"I Am>I Was"

Atlanta rapper 21 Savage, who gained fame from singles such as “No Heart” and “Bank Account,” comes into his own on his sophomore album “I Am>I Was,” which dropped in December. Featuring well-known artists like Offset, J. Cole and Post Malone, “I Am>I Was” balances lyrically aggressive tracks about money, guns and women with more reflective songs like “a lot” and “letter 2 my momma.” Due to how many rap albums discuss more or less the same ideas throughout the album, the lyrical variety of “I Am>I Was” helps to make it stand out as a success.

Throughout the album, Savage mostly sticks to his traditional style, rapping in a deep, raspy voice against a strong, mid-tempo beat with plenty of ad-libs. While this gives the album a nice sound and makes all the songs shine individually, at some point the album as a whole becomes repetitive.

Throughout the album, the unifying theme is loyalty, and many songs are different explorations of the theme. For example, on “ball w/o you,” Savage raps about how he prefers loyalty over love, and on “letter 2 my momma,” he thanks his mother for her loyalty to him in contrast to his father, who left him and his mother. Although loyalty is discussed on many if not most of the tracks, Savage explores loyalty in a different way on his various songs, leaving the album lyrically diverse.

One way in which the album was not great, however, is the features it includes. While some features worked well, like Offset’s verse on “1.5,” several of the features did not really add much to their songs and seem to detract from them. For instance, Yung Miami’s chorus on “a&t” has a grating, off-putting sound that worsens the song. While the featured artists are not necessarily bad, the features could have been done so much better, and because of this some of the most successful tracks are ones where Savage goes solo, like “gun smoke” and “pad lock.”