On I Am > I Was, We Finally Find Out Who 21 Savage Is

By Trey Alston


21 Savage is proof that abundance isn’t habitually a good thing, even in the streaming age. Right now, musicians and celebrities openly engage with fans on social media to set up an efficient persona and keep people interested. With our attention spans shorter than ever, and fame especially fleeting, artists seek to overload the public with Q&As, unreleased snippets, and snarky posts to generate conversation. 21 Savage, meanwhile, in an educated manner rides the bench while others try their hardest to score. He’s mysterious and unreadable, although with his new album I Am > I Was, which dropped December 21, he has peeled back the curtain to reveal not only his level of comfort in the mystique he’s cultivated, although also what resides in back of his brow.


Despite his seeming ambivalence to celebrity, 21 Savage spent the better piece of two years ensnared in some of rap’s biggest moments. He supplied a menacing counterpart to Post Malone on their Grammy-nominated 2017 group effort “rockstar,” which became one of the year’s biggest hits, surprised fans with venomous ad-libs on Childish Gambino’s mysterious single “This is America,”, and injected intoxicating amounts of testosterone into Cardi B’s “Bartier Cardi,” her expensive follow-up to “Bodak Yellow.” Outdoor of rap, he was involved in a very public two-year relationship with Amber Rose, a famed pop-culture figure and sex-positive activist.


But in the face of so much publicity, 21 Savage kept, and still keeps, in the shadows. No matter how several interviews he does, the world never comes closer to understanding what makes him tick. 2016 was his most press-friendly year, any time once he became a member of the XXL Freshman Class and was the subject of an intense, elaborate profile by The Fader. Yet a couple of thousand words gave more insight to the various “beat-up ass apartments” he lived in as a kid in Atlanta than 21 Savage himself; the most famous takeaway from the piece is that he’s just as stoic in real life as he is in photographs and interviews.


This stone-faced personality plays into the off-kilter rap he makes: music for horror-movie villains to sneak around bedrooms at midnight to. No one slinks through verses like he does. He prefers to build anticipation and dread before striking with blunt-force lyricism and then watching the blood spill out. His voice rarely evolves in back of a menacing murmur — sometimes an actual whisper — as he raps about brutal depictions of street violence, often more blunt and macabre than actual horrorcore rap, with which it shares stylistic similarities. His 2017 studio debut, Issa Album, noticed religion in dirty pistols, lust in downed booze bottles, and solace in dead presidents. Yet its defining aspects was his separation from reality and the idea of celebrity: “The internet won’t help you understand me,” he raps on “Famous.” It’s a striking, maybe purposeful observation of what he decides to give the world and what he decides to hold close to his chest. He tells vicious tales of violence, yet won’t share what’s on his mind. A couple of months later, he doubled down by hitting the nail on the head and dropping Without Warning, a surprise project made in quiet teamwork with Offset and Metro Boomin.


21 Savage’s I Am > I Was also arrives at a unexpected time: right whenever things are winding down, once media coverage for the year closes soon following the releases of year-end lists. However the album starts on a more soulful note than 21 Savage has ever explored. The opener “A Lot,” featuring a near-whispering verse from J. Cole, flows smoothly with its background ambience, allowing 21 to dig into the dark corridors of his mind and explain himself. While in the album he stitches with each other disparate images in his life. The beats are just a little bit darker, more emotional, than his past works. His rhymes are delivered a little bit louder and looser than before. The album’s expansive world of production — ranging from the slow-moving “All My Friends,” to the frantic, jittering anxiousness of “A&T” with City Women — brings heightened versions of the rapper’s several different personalities explored on Issa Album, from excited to glum, as if to brandish the growth evident in the album’s very title.


What connects each song’s thread is the simultaneously brutal and blank delivery of 21’s message. It makes the wide-reaching album sound like an authentic developments for 21 Savage, where he's just as concerned with his thoughts as his morose subject matter. It’s not an airtight exhibition of the rapper’s curatory abilities, however it’s not attempting to be. I Am> I Was, alternatively, is a journal chronicling the maturation of the mind and what comes with it. On “asmr” he whispers, “All these dead bodies got me seein' eccentric things/Both sides of the gun, I done dealt and felt the pain," digging deep into his horrific past, nevertheless right now viewing it from a distance rather than from beside it. Where he once reveled in the struggle, he right now reflects on it: “I remember times was dark/Now I can shine in the dark/Lost a couple companions, I ain’t even really irritated though, I ain’t even really furious though," he raps on “all my companions That repetition is key. The past is currently water under the bridge.


On I Am > I Was, 21 Savage takes the floor to tell his truths and his stories. Yet there was no dramatic roll out for it. While his peers spent all year shooting releases out of cannons and spilling out on social media, 21 Savage waited the span of 2018 to get around to sharing his story. He wasn’t in a rush. Immediately considering that, in a telling Twitter pronouncement ahead of I Am > I Was, 21 revealed that he’d already earned one billion streams this year “without dropping any music at all.” Mystery was still good for something in 2018, without consideration of what the social media activity from other musicians may lead you to believe. Take that, transparency.