Song #20: "For the Night" by Pop Smoke featuring Lil Baby & DaBaby

 

🎵 Today’s Song

Pop Smoke featuring Lil Baby & DaBaby — “For the Night”
Year: 2020
Rating: 29/100

Random draw: Song #20
Selected era bucket: 2020–present
Verified remaining eligible population before draw: 9,055 recordings
Remaining eligible in selected era before draw: 743 recordings
Selection method: Era selected uniformly from the eight project buckets, then one remaining eligible recording selected uniformly from that era
Pool ID: OSAD-08386

Chart performance

Billboard Hot 100: #6
Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs: #4
Rhythmic Airplay: #1, five nonconsecutive weeks
UK Singles Chart: #14
Yearly rank: #49 (2020); also #32 on the 2021 year-end Hot 100 after its chart run crossed calendar years
Weeks charted: 43
Weeks Top 20: 29
Weeks Top 10: 3
Weeks at peak: 1

Pop Smoke at this point

Charting record: 6th of 34
Top-20 hit: 1st of 4
Top-10 hit: 1st of 2
#1 pop hit: None of 0
Previous Top-20 hit: None
Next Top-20 hit: “The Woo”

Lil Baby at this point

Charting record: 59th of 159
Top-20 hit: 9th of 27
Top-10 hit: 5th of 13
#1 pop hit: None at this point; 0 eventual #1s in the canonical Extended data
Previous Top-20 hit: “The Bigger Picture”
Next Top-20 hit: “On Me”

DaBaby at this point

Charting record: 39th of 53
Top-20 hit: 9th of 10
Top-10 hit: 4th of 5
#1 pop hit: Had already reached #1 with “ROCKSTAR”; 1 eventual #1
Previous Top-20 hit: “JUMP”
Next Top-20 hit: “Levitating”

Retrospective standing

GOAT overall: #3,205
GOAT points: 329,705

Among Pop Smoke songs: #1 of 34
Among Pop Smoke Top-20 hits: #1 of 4

Among Lil Baby songs: #2 among his GOAT-ranked recordings
Among Lil Baby Top-20 hits: #2 of 28 in the GOAT workbook

Among DaBaby songs: #3 among his GOAT-ranked recordings
Among DaBaby Top-20 hits: #3 of 10

Hot 100 portion of chart run: Entire 43-week run; peak #6

Data note: The Eligible Pool contains 27 Lil Baby Top-20 qualifiers, while the later GOAT workbook contains 28 GOAT-ranked Lil Baby Top-20 recordings. The career-position count above follows the canonical Eligible Pool/Extended data; the retrospective ranking follows the GOAT workbook.

Record details

Entered chart: July 18, 2020
Released: July 3, 2020
Recorded: 2020; exact recording date not reliably established
Single: Digital/streaming release; no traditional A-side/B-side
Album: Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon
Songwriters: Bashar B. Jackson, Alex Petit, Christoffer B. Marcussen, Daniel M. Raab, Dominique Jones and Jonathan L. Kirk
Lead vocal: Pop Smoke
Featured performers: Lil Baby, DaBaby
Running time: 3:10
Label: Victor Victor Worldwide / Republic Records
Catalog number: USUM72013356
Recording to use: Original explicit 2020 album/single recording featuring Lil Baby and DaBaby

Listen / watch / read

🎧 Original recording: Pop Smoke featuring Lil Baby & DaBaby — “For the Night”

📺 Official visualizer: The song did not receive a conventional narrative/performance music video; the official visualizer is the familiar looping nighttime-drive animation.

📝 Lyrics: Shazam lyrics

Versions & title history

Original or cover: Original recording
Important alternate versions: Clean/radio edits were distributed, although clean-version metadata on streaming services can be inconsistent.
Same-title unrelated chart hits: None relevant to this project identified.

Streaming note

The original explicit album recording is the version to use. There is no meaningful re-recording or remix ambiguity comparable to some earlier project songs.

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The Pop Smoke Song That Doesn't Sound Much Like the Pop Smoke Story

One of the strange things about doing this project strictly through songs that reached the Billboard Top 20 is that sometimes we enter an artist's career through the wrong door.

Pop Smoke is a particularly extreme example.

If all I knew about him came from today's random selection, I would probably describe him as a deep-voiced rapper making smooth, atmospheric, Auto-Tuned trap. When “For the Night” started, my immediate reaction was that it sounded like mumble rap. The beat floats rather than attacks. There is a flute-like figure drifting through the production, the trap drums settle into a groove, and Pop Smoke's enormous voice is softened by vocal processing.

Then the chorus arrives and something even stranger happens.

Pop Smoke sings.

Not “raps melodically.” Not merely “uses a melodic cadence.” He sings the hook.

Nobody is going to confuse him with Luther Vandross. This isn't a vocal showcase, and the processing is doing plenty of work. But that's not really the point. What matters is that the gravelly voice associated with one of the defining figures in Brooklyn drill turns out to work surprisingly well as the melodic center of a smooth pop-rap record.

And if the Top 20 were the only history available to us, we would have almost no idea why that was surprising.

The career before the charts noticed

Pop Smoke, born Bashar Barakah Jackson, had become one of the central figures in Brooklyn drill before the Hot 100 really knew what to do with him.

“Welcome to the Party,” his 2019 breakthrough, became a major New York record without ever reaching the Hot 100. “Dior,” probably the song most closely associated with his original sound, eventually made the chart but peaked at #22 — two places outside the boundary of this project.

So our randomizer will never select either of them.

Chronologically, “For the Night” is Pop Smoke's first hit that qualifies for this project. It was also his first Top-10 hit and ultimately became the highest-ranked song of his career in my retrospective GOAT workbook.

That means the Top-20 cutoff misses the music that established Pop Smoke's reputation and picks up his story only after he had begun reaching for a much larger audience. His drill records made him a star in New York; the smoother “For the Night” became a much bigger national hit.

But what exactly is drill?

At its simplest, drill is a branch of hip-hop built around dark, sparse and menacing production, often paired with blunt lyrics about street life, violence and survival. It emerged in Chicago in the early 2010s through artists such as Chief Keef. The music then traveled to the UK, where producers reshaped the sound with skittering percussion, heavy bass and the sliding 808 bass lines that became one of drill's most recognizable musical signatures.

Those British beats eventually made their way back across the Atlantic. Brooklyn rappers began using UK drill production and combining it with New York voices and experiences, creating what became known as Brooklyn drill.

Pop Smoke's booming voice over the production of London producer 808Melo became one of the defining versions of that sound.

I knew “Dior” before doing this project, although I don't think I consciously understood it as “drill.” In fact, I'm pretty sure the term itself didn't really register with me until New York mayor Eric Adams made news criticizing drill videos and their association with violence in 2022.

That probably gave me a distorted idea of what drill actually was. I encountered the genre label through a political argument about violence rather than through the music.

“For the Night” barely sounds like drill at all.

The other Pop Smoke was already there

The obvious story would be that Pop Smoke became successful making hard Brooklyn drill records and then somebody decided he needed to soften his sound to reach the mainstream.

The actual story is more interesting.

Steven Victor, the music executive who signed Pop Smoke to Victor Victor Worldwide in 2019, heard melodic material almost from the beginning. Pop told him he had sung before he started rapping, including singing in church. Victor remembered early Pop Smoke material that included “For the Night” and other melodic songs.

Rather than release everything at once, Pop Smoke and his team concentrated first on establishing his drill identity. The mixtapes could establish who he was; the album could show what else he could do.

That makes “For the Night” less a pivot than a delayed reveal.

When Pop played the song for Victor during album sessions in the Bahamas, it contained only Pop Smoke's part. Victor remembered being struck by the different tone of his voice. Producer CashMoneyAP remembered the same thing: Pop Smoke was singing rather than using the harder delivery people expected from him.

And then Pop Smoke was killed.

February 19, 2020

Pop Smoke died on February 19, 2020. He was 20 years old.

He was staying at a rented house in the Hollywood Hills when armed intruders entered during a robbery. Investigators later connected the attackers' ability to locate him to social-media posts that had exposed the address. During the robbery he was shot and killed. The group escaped with a diamond-studded Rolex that was later sold for $2,000. Despite the associations between drill music and real-world violence, investigators established robbery — not his music — as the motive.

The timing was devastating.

His second mixtape, Meet the Woo 2, had been released only twelve days earlier and debuted in the Billboard 200 Top 10. His debut album was still ahead of him.

He never heard “For the Night” become a hit.

Finishing a record without its artist

After Pop Smoke's death, Steven Victor initially wasn't sure he could even bring himself to finish the album. 50 Cent, one of Pop Smoke's idols, encouraged him to complete it and eventually helped executive-produce the project. Victor estimated that roughly 80 percent of the album's songs were already essentially finished as Pop wanted them.

“For the Night” occupies an interesting middle ground.

Lil Baby was not simply attached to the song afterward because he was famous. When Pop played the unfinished song for Victor, Victor thought Lil Baby would fit its sound, and Pop wanted to work with him.

Lil Baby's actual verse, however, contains a reminder that the finished recording belongs to a different world than the one in which Pop Smoke created it.

“C.I.P. Pop,” he says — “Crip in Peace” — wishing Pop could see what was happening.

It's only a moment. “For the Night” does not become a memorial song. The groove never stops and the subject matter barely changes. But the line quietly acknowledges the impossible circumstance at the center of the record: Pop Smoke is singing the hook of what would become his biggest hit, while one of his guests is already mourning him.

DaBaby's presence came later in the process. Unlike Lil Baby, whose involvement had been envisioned while Pop was alive, DaBaby was added after Pop Smoke's death. He also gives Pop a brief rest-in-peace acknowledgment.

What's remarkable is how little any of this history can be heard in the finished record.

Three rappers, one groove

Knowing the backstory, I expected the seams to show.

They really don't.

Pop Smoke raps the first verse in a smoother style than the one I associate with “Dior,” then sings the chorus. Lil Baby enters in a much higher register with a faster, more compressed flow. DaBaby is considerably easier for me to understand, although that seems mostly attributable to his usual clearer, more percussive delivery.

But the groove underneath them barely changes.

Nobody hijacks the song. Nobody forces it into a different style. Even DaBaby, who was added later, sounds like he belongs there.

The guests provide variation without changing the atmosphere, while Pop Smoke keeps returning to supply the thing that actually holds the song together: the hook.

And the hook is easily the most important part of the record.

The lyrics are mostly garnish.

For the night means exactly that

All three rappers stay remarkably close to the same basic subject: wealth, expensive things, guns and casual sex.

The title is unusually accurate. These women really are “for the night.” There isn't much interest in relationships; they're largely presented as another benefit of the lifestyle being celebrated.

There are more references buried in the verses than I initially understood. An “AP” is an Audemars Piguet watch. Lil Baby mentions his mother, LaShawn. DaBaby makes a Major Payne joke while wearing camouflage. Decoding those references made me a little smarter about what I was hearing, but it didn't fundamentally change the song for me.

The words fit the groove, but the verses aren't where the record's appeal lies.

This is an atmosphere record.

Range or dilution?

Contemporary critics didn't entirely agree about records like this one. Some heard Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon as evidence that Pop Smoke could operate far beyond Brooklyn drill. Others thought the smoother production and high-profile guests diluted the qualities that had made him distinctive.

The frustrating thing is that Pop Smoke never got the chance to settle that question himself.

Had he lived, maybe “For the Night” would have been one lane among several. Maybe he would have moved steadily toward mainstream melodic rap. Maybe he would have moved back and forth between all of it.

We don't know.

The album arrived on July 3, 2020, less than five months after his murder.

“For the Night” debuted at #6.

It spent 43 weeks on the Hot 100.

In my GOAT rankings, it is the biggest record of Pop Smoke's career. Remarkably, it's also the second-highest-ranked Top-20 record involving Lil Baby and the third-highest involving DaBaby. What initially looks like two established stars being recruited to elevate an emerging rapper became one of the largest chart records in all three careers.

Whether those features made the song a hit is impossible to know. They probably helped its ceiling. But after listening closely, neither guest explains why the record works.

The thing I remember when it's over isn't either guest verse.

It's Pop Smoke singing the hook.

29/100

“For the Night” is a little better to me than Kodak Black's “Tunnel Vision,” but not by much.

The backstory is more interesting, and Pop Smoke's sung sections feel less coarse to me than Kodak Black did. The production establishes a smooth, consistent groove, and I don't dislike the atmosphere.

But the lyrics don't give me much beyond wealth, guns and casual sex, and their treatment of women limits the record's appeal for me. There's also not enough cleverness or memorable writing in the verses to overcome that.

So this becomes a vibe record.

I don't hate the vibe, but I'm not going to search out the song again.

The more interesting discovery is Pop Smoke himself. I came into this knowing very little about him beyond “Dior,” his voice, and the fact that he had died young. “For the Night” shows enough versatility to make me believe that somewhere in the career Pop Smoke never got to have, he very well might have made a song I loved.

It just isn't this one.

29/100.