Five years since Pop Smoke

February 19, 2025 — five years to the day since Pop Smoke was killed in Los Angeles. Across Canarsie, East Flatbush, Brownsville, and East New York the catalog played on car speakers and at block-party rigs from sundown. The dancers who came up listening to him — many of them in their early twenties now — held cyphers in the spots they'd first heard Welcome to the Party in 2019. Half a decade in, the sound he built is the soundtrack of a scene he never got to grow old in. The way the borough marked the date said as much.