21 Savage, whose new album WHAT HAPPENED TO THE STREETS? dropped on Friday, says he warned Drake not to dive fully into what later exploded into a massive, chart-topping feud with Kendrick Lamar.
During a three-hour sit-down with Big Bank on Thursday (Dec. 11), Savage briefly addressed Drake’s tension with Metro Boomin and predicted the two would likely reconnect “in the near future.” That talk eventually shifted to Drake’s battle with Kendrick, where 21 made it clear the situation was a no-win scenario for someone in Drake’s position.
“Do I think he took a hit? Nah,” he said. “He’s still the number one streamed n***a this year. I feel like he took an internet hit. But then it be like, damn, did you take an internet hit? Because streaming, you gotta go on the internet to stream. … I feel like to certain people, they might say he took a hit. But I don’t look at that shit like that. I don’t know. I told that n***a not to even do all that shit anyway. I told that n***a to leave that shit alone.”
According to 21, his Her Loss collaborator “felt like he was being challenged lyrically so he wanted to respond.” He went on to break down the advice he gave Drake during one of their phone calls.
“He called me one of them days or I called him,” he said. “I think this was after the first song, the song with Metro and them, and I said, ‘You finna go into a battle that you can’t win, like, there’s no way you can win.’ No matter what, bruh. Certain situations, even if you win, you still don’t win.”
21 added that ego definitely played a role in the exchange, pointing out that both Drake and Kendrick have a genuine “love” for the craft. He also argued that fans were rooting for Drake to take the loss from the start, making an actual win impossible — even if people had called it in his favor.
On his WHAT HAPPENED TO THE STREETS? album, available here, 21 teams up with Drake on the track “MR RECOUP.” In the third verse, Drake once again hints at his upcoming Iceman album, which was originally expected to drop before the end of the year.
