#3: On 21 Savage
January 21, 2024
Cambridge
21 Savage – dark days
The first thing you should know about 21 Savage is the tattoo smack in the middle of his forehead. It looks like a cross, almost—but it isn’t. As he explained in a YouTube clip that went viral back in the mid-2010s: it’s a knife. The tattoo fits a rapper whose lyrics extol violence with religious fervor. In one of his early hits, he raps, I grew up in the streets without no heart / I’m praying to my Glock.
His new album, american dream, mostly offers more of the same, lines like he a homebody, fuck it, kill him in his yard or graveyard, that’s where the opps stay…take my chopper everywhere, that’s bae. But listen carefully and you pick up on a different thread, one that you can trace back through interviews and previous albums to unravel the heartless mythology that he, along with the music industry and his fans, created out of his life.
Start with the very last song on the album, dark days. He warns all the teenagers that wanna gun tote that you gon’ lose a lot of your friends and that’s what hurt the most; you can't do nothing but reminisce about y'all cracking jokes. You feeling like nobody love you, I know how that go. Later, he admits: Gangsta, but I still cry when nobody around, tryna numb the pain, drinking bottles 'til I drown. Never do no suicide, but I'd be lying if I said it hadn't crossed my mind.
The warning about losing friends isn’t creative license or a work of imagination; he’s talking about real people. On letter to my brudda, he names them: Hard work, tryna keep the past behind me. I still be having flashbacks about Johnny. … Tayman and CJ, I can still feel their spirits. Skinny and Wanwan used to rap, I know they hear it. It ain’t that easy, putting pain inside of lyrics. Last year, after Migos member Takeoff was killed by a stray bullet, 21 Savage reflected in a YouTube interview: I’m scared of everybody. … Scared n****s stay alive. I’ve been shot. I’ve seen my friend die. In my face, on my birthday, in the car. … I’m talking about right here. He’s in the driver’s seat, I’m in the passenger seat.
That trauma has always been part of how 21 Savage tells his own story. In 2016, after his viral “it’s a knife” interview, he discussed the tattoo further in an interview on the Breakfast Club. The show’s host prompts him: “You said ‘it’s a knife!’ And they got the funny ass gif. You seen the gif? It sound like a horror movie. … It’s a meme.” He laughs. 21 Savage laughs. But he answers in an awkward, quiet mumble: Yeah, my little brother got killed, man. My little brother, man. Rest in peace my little brother, man, Lil Tay, man. His grief resonates and strikes the room dumb. The host recovers, asks breezily, “What? How many funerals you done been to, man?” Savage answers: Too many. My granddaddy died last month, my grandmama died last year, my little brother Tay, Johnny, Larry, Tamika, TJ, Nino, V, Renzo, Gin Gin, Loc… I done lost too many people. The host is mute as 21 Savage trails off into the morbid ledger.
Underneath the dagger tattoo (a replica of his dead brother’s) and the violent mystique of his music is pain, but 21 Savage is savvy; he knows what consumers want to hear. In the same interview, he mused about his violent lyrics: if 21 Savage didn’t come out rapping about them things, who would be listening to 21 Savage? Would I even be on this platform to be talking to you, if it wasn’t for me saying ignorance to catch people’s attention? He's right, of course: there’s long been a segment of the mainstream rap market reserved for people celebrating death. Right now, that fascination is with the gang disses of Brooklyn and UK drill, but in 2016, it was 21 Savage; before that it was 50 Cent bragging that “he got hit like I got hit, but he ain’t fucking breathing.”
Of course suffering underlies violent music. We shouldn’t need 21 Savage opening up about his trauma for us to recognize that when somebody doesn’t value another person’s life, it’s because he’s already learned that his own life isn’t worth much. Yet for at least 30 years, kids like me, who grew up far away from that kind of suffering, have been creating a market for it—by streaming songs, watching interviews, and buying concert tickets for rappers who sell their lives to us as a kind of performative fantasy.
Everything stays the same: the white kids at suburban high schools seek out violent rap and learn all the lyrics as part of their masculine wardrobes; the Black protagonists who live and make the songs continue to suffer real violence. If you’re 21 Savage, your choice is only whether or not to wear your trauma as a badge of honor and get rich off of it. He acknowledges as much on Nothin New: They thought I only rapped about murder and pistols, I'm tryna feed my family, I ain't being political. … Treat us like slaves then they lock us up in cages: Young, black, poor, ain't had a father since a baby. Why you think we skip school and hang out on the pavement? Why you think we ridin' 'round with choppers off safety? Streets cutthroat, so I'm cutthroat. I used to sell dope, now I can't vote. … Anger in my genes, they used to hang us up with ropes.
There's a lot to learn about the music industry’s relationship to Black lives in America from 21 Savage’s music and persona—from his introspection, his real suffering, and his armor of swagger. But nobody is really listening to him.