Shayaa Bin Abraham-Joseph, better known by his stage name 21 Savage.
The Atlanta rapper’s track ‘Nothin New’ is a stunning combination of lived experience and historical literacy
In the years since three queer, Black women’s declaration of dignity first ignited a wave of pro-Black activism in 2013, several artists have openly aligned themselves with the fight to end state-sanctioned violence.
On his debut studio album, 21 Savage quietly joined their ranks.
The Atlanta rapper’s Issa Album premiers at a politically fraught period. As of this year, police officers continue to kill Black people without facing convictions. Republican politicians control the White House and Congress. Federal judges threaten to nullify landmark Civil Rights legislation. And during all of this controversy and upheaval, 21 Savage has been keeping close watch.
While Issa Album features plenty of the speaker-rattling odes to Percocets and pistols fans expect, it is the political treatise ‘Nothin New’ that’s the album’s standout track. On the song, 21 contextualizes the trap’s social dysfunction within the broader phenomenon of American racism:
“Shit gettin' outrageous
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?”
With great economy, 21 recounts the toll slavery’s modern-day reincarnation--mass incarceration--has extracted from Black families.
According to The Pew Charitable Trusts, One in 9 African American children have an incarcerated parent. The same report found that for the children in these families, paternal incarceration was associated with behavior problems, school suspensions, and delinquency.
For 21, this relationship between a broken criminal justice system and troubled, and often violent, adolescence is self-evident. Through a series of rhetorical questions, ‘Nothin New’ almost mocks others who fiend naivety about the predictable consequences parental incarceration exacts on Black youth. “Why you think we ridin' 'round with choppers off safety?” he asks.
Beyond the familial and communal cost, Savage also explores the political toll of incarceration. “I used to sell dope, nigga, now I can't vote” he raps. Here he showcases an acute knowledge of the nation’s controversial felon disenfranchisement laws which, according to The Sentencing Project, have robbed one of every thirteen Black Americans of their voting rights.
In the second verse, Savage pivots effortlessly from insidious forms of discrimination like Black voter suppression to the blunt force trauma of police brutality:
“Welcome to the hood, yeah where niggas dyin' at
Same place where the best chicken gettin' fried at
Same place where the police killin', tellin' lies at”
Police malpractice cases in the rapper's hometown, like the tragic murder of Kathryn Johnston, buoy his lyrics. In 2006, Atlanta police officers illegally raided the home of the innocent Johnston, a 92-year-old Black woman, and shot her to death. And after the raid, officers planted marijuana at her house in an attempted coverup. As the story broke local and national headlines, the news about Johnston likely was a formative--and familiar--experience for a young 21.
More recent cases involving attempted police cover-ups, like Michael Slager in South Carolina, Ray Tensing in Ohio, and Roy Oliver in Texas, ground and validate the song. Extending beyond police brutality and body cameras, 21 Savage doesn't limit his critique to recent years’ controversy. Rather, ‘Nothin New’ traces the full arc of American racism:
“Anger in my genes, they used to hang us up with ropes
Civil rights came so they flood the hood with coke
Breakin' down my people, tryna kill our faith and hope
They killed Martin Luther King and all he did was spoke”
Whether discussing Jim Crow era lynchings or cell-phone-streamed police brutality, 21 Savage reminds his audience that racism is, in fact, nothing new. Political and poignant, the song is a landmark track both for its author and the genre it represents.
Over recent years, much of popular Black music has been influenced by the looming message of the Black Lives Matter movement. The proliferation of protest ballads like Jamila Woods’s Blk Girl Soldier and Kendrick Lamar’s Alright atest to this.
But 21 Savage is a trap artist, and therefore, he is a member of a genre much less steeped in the music-activist tradition. But just as the Civil Rights movement spurred creators like Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka in the Black Arts movement, Black Lives Matter has turned 21’s trap house to an arthouse.
Over Metro Boomin & Zaytoven’s conjuring and bleak production, Savage’s stunning combination of lived experience and historical literacy, proves to critics and fans alike that trap music is more than mumble rap. It is one of the most dynamic and socially relevant genres out today -- one where the purveyors both watch and sing America too.