“I have the latter because they’re dual‑concentric and I’m hyper‑sensitive to phase. “I have Pro Tools HD in my studio, as well as an SSL Sigma summing mixer, Amphion BaseTwo25s paired with Two18s, and Tannoy DMT II speakers,” explains Jess Jackson. But first he elaborates on his idiosyncratic viewpoints and methods, which he applies for the most part in his own studio in Los Angeles. How the album came into being, after Bashar Jackson, aka Pop Smoke, was killed on February 19 of this year aged only 20, is an interesting story in itself, on which Jackson touches further. Nothing could be further from the truth: at 39 years old, Jackson is in the prime of his life, and he’s recently mixed and/or co‑produced 32 tracks on one of the biggest albums of 2020, Pop Smoke’s Shoot For The Stars, Aim For The Moon. Reading the above without having seen Jackson, you could be forgiven for assuming he’s been in the business for decades and has long since stopped making cutting‑edge records. But with analogue you achieve imperfection accidentally, and our ears tend to really like that.” Present Imperfect The problem with digital is that you need to go out of your way to achieve imperfection. Essentially you get a pseudo‑stereo acoustic environment that is not perfect. “When you pan things left and right on an analogue desk, they’re not 100‑percent the same, because there are electronic idiosyncrasies inside each channel, and this is going to give you a slightly different sound on the right and on the left. Jackson’s love of analogue is also in part informed by his adherence to the rule of thirds and his quest for imperfection. So I frame things visually, splitting width and depth into three areas.” I see music visually, I don’t hear it with my ears per se. When asked what he means about humans thirds, he replies: “I apply the rule of thirds from photography and painting to mixing records. Speaking is Jess Jackson, who explains that he likes to “analyse the human mind and why it enjoys certain things and not others”. I wouldn’t just put things in stereo and let them live symmetrically in the speakers.” I may use a completely different reverb on the left as on the right, or EQ things differently on one side than on the other, and so on. So I don’t look at my speakers as left and right, I look at them as two independent mono channels. We are programmed not to like perfect symmetry. Mix engineer Jess Jackson turned it into a piece of pop magic. As fast as things were moving for him, he couldn’t have had a second of spare time to give to anyone who didn’t believe.The lead single from Pop Smoke’s posthumous debut album was stitched together from two demos in different keys. Canarsie had Pop Smoke famously calling friends and associates his “woos,” but his enemies mostly went nameless, barely worth mentioning. He’d even have no problem setting his own tone on his Travis Scott collaboration “GATTI,” from the JACKBOYS project. Pop Smoke worked well with the stars of his city, nabbing collaborations with Nicki Minaj, Bronx heartthrob A Boogie wit da Hoodie, and fellow ascending voices Lil Tjay and Fivio Foreign. Fans worldwide got indoctrinated upon accepting his 2019 debut project’s invitation to Meet the Woo a sequel, Meet the Woo 2, was released just weeks before his death. (A great deal of his "Welcome to the Party” video takes place in front of the long-standing jerk chicken staple Peppa’s.) His slang (“sturdy,” “dap me up”) was largely New York City-centric, which helped songs like “War,” “Christopher Walking,” and “Dior” reverberate quickly through, and beyond, the five boroughs. Pop Smoke was from the far-flung Canarsie neighborhood, and his verses radiate a singular kind of Real Brooklyn energy. His voice across it-gruff and road-worn beyond his age-carries the delivery of a supervillain, daring his adversaries to try and stop the mayhem he has planned for the city. He exploded onto the scene in 2019 with “Welcome to the Party,” a song that somehow plays as enticing as it is menacing, exemplifying Brooklyn’s rising drill music scene at its sharpest. When his life was cut short in the early hours of February 19, 2020, Brooklyn rapper Pop Smoke was, at the age of 20, more famous than he’d ever been, yet nowhere close to where he was likely to end up.
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