For years, 21 Savage built an empire off the aesthetics and trauma of the streets — selling tales of violence, hood culture, and “gun smoke,” as one of his most popular songs proudly puts it. Now, the rapper has flipped the script in a way that’s left rap fans scratching their heads.
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His supposed change of heart — or blatant hypocrisy, to be frank — feels less like growth and more like a convenient rebrand, considering the streets weren’t something he escaped — they were something from which he profited. And now folks are calling it out.
To be clear, we fully respect rap music history and hip-hop as a culture. But there’s something downright distasteful about skyrocketing to a reported net worth of $16 million before deciding the very streets that fueled your rise are suddenly disposable, immoral, or unworthy — especially when that same street imagery is still being packaged, streamed and sold for profit.
Mind you, 21 — who recently released his highly anticipated fourth studio album, “What Happened to the Streets” — hasn’t actually moved away from “the streets” the way he’s led us to believe. The album’s opening track, “WHERE YOU FROM,” comes in hot with lyrics like, “Gen5 with the switch / Like my nigga Nudy, I’ll never leave the 6,” and “Pussy, don’t ask me about Metro or Drake / Play with either, get shot in the face / Gun shots for everybody — us, never them niggas.”
Keep in mind, this is just the first song.
Five days after the album’s release, Savage took to Twitter to double down on this change of heart, directly tagging fellow rappers Young Thug and Gunna, urging them to squash their longstanding beef. He claimed they “love each other,” while adding that the streets bring nothing but “trauma.”
“@gunna @youngthug. Yall niggas fix that shit yall love each other nigga you knew gunna wasn’t no gangster when he told the first time and we swept it under the rug for you you know he wasn’t tryna leave you to hang nigga fuck the streets we ain’t get shit but trauma from that shit,” 21 Savage penned in his post.
Young Thug seems to agree based on his response. Two days later, the YSL rapper wrote back: “Fuck the streets @21Savage.”
Fans ran knees to chest to the comments section to sound off. From pointing out this random shift to dubbing the streets, to calling the rapper a “part time gangster,” it’s clear fans are grappling with similar confusion on the new outlook. And they didn’t hold back.
“I thought the streets came first,” one fan teased, side-eyeing in their response.
“How ysl niggas serving life sentences looking rn,” a second wrote referring to the anti-snitching rhetoric surrounding the YSL trial.
“Part time gangster. Either stand on bidness or move around,” a third called out.
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