The beef between Yungeen Ace and Foolio
exposed the world to what's going on in the city of Jacksonville.
But now lesser-known artists are also starting to get some shine.
One of those artists is a rapper by the name Lil Poppa,
who recently signed to Yo Gotti’s CMG label.
This is the wild story of Lil Poppa’s come up.
Lil Poppa grew up in Jacksonville, Florida,
a city where the murder rate is over 2x the national average.
During his early years, he bounced back and forth between his mom’s place on the east side,
and his grandma’s crib on the west side.
His mom made him go to church at a young age to help keep him out of trouble,
and that’s where he discovered music.
He started rapping at just six-years-old,
writing Christian rhymes to perform at church.
His older brother Chi Chi taught him how to rap, and Lil Poppa just picked it up and ran with it.
Not before long, Lil Poppa was showing off his skills outside of church too.
When you grow up in a place like Jacksonville, sooner or later
you get sucked into the streets.
And when Poppa hopped off the porch,
his lyrics started to reflect the gritty and violent environment he grew up in.
But Lil Poppa never gave up on his dreams of being a rapper.
He suffers from a chronic blood disease that sometimes forces him to stay inside,
but instead of feeling sorry for himself he used the downtime to work on his craft.
Back in the day, he even set up a homemade studio in his grandma’s closet
so he could record bars without ever leaving.
Poppa released his first music at 14, and over the next few years
he went on a run dropping singles, mixtapes, and picking up a decent buzz in the city.
But 2018 is when his career leveled up with his breakout track Purple Hearts.
Purple Hearts is a raw, emotional track about a shooting that Lil Poppa survived
but left one of his closest homies dead.
He tells the whole world how badly the shooting affected him with lines like
“At night I wonder, ‘Why them bullets ain’t hit me?’
Why the **** they miss me?
Rather be gone take me out my mother******’ misery.”
Later in the track Poppa talks about how the cops tried to blame him for the death of his homies
“Detectives try to frame me, interrogation, they blame me
Wish I could take it back to the day that my mama named me.”
The track came out of a tragic situation, but it put Lil Poppa on the map.
He had a decent following in Jacksonville already,
but Purple Hearts got the attention of artists like Polo G
and led to Poppa signing a deal with Rule #1/Interscope Records in 2019.
But while Lil Poppa was blowing up in the music industry, his life behind the scenes
was still full of beef, violence, and death.
Poppa, his brother Chi Chi, and other rappers from they hood
formed a crew called Cutt Circle,
and their rivals in Jacksonville was a group called Head First.
Cutt Circle and Head First portrayed themselves as music collectives,
but the cops believed they were both violent street gangs.
In 2015, Cutt Circle even reached out to Action News Jax
to tell their side of the story.
In an email to the news station, they said
“First and Foremost, I would like to take the opportunity to state that Cutt Circle Records
is not a gang.
Cutt Circle Records is also in the process of putting a program together
to provide kids help with homework and life decisions, to keep them out of prison.
So is Cutt Circle a gang? No. Strictly a group of guys with a rap dream.”
A week before the email was sent, a Cutt Circle affiliate named Big Desi
was shot and killed.
A prosecutor from the Florida state attorney’s office
said that even if Cutt Circle itself wasn’t a gang,
they were directly tied to an east side Jacksonville gang called 1200.
Back in October 2014,
Head First was throwing a party on the Northside of Jacksonville.
Two Cutt Circle affiliates named Prosper and Tay slid through
and allegedly started letting off shots.
The opps returned fire and turned the party into a shootout.
When all the smoke cleared, Prosper, Tay, and a Head First affiliate was all dead
- and two women were injured.
A little over a week after Prosper and Tay died,
their Cutt Circle homies paid tribute to them with the track Lions, TIgers, and Bears.
Head First responded with a diss track against their dead opps
and a Cutt Circle member named Big Desi.
They said “Face shot as he hit the floor
callin’ his daddy as he hit the door.”
Rumors say that Head First caught Big Desi lacking and shot him in the face.
Desi survived the shooting, only to be shot and killed a year later.
Head First was rumored to be behind the hit, but no one was ever arrested for the murder.
Two days after Big Desi’s death, Cutt Circle allegedly got back by
killing Lenford Smith and Charles Eunice.
Then in September 2017,
a Head First affiliate named Lil Rap got ambushed in his car by three gunmen
who shot him to death.
Lil Rap was allegedly the one who killed Big Desi,
and his death is rumored to be another getback from Cutt Circle.
Head First and Cutt Circle were trading bodies back and forth,
and the next shooting is what inspired Lil Poppa’s Purple Hearts.
Poppa, his brother Chi Chi, and his homie were all hit in a drive by.
Poppa and Chi Chi both made it out alive,
but their friend was tragically killed.
Shout out to Shuuush-Utube channel for their deep dive into the crazy beef
between Cutt Circle and Head First.
While Cutt Circle and Head First were going at it, Lil Poppa also started beefing
with one of the rappers who put Jacksonville on the map: Foolio.
Almost every hip hop fan
knows about the war between Foolio and Yungeen Ace going on today,
but back in 2015 he was just another up and coming artist trying to break into the industry.
Lil Poppa and Foolio were actually cool back then
and even recorded a few songs together.
Then something went down between them that eventually led to a fistfight in a Foot Locker.
According to Lil Poppa, people were comparing him and Foolio on social media,
then Foolio commented that he was better.
But Foolio told a couple different versions of what went down.
He did an interview with Say Cheesetv in 2021
and said the fight happened because Poppa had been sneaking dissing him on tracks.
Y'all don't hear the thousand sneak disses the ***** say to me,
antagonising me and ****, you get what I'm saying?
So when I see you, Ima address it type ****
Then a couple of weeks later he told Cam Capone News
that Poppa spotted him at the mall and said he was being disrespectful.
As I was walking out the,
the mens foot locker, he point at me like man it's him man.
He too disrespectful and yada yada yada.
Then Poppa’s homie dissed Foolio’s dead brother, and that’s when the fight broke out.
After he said Kendrick dead for real it was just,
No more thinking
Splat now, we just followed beat they ass.
No matter how it started, some of the fight was caught on video
and you can see Foolio and his two homies beating up Poppa and the dude he was with.
The fight wasn’t too serious and it don’t seem like anyone was really hurt,
but ever since then Foolio and Poppa have been dissing each other back and forth.
In August 2018, Foolio dropped a remix of Yungeen Ace’s track **** That.
In the song, he goes after Ace, Quando Rondo, and Lil Poppa for linking up.
Then he calls out Lil Poppa and disses Ace’s dead brother and homies with the lines
“Just left out South with a hundred missed calls
Everybody mad like why y’all beat Lil Poppa at the mall?
Put on my ski, call up P, I’m tryna shoot some threes.”
Lil Poppa responded with his own tracks and they went back and forth for a while,
but then Poppa turned up the disrespect by taunting Foolio’s dead brother 8ball
during an IG Live session and on the track No Issues, rapping
“ I just said my prayers, I’m feelin’ great,
finna roll me up some, wait
You know they want me to watch what I say
How many J’s you smoked? Eight.”
Foolio came back and dissed Poppa’s homie Corbin Johnson,
who was kidnapped and found murdered a year later.
Foolio has dissed Corbin on a few different tracks, and on List of Dead Opps he raps
“Ayy, Corbin got kidnapped, how the **** a grown man go missing?”
Then Lil Poppa responded on the track Missing Something with the lines
“You won’t make me crash unless I wanna crash
Pray everybody on that list come back and haunt his ass.”
Foolio also allegedly pulled up to Lil Poppa’s show in Jacksonville
to confront him about everything,
but Poppa wouldn’t come out and face him.
In the May 2021 interview with Cam Capone News,
Foolio claimed the beef wasn’t that serious
and said “To be honest, I wish the best for all of us
because I know what all of us come from.
We from Jacksonville.
That **** ain’t a place that many people make it out of.”
But even after that interview, Foolio went after Lil Poppa and his homies
on tracks like List of Dead Opps.
In late 2021, Foolio claimed he was done dissing dead opps and called it “childish,”
and since then the beef with Lil Poppa has cooled off.
They’ve been sending shots at each other for a few years,
but it never really escalated into anything more than disses.
They had that fight back in 2018, but even that wasn’t nothin serious.
But, Foolio ain’t the only dude from 6block that Lil Poppa has issues with.
Another rapper from the same hood named Kshordy
went after Poppa’s dead brother Luh Leeke on the track Fuck Da Opps with the bar
“Smoking on Meechie and Leeke they speaking on Teke.”
And on another track he rapped
“I ain’t worried ‘bout Ducci, I’m lookin’ for Poppa.”
Lil Poppa responded on the track Discus Me with the line
“N***a talking ‘bout he looking for Popp what the fuck he gon’ do to him
That innocent lil girl lost her life behind yo shit, you ain’t looking for them.”
That last line was a reference to the tragic death of a 17-year-old girl
named Inandi Wyche back in 2020.
According to rumors, she dropped Kshordy off after a date,
then two shooters popped out and started letting off shots.
Kshordy was allegedly the target,
but Inandi Wyche got caught in the crossfire and died on the scene.
The attempted hit on Kshordy was allegedly getback
for a death that happened two days earlier.
It’s rumored that Kshordy shot and killed a dude named Daquan Saxton
just three blocks away from where Inandi died, but it was never officially confirmed.
Lil Poppa still has a lot of beef in Jacksonville,
but he’s also trying to level up his music career.
In April 2022, Yo Gotti signed him to his CMG label
and they dropped a track together called H Spot.
Signing with Gotti could be huge for Poppa’s career.
CMG is one of the hottest labels in the industry right now
with artists like Moneybagg Yo, 42 Dugg, and EST Gee,
and Gotti obviously sees Poppa’s potential to be his next star.
Now that Poppa is starting the rollout for his next project,
hopefully he can avoid any more drama in his city.
He has the talent and momentum behind him to really blow up and make it out as an artist,
but sticking around in Jacksonville is only gonna cause more issues in the future.
Like Boosie says, most rappers die in their own city.
Poppa has named Boosie as a major influence, so maybe he’ll take his advice
and get out of Jacksonville as soon as he can.