in-the-moment, with the rapper almost never coming in with pre-written material.
“I’ve never seen him look at anything,” Nutile said. “He just went straight off the top. He was very creatively free. He had no commitment to one idea or style. If it didn’t work, he’d just change it.”
A typical Pop Smoke session started one of two ways, he went on.
“You would never know if he was gonna be super-late or right on time. You had no idea if he was ready to make some music tonight, or if he was coming from some shit and he was going to be a little late.”
Regardless, once Pop did show up, he’d “put his stuff down, get comfy, and ease into it.”
Often, he’d have a specific beat in mind that he’d want to rap over. Failing that, Rico would come in and go through beat packs from the producers he worked with, primarily UK ones like 808 Melo and AXL Beats. While working together night after night, Corey began to get a feel for how Pop created—when he was ready to go, the pace he’d want to record, when he’d want to double a vocal up or try something again.
“When you get to understand an artist the way I understood Pop, words don’t need to be said,” Corey told us. “He could just give me a look and I’ll know he’s about to go in the booth and record. He doesn’t need to say anything.
“Then when he’s in the booth, it’s just seamless communication. Sometimes he’ll record slower, and then once he figures out what he wants to do, he’ll want to go fast, and I’ll switch up. It’s non-verbal communication. That’s what I feel like most artists want out of an engineer.
After a while, Corey got so attuned to the rapper’s taste that he even began to be able to guess which beats Pop was going to like.
“It would be dark sounds and slappin’ kicks and 808s,” the engineer explained. “He would always say, ‘Yo, I need to fight the beat right now.’”
“My voice is crazy”
Another person involved in that fight was Jess Jackson, a producer and engineer who connected with Pop Smoke through Steven Victor, the head of Pop’s record label. Jackson, who grew up in the UK before decamping to Los Angeles, told us in a 2020 interview that his main memory of working with the rapper was one very unusual request.
“The one thing he always used to say was, ‘Don’t turn me up too loud,’” Jackson revealed. “Pop was very active in his communications in respect to making sure his vocals weren’t too loud. He was like, ‘Nah man, they’re going to hear me. My voice is crazy. They’re gonna hear me regardless. My voice cuts. Turn me down, and make sure the beat bangs.’”
“It’s refreshing to work with an artist who would say, turn me down—because I’m always the one saying to the artist, let’s turn you down,” he continued. “That’s always the big argument in the studio. It was just a beautiful thing. It made my job way easier.”
Jackson told us that Pop was easygoing when it came to mixes—usually satisfied after one or two attempts to balance a song’s tracks, as opposed to the “ten or 20” tries that many artists demand.
Another thing that made working with Pop Smoke easy for Jackson? His method of recording.
“Pop really liked to double a vocal—that was his whole sound,” Jackson told Complex. “And on a couple of songs he would double it twice, which is great for guys like me, because you put one in the left speaker, one in the right speaker, and you have one down the middle, and it's a perfect symmetrical vocal.”
Jackson recalled how Pop got his start in friends’ “bedroom studios” in New York. On signing with Steven Victor, his world began opening up.
“He started working in bigger studios,” the producer remembered. “You could hear the elevation of his sound.”
Sadly, Pop Smoke never got a chance to complete that elevation. Corey recalled that he didn’t even get a chance to celebrate the release of 2020’s Meet the Woo 2 with Pop, as the rapper was killed less than two weeks after its release.
“I wasn’t even finished telling Pop that I was proud of him,” he recalled. “It felt like we could chill for five seconds and just enjoy this moment. And then this shit happened.”