PHOTO: 21 Savage said describing male friendships is zesty as hell

21 Savage when asked by Rolling Stone about his friendship with Drake:

“I feel like describing male friendships is zesty as hell.”

At some point, as his friends enjoy the scene, Savage slips away, back into the luxury black SUV that took us here. He’s taking it in quietly, but this visit to Paris is a pivotal new chapter in one of hip-hop’s most unique stories. Savage is back to Europe for the first time since he was child; until very recently, this was impossible.

Born Shéyaa Bin Abraham-Joseph in London, and raised in Atlanta from the age of seven, Savage, 31, is American by all standards but paperwork. He lived much of his life as an undocumented immigrant; for a while, he couldn’t even drive or fly for lack of a government ID. As he made a name for himself as a street rapper with real gangster bona fides and menacing wit, he had to take cheap buses up the coast to label meetings in New York. 

Shéyaa found his way into illicit money around the sixth grade — selling a little weed — to pay for his own cellphone. Around the same time, at age 12, he made friends with a boy called Skiney, who was killed in 2021, he tells me. Skiney lived below him; they’d rap and make up songs. 

Years later, at about 18, Savage came into big money in the streets, and he put it toward studio time. “I had hit a lick for like $80,000,” he says. “Me and my partners, we split it four ways. I already had a little money just from hustling, then had an extra $20,000, so I was just trying shit.” The name 21 Savage, he has said, represents the 2100, a Decatur gang he was affiliated with; a former propensity for theft and shooting; and the deaths that came with that life. 

Savage says his mother moved him and his siblings to the U.S. in search of a better life. They didn’t necessarily find it, and young Shéyaa grew up amid poverty and violence. “I think it was the same shit [as London], really,” he says. Savage often raps lovingly about his mom, and I ask him when, as a child, he remembers her being proud of him. He tells me that, in the fifth grade, he won a spelling bee; he remembers acing some math competitions, too. She was always happy with him, he says, despite the difficulties.