The video for “A Lot,” 21 Savage’s elegiac single, takes place at a formal dinner and party in a cloud-high mansion, a lavish and exuberant celebration of black wealth. But there’s a moving sequence midway through that suggests trouble just beneath the surface.
The cuts are quick — warm shots of confident guests at the dinner table interspersed with darker scenes in which they’re suffering: poor health, financial hardship, criminal past, abuse, death of a loved one. The message of the video isn’t exactly that nothing is as it seems, but more that where you end up may be far from where you came from, and that success doesn’t cure all obstacles.
When 21 Savage first emerged in 2015, he was a cold brutalist of a rapper whose verses verged on the dead-eyed. But just a few years on, he’s taken a turn to the reflective. Later in the video, he added a ruminative new verse to the song, rapping, “Went through some things, but I couldn’t imagine my kids stuck at the border,” directly addressing the current administration’s divisive immigration policies.
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On Sunday, just a couple of days after that video’s release, 21 Savage was arrested by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which said he was in this country illegally and placed him into deportation proceedings. As of Wednesday afternoon, he remained in ICE custody.
Is 21 Savage American? By any measurement other than citizenship, yes. He was born She’yaa Bin Abraham-Joseph in England in 1992. According to Charles Kuck, one of his immigration attorneys, he came to the United States at age 7 and has been here continuously ever since, apart from a one-month period in 2005. He then re-entered the country on an H-4 visa, which expired in 2006, leaving him without legal status.
But the events of the last few days underscore the ways in which the hard power of government authority and soft power of online conversation can align in peculiar and insidious ways. As news began to spread on social media of 21 Savage’s arrest on Sunday, the meme and joke ecosystem that uses trauma as oxygen went into overdrive, reacting with special intensity to the revelation that 21 Savage — one of the titans of Atlanta’s rap scene — was in fact British. As the government put his relationship with this country in peril, thousands of people chirped in online to poke at the unlikeliness, and precariousness, of his situation.
That 21 Savage is in fact a British national is, ultimately, not particularly revelatory, or even meaningful. Foreign-born residents made up 13.7 percent of the United States population in 2017, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, published last year (which includes those in the country legally and illegally). Most of the humor turned on a high-society caricature understanding of England, and the dissonance of locating someone like 21 Savage — a seen-it-all stoicist with a dagger tattooed on his forehead — inside it. By and large, those people overlooked, or didn’t think as far as, the more odious association: that of empire and colonization. (His mother’s family hails from Dominica, a former British colony in the West Indies.)
His success, however, is especially American. Growing up in some of Atlanta’s poorest communities, 21 Savage had a troubled childhood. He’s said that he dropped out of school to sell drugs, and has spoken in interviews of a youth marked by violence and crime. But after losing a close friend and a brother to gun violence, he turned to rapping. And within a year, he was one of Atlanta’s most promising prospects.
He’s since worked with Drake, Cardi B and Post Malone. His 2017 debut album, “Issa Album,” went gold, and his second studio album, “I Am > I Was,” released in December, debuted at the top of the Billboard album chart. At this Sunday’s Grammy Awards, 21 Savage is nominated in two categories.
He has also been maturing in the public eye — advocating for gun control, donating money to educate young people in Atlanta on financial literacy (an announcement made on Ellen DeGeneres’s show, of all places), even walking alongside then-girlfriend Amber Rose in 2017 at her SlutWalk, a women’s empowerment event, carrying a sign that read “I’m a Hoe Too.”
This is the American promise, no? To start from nothing and turn it into a bounty. To receive a cruel hand and still emerge victorious.
And yet there is this other American promise, or threat, which is that all that comfort can be easily ripped away if it isn’t achieved in the correct fashion.
In the case of 21 Savage, whose public image was built on a kind of impenetrable toughness mixed with weary resilience, this moment of vulnerability was destabilizing. Even in his most intimate music, he never presents as anything other than an agent of control.
But the immigration system is beyond his jurisdiction, even though, since becoming a public figure, he has taken steps to address his status. According to a statement released by his attorneys on Tuesday, in 2017 he applied for a U visa, which, according to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, can be issued by the government to crime victims “who have suffered mental or physical abuse and are helpful to law enforcement or government officials in the investigation or prosecution of criminal activity.” 21 Savage has said he was shot in 2013. The statement did not specify whether he cooperated with authorities.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that 21 Savage was arrested at the same time DeKalb County police arrested another rapper, Young Nudy, on unrelated charges. But 21 Savage was detained directly by ICE, Kuck said. 21 Savage also was convicted on felony drug charges in 2014. The conviction record was expunged in September 2018 as part of Georgia’s first-offender program and the files have been sealed, according to Jacoby Hudson, who represented 21 Savage in the matter.
(Though expunged convictions have been used in deportation proceedings, 21 Savage would be eligible for removal simply for the overstayed visa.)
21 Savage is now among the highest-profile immigration detainees, his situation instantly becoming a flash point in national conversations about people living in this country without legal status, and in dialogues about the ways in which immigrants contribute to American society. A petition asking for his release started by Black Lives Matter has amassed over 200,000 signatures.
On Tuesday, Jay-Z posted on Facebook that 21 Savage’s detention “is an absolute travesty.” Jay-Z has also hired an attorney, Alex Spiro of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart and Sullivan, to work on 21 Savage’s case, Spiro confirmed in an email.
A star who built his own success, 21 Savage has in one fell swoop re-emerged as someone in need of protection. But in his recent music and public life, his identity was already becoming more complex and nuanced, delivering tales about the horrors of life at the bottom salted with a fresh understanding of just how slippery it can be at the top.