On What Happened To The Streets?, 21 Savage is out of ideas

Can rappers age gracefully?

These days, it seems the only options available to hip-hop mainstays are creative stagnancy or pivoting to other, more lucrative business ventures. Ludacris does movies; Cam’ron does podcasts; Drake does gambling ads. When it comes to 21 Savage, his tougher-than-nails public image helped his last four projects top the Billboard 200, despite their ever-diminishing musical returns. Rap fans have joked for years that mainstream trap albums rehash the same combinations of producers and features, and their continued commercial success has entrenched bad habits. If it ain’t broke, why fix it?

2025 might be the year that changes.

It’s been less than two years since 21’s last solo release but WHAT HAPPENED TO THE STREETS? arrives in a totally different world. The current landscape of mainstream rap seems preoccupied with hashing and rehashing, on one hand, the “Not Like Us” beef, and on the other, the fallout of the YSL trial. In a recent Big Bank interview, 21 Savage keenly acknowledged as much: “The internet just be ready to tear n***as down man,” he complained. “How can you win a battle when n***as want you to lose it?”

Nearly a decade into his career, you’d expect 21 Savage to brush off the peanut gallery. But the incessant chatter — about Drake, about Lil Baby, about himself — clearly bothers him, and you can hear it on WHTTS?. “Internet nerds tryna tell us how the street feel,” 21 rolls his eyes on the penultimate track. “All you internet n***as I see you,” he warns on the intro. “All you content creators / Catch you down bad and break your MacBook.”

As hilariously petty as it sounds on wax, 21’s narrowed scope suggests that perhaps he’s too online, dissecting digital debates over how badly Kendrick Lamar beat Drake and whether Young Thug and Gunna actually snitched. It makes for a deeply uninspired record, one that’s starting to show the limits of 21’s Teflon facade: with just 53K projected first-week sales, WHTTS is on track to be his first album in seven years to not top the Billboard 200.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE STREETS? presents a legitimate dead end. Despite its more reflective second half, WHTTS? largely rinses, repeats, and recycles the typical shootouts and sex raps in perfunctory fashion. Forget about 21 recapturing the delirious verve of his ominous early discography; nothing here even approaches the pleasantly viral rush of last year’s “redrum,” let alone the sneering contempt of “Broke Boys” or “Privileged Rappers.”

As his subject matter has shifted from horrorcore street tales to the spoils of hip-hop stardom, 21’s voice, stoic but not quite dispassionate, has remained an anchor, imbuing his bourgeois raps with gravitas via the specter of his hardnosed past. But that’s come at the expense of lyrical development: no one expects a 21 Savage album to bowl them over with dense bars, but his deadpan delivery isn’t doing clunkers like, “She fucking everybody so I’m cool / I told her best friend send me nudes” (“J.O.W.Y.H.”) or “She’s so fine I got her pregnant off my precum” (from Young Nudy collaboration “STEPBROTHERS”) any favors.

The latter line is something of a microcosm for the record as a whole: aiming for blunt nonchalance but landing closer to crass juvenalia. Earlier on that song, 21 snarls, “If rap wasn’t working, I’d probably rob a Brinks truck.” This specificity and energy is sorely lacking across the tape as a whole. Flash back to 21’s standout feature on Lil Baby’s uneven January album WHAM, where he compared the diamonds in his watch to Hi-Chew candy and puts the bulletproof Maybach in cruise control, and it’s genuinely confusing as to why the raps on his own album are so undetailed.

Speaking of Lil Baby, their collaboration on “ATLANTA TEARS” is a clear highlight, tender and introspective. “When you thuggin', it's like fuck it when the judge give life sentences / Fifteen years in and I guarantee you feel different,” Baby advises over a warmly analog instrumental. 21 meets the moment with a reflective verse that lopes from island vacations to legal appeals to dirty sodas, threading together trophies and trauma alike. There’s still a boneheaded, lascivious edge to his problems (“Would you suck my dick the way you do if I was local?”), but it doesn’t overshadow the wisdom in a line like, “Thought you had to rap 'bout what you live and I got older.”

Much will also be made of “I Wish,” both for its R. Kelly sample and its litany of inverted RIPs, but it’s the album’s clear nadir, cringe for its overly broad conceit and clumsy in its execution. No matter how raw and honest his feelings may be, 21’s bars are too weak for the emotional weight he wants them to carry. “I wish Dolph would've Uber Eats’d them cookies instead / I wish Nipsey stayed at home with Lauren, chilled in the bed.” These sound more like middling slam poetry than the laments of a Grammy-winning rapper, and the throwaway hypotheticals undercut his allusions to more personal grief.

It’s fine if 21 Savage can’t always sell deeper songs, but even the bangers here don’t feel as indelible as his biggest singles (“Ric Flair Drip,” “Runnin”) or early cult successes (“Dip Dip,” “Bad Guy”). Latto's appearance on “POP IT” continues her 2025 hot streak while 21 breaks down the body count threshold to be his wife; his flip of “Hit Another Lick” by Gucci Mane on “HA” is more karaoke than homage but still sounds pretty good all things considered.

21 tapped British graffiti artist SLAWN for the cover art of WHAT HAPPENED TO THE STREETS?, who remixed a Kerry James Marshall painting with his own clown-based imagery (that’s been criticized for repackaging minstrel blackface) and 21’s iconic knife face tat. Much like 21 Savage on this album, SLAWN took the easy route here, confident the client will buy whatever he’s selling. It isn’t lost on me that the Marshall they’ve decided to deface is titled “The Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self.”