Album Review: What Happened to the Streets? by 21 Savage

21 Savage's fourth solo album interrogates the collapse of street code through fourteen tracks of paranoid accounting and emotional shutdown.

Courtesy of Slaughter Gang/Epic Records.

On “Stepbrothers,” the audio clip introduces, “Everybody glorifyin’ all the wrong shit now,” mounting the central problem before the album’s first verse even starts. The title asks a question the songs never answer because there’s no answer left to give. What happened was a slow erosion, the kind that turns principles into negotiables and makes rats look like entrepreneurs. On “Where You From,” 21 Savage lays out the premise with brutal economy: “Shit like Vietnam, gun smoke in my lungs,” then pivots immediately to identity policing, asking “Savage where you from?” like geography still determines loyalty when the rules have already moved. Is the question rhetorical? Nope. It’s territorial anxiety dressed as a challenge, the sound of someone watching borders dissolve and trying to redraw them with threats.

He was born in London, moved to Atlanta as a child, and in 2019 faced an immigration case that became public spectacle before he later became a lawful permanent resident. That history complicates every time he demands to know where somebody’s from, because his own answer to that question has always required explanation. The fixation on “where you from” isn’t just street talk. It’s the anxiety of someone who’s had to prove belonging in multiple contexts, watching other people fake credentials he had to earn twice. When he says “Gen 5 with the switch/Like my nigga Nudy, I’ll never leave the 6/Like my nigga Chubbs, I’ll never leave the 6ix,” he’s not picking sides between Atlanta and Toronto. He’s cataloging the people who stayed where they were supposed to stay, honoring a kind of geographic loyalty that his own biography can’t replicate but his value system still demands.

The album processes street code as a rulebook nobody follows anymore, and 21 Savage talks about it the way someone talks about a dead language they still speak. “Back then it’d be consequences for niggas that’s snitchin’ and shit,” he says, not mourning the consequences but mourning the consistency. The problem isn’t that the streets got softer. The problem is they got incoherent. On “Gang Over Everything,” he circles the same grievance from different angles: “How you feel like I’m ‘posed to take care of you when yo’ ass way older?” and “Why you feel like it’s my job to make sure you got motion?” The questions sound like someone doing emotional labor he didn’t sign up for, watching grown men behave like dependents while the code that was supposed to govern mutual aid turns into one-way extraction. He calls it treason when people violate, but he also admits, “If I let it slide, I had a reason/If I let it slide it’s ‘cause I’m busy fighting demons,” which means the enforcement is inconsistent too, which means the system’s broken from every direction.

Grief sits at the center of this record, stated plainly and returned to constantly. “Code of Honor” opens with someone remembering Johnny, explaining “that ain’t no nigga you thought that would die,” and 21 Savage turns the loss into a litany: “Tattoos cover my face/Scars on my whole body/On the cup bad, I’m missing Johnny.” The repetition of “I’m missing Johnny” across the hook doesn’t build to catharsis. It just restates the absence, over and over, because there’s nothing else to do with it. He says, “Larry got killed with his mama, I broke into pieces,” a detail so specific it resists metaphor, then immediately returns to enforcement mode: “I’ma up this bitch and blam soon as you get to reachin’.” The grief doesn’t soften him. It calcifies him. G Herbo picks up the same thread on his verse, running through the names—Kobe, Gilly—and the circumstances, none of them abstract. “I told Kobe not to walk home, but he didn’t listen/I heard every shot go off when them nigga hit him.” That’s not memorial writing. That’s forensic memory, the kind that replays the preventable moments until they stop feeling preventable and start feeling inevitable.

“I Wish” pulls the lens back. Unfortunately, the track samples Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with the same name. 21 Savage catalogs losses that go beyond his immediate circle—Dolph, Nipsey, Takeoff, Lil Keed, Trouble, Pop Smoke, PnB Rock, Rich Homie Quan, Juice WRLD, King Von—and the list keeps growing until it becomes a report on an entire generation’s mortality rate. “I wish CJ never even tried to sell that boy dope/Should’ve picked up Tayman and just let him ride to the yo’” are the album’s most direct expressions of regret, specific enough to mean something, general enough to stand in for every small decision that turned fatal. He just wishes things went differently, which is the closest the album gets to admitting that violence as a coping mechanism doesn’t actually cope with anything. Jawan Harris sings the hook—“I wish that I could see my friend/Just so I could smile again”—and the simplicity of that desire, just wanting to smile, cuts through all the threat posture everywhere else on the record.

The album’s self-medication routines get stated as plainly as the grief. “Cup Full” opens with 21 Savage explaining his own emotional illiteracy: “I think, the way we grew up/Our childhood, our parents worried about way stronger things/Than those type of feelings, those type of emotions/We don’t know to, like, cope with agony/We cope with bad things by doing drugs, sippin’ syrup/Smoking weed, poppin’ Percs, doin’ ecstasy.” That’s not confession for effect. That’s just explanation, the kind of self-awareness that doesn’t lead to behavior change because the behavior is the only tool available. The hook repeats “Pourin’ up syrup till I nod off” like it’s routine maintenance, and the verses confirm it. A couple songs later, he says, “Talkin’ to my codeine, that shit sad, that’s what I cope with,” which names the problem and the solution in the same breath, neither canceling the other out. He knows it’s sad. He’s still doing it. It just shows someone managing pain with the resources at hand, which happen to be substances and violence, and the proximity between those two coping strategies is the album’s quietest horror.

Of course, you get the usual government-mandated features including The Man Who Can’t Stop Taking L’s on a throwaway “Mr Recoup,” and on “Atlanta Tears,” Lil Baby shows up to mirror the same dilemma from a slightly different angle, asking “What’s it worth being solid in a world full of fuck niggas?” and answering his own question by not answering it. His verse runs through the same tension 21 Savage circles on the rest of the album—trying to go legit, trying to take care of people, watching it all get twisted into leverage or resentment. “I done doubled on my grind, I keep on climbin’ up for the trenches/Get a million, you think everything’s alright, it ain’t that simple.” That’s the clearest the album gets about the impossibility of success as escape. On “Pop It” with Latto and “Dog $hit” with GloRilla, the album shifts into playful money talk, and the contrast exposes 21 Savage’s range and his limits. The former is fun for what it does sonically, which is mostly absent from the rest of the record, and the latter leans into absurdist slang, turning money into “dog shit” and making the whole song a joke about excess, but even here 21 Savage can’t stay in playful mode for long.

The beats throughout give him room to work in short declarative phrases from Southside to Zaytoven to Metro Boomin, pushing him into clipped threats (like on “Ha,” no Juvie) and pulling back into slower, more reflective pacing. The soundscape doesn’t call attention to itself, and that’s functional. It leaves space for his deadpan delivery, for the way he can make “Quarter-brick of work, hit the gas, they try to search” sound like casual conversation and “Lost Johnny and Larry, I can’t lie, my heart got colder” sound like the same tone of voice, no shift in register to signal that one’s flex and one’s grief. The album doesn’t sonically distinguish between those two modes because his psychology doesn’t either. The threat talk and the grief talk occupy the same headspace, and the production reflects that by staying spare and consistent.

On “Big Stepper,” he admits, “All this fuckin’ trauma got me stiff so I ain’t makin’ friends” and “Better stand on all that shit you sayin’ when we stand on yo’ twin,” which means the trauma makes him rigid and the rigidity makes him alone, but the solution to loneliness is still more enforcement. He raps, “She showed me love, then took it back, I couldn’t even learn that shit,” like vulnerability is a skill he never developed, which it is. On “Atlanta Tears,” he circles the same problem: “Really stopped the bros from smackin’ that boy cold, he still trippin’” shows him trying to de-escalate, but then he immediately returns to “We the type of niggas, cut the tails off the rats,” which is just more enforcement. The album documents someone trapped between wanting to move differently and being unable to imagine what differently would even look like, because the only tools he has are the ones that already failed.

The title remains unanswered. What happened to the streets is that they collapsed under contradictions nobody could resolve, and this album is the inventory of what that collapse looks like from inside. 21 Savage doesn’t offer solutions. He offers documentation, naming the dead, naming the code, naming the ways both got betrayed. “I wish me and Johnny said, ‘Fuck it,’ turned back ‘round” is a small moment of alternate history, the kind that never leads anywhere because you can’t rewrite what already happened. The last thing you hear is Jawan Harris singing the same words over and over, desire without object, grief without resolution, just the sound of wanting things to be different when different was never an option.

Above Average (★★★☆☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Cup Full,” “Code of Honor,” “Gang Over Everything”