Hey I'm Brian Hyatt and this is Rolling Stone Music Now. This is officially the first

podcast of the Biden era because we're recording this like three minutes after the inauguration but we're going to

look back again at 2020 we're going to look back at hip-hop in 2020 and to help

guide us through the year we have Jeff Ahisa, our new senior editor at

Rolling Stone who's guiding our rap coverage. Jeff, welcome.

Hey, how are you Ryan?

I'm doing all right. I'm holding up. I'm holding up I'm grappling with our hour of the new era it has

just dawned upon us yes so we were going to start with I think pop smoke.

It seemed at the beginning of the year like it was going to be pop smoke's year and in some ways

it was but not in the way that it seemed like it was going to be.

It was pretty much right away, I think around February 19th,

the rapper at the moment was murdered,

and yet he had a song that became one of the defining songs of the year.

Right, you know, so going into the end of 2019,

pop smoke was having, you know, the type of rise that I don't think anyone in

hip-hop has seen in a really long time.

And it was super exciting not only because you have this guy from New York who's doing this thing,

you know, in a city that hasn't really had a hip-hop superstar in a super long time, but he's also bringing in this like UK flavor that I think again was just very unique and very interesting to to audiences and to people around the world and kind of in a flash that all went away and that all ended when he was

murdered and I think you know in a lot of ways the the death of pop smoke set

really set a different trajectory for hip-hop in 2020 because I think as you said

Everything was pop smoke everything was supposed to be pop smoke I think the other day a trailer just got released for the movie that he was going to be in this year so you know you know, I think once that happened, we kind of,

and then, you know, shortly after that happened, COVID started

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