Pape — A Name That Still Moves

Portsmouth has always had something to prove.

Sandwiched between Norfolk's cultural gravity and Virginia Beach's commercial polish, the city has historically produced artists who had to fight twice as hard for half the recognition. That context matters when you try to understand what Pape was building, and why it carried the weight it did.

Born Clifton Erving Privott on September 6, 1991, Pape spent his career doing what Portsmouth artists have always done: putting in real work with limited infrastructure and making it count anyway. His catalog wasn't built on industry favors or playlist placement. It was built on the ground, record by record, in a city the wider world treats as a footnote to its neighbors.

The numbers tell the first part of the story. His most visible record, 3 Kingz — a 2017 collaboration with Norfolk's Young Crazy and Breeze Barker — crossed 170,000 views on YouTube, a figure that represents genuine regional traction for an independent artist outside the promotional machine. Hotboy Pape followed with 69,000 views. Bidagg pulled 60,000. Broke Bitch Freestyle reached 36,000. 9pm Out The Red hit 33,000. The numbers step down from there, but they don't disappear — Still Savage, Freeze Up, Bangor Drive — each record adding another layer to a catalog that was clearly building toward something.

What separates 3 Kingz from the rest of the catalog isn't just the view count — it's what it represents. Young Crazy and Breeze Barker were among the most credible names in the 757 independent scene at that time, artists with real regional reach and production connections that ran through Timbaland's orbit. For Pape to be on that record as a co-lead wasn't a feature appearance — it was a statement about his standing in the scene. You don't land that collaboration off potential. You land it off reputation.

The most telling detail in his entire catalog is a song title: Bangor Drive. That's not branding. That's a street in Portsmouth — and naming a record after it is the kind of move that only means something when the music actually sounds like it came from there. Pape never tried to sand down his Portsmouth edges or position himself toward a sound that would travel easier. His identity was specific, deliberate, and rooted in an exact address. In a scene where plenty of artists chase whatever sounds marketable, that kind of specificity is a choice — and it's a hard one to sustain.

His SoundCloud presence, operating under the handle @westsidepaper, dates back to at least 2020, with records like 2010 Vibes showing an artist who understood his own timeline and wasn't trying to pretend otherwise. The west side of Portsmouth is where the catalog lives. The handle is the biography.

On September 21, 2022, officers responding to a shooting near the 2500 block of Victory Boulevard in Portsmouth found Clifton Privott with a fatal gunshot wound. He was 31 years old. Two suspects were captured on surveillance footage; no arrests had been publicly confirmed at the time of this writing. His death added his name to a city already strained by gun violence — a city where the music he was making was, in part, a direct response to that reality.

What remains is a body of work that hasn't stopped moving. His name still surfaces in posts, in tributes, in conversations that have nothing to do with promotion. His YouTube catalog is still being watched. The Threads post marking his September birthday — "Paper Day! Bangor Drive Pape" — appeared in September 2025, three years after he was gone, posted by someone who still had the music cued up.

That's not an algorithm keeping him alive. That's community.

Pape lands at #10 not because his story is the smallest on this list, but because his catalog was still building when it stopped. The foundation was real, the reach was growing, and the identity was locked in. What he left behind doesn't feel like an ending. It feels like an interruption.

Some artists fade with time. He didn't.