For a crew of young musicians in New York, the Brooklyn rapper’s killing was more than just a headline.
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.
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. ♦
