Pop Smoke: The Brooklyn Drill Star Whose Grave Was Desecrated — and the Career Behind the Headlines

The vandalism of Pop Smoke’s grave still turns up one of the more disturbing footnotes in modern hip-hop history: the 2021 desecration of his crypt at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where vandals smashed through the marble mausoleum and left drag marks suggesting they’d tried to pull the casket loose.

It happened over a weekend, discovered by a cemetery employee who alerted security before police were called in. The plaque bearing his birth name, Bashar Barakah Jackson, was cracked almost through, and debris — broken stone, flowers, burnt joints — was scattered across the site. No one was ever arrested, and the total physical damage, oddly, was estimated at only a few hundred dollars, a number that never matched the outrage it caused. His mother Audrey Jackson later returned with family to clean the site herself, turning grief into something quieter and more defiant than anger.

That the grave has become a recurring point of fascination years later says a lot about how large Pop Smoke still looms in hip-hop, despite a career that barely lasted two years. Born in Canarsie, Brooklyn, he was still a teenager when he started rapping seriously, developing a sound built on booming 808s, sparse but menacing beats, and a gravel-deep voice that sounded like it belonged to someone twice his age. His breakout came in 2019 with “Welcome to the Party,” a track that took the aggressive template of UK drill and planted it firmly in New York, giving the city’s rap scene a new identity almost overnight. When Nicki Minaj and Skepta hopped on the remix, it confirmed what a lot of people already suspected — that Brooklyn drill was no longer a regional curiosity, it was about to be everywhere.

His mixtapes moved fast. “Meet the Woo” and its sequel “Meet the Woo 2” built a devoted following, with the second landing in the Billboard top ten just days before his death. That’s what makes the story so jarring: he was killed during a home invasion robbery at a rented house in the Hollywood Hills in February 2020, only 20 years old, at the exact moment his career was accelerating rather than peaking. Four suspects were eventually charged in connection with the killing.

What followed was unusual even by hip-hop’s often tragic standards. Two posthumous albums, “Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon” and “Faith,” both debuted at number one, essentially extending his career and his commercial dominance well past his death. Features from Travis Scott, Quavo, Karol G and others helped stitch together unfinished verses into full records, and rather than feeling like leftovers, both projects became defining moments in his catalog.

Pop Smoke’s influence on drill, and on New York rap more broadly, is hard to overstate. He didn’t invent the sound, but he’s the one who made it a global commercial force, opening the door for a wave of Brooklyn artists who came after him. The grave vandalism, unsettling as it was, hasn’t really changed that legacy — if anything it’s become one more strange, sad chapter in a story that was already defined by how much was cut short.