The 2010s File Feature
X
21 Savage, Metro Boomin, and Future's "X": A Career-Defining Slow Burn The collaborative album Savage Mode, released by 21 Savage and Metro Boomin in July 20…
01 The Story
21 Savage, Metro Boomin, and Future's "X": A Career-Defining Slow Burn
The collaborative album Savage Mode, released by 21 Savage and Metro Boomin in July 2016, was one of the most consequential rap projects of that year, establishing 21 Savage as a genuine artistic force rather than merely an Atlanta street rap curiosity and demonstrating Metro Boomin's capacity to construct sonic worlds of unusual coherence and emotional depth. "X" featuring Future was one of the standout tracks from that project, and its extended chart run through late 2016 and into the winter of that year helped sustain the album's commercial momentum during a period when the rap landscape was exceptionally crowded with major releases.
The song was produced entirely by Metro Boomin, whose real name is Leland Tyler Wayne, a St. Louis native who had established himself as the preeminent young trap producer of the 2015-2017 period. His work with Gucci Mane, Young Thug, Drake, Future, and 21 Savage himself had created a signature sonic world characterized by minor-key synthesizer melodies, cavernous reverb on snare drums, and a general atmosphere of gothic menace that matched the content of the street narratives his beats typically supported. The beat for "X" exemplifies these qualities, building a musical environment of cold, cinematic darkness that gives the performances of both 21 Savage and Future their maximum dramatic effect.
Future's presence on "X" was a significant indicator of 21 Savage's status at the time. Future, by 2016, had established himself as one of the most influential voices in rap following a remarkable run of projects including DS2, What a Time to Be Alive with Drake, and EVOL. His willingness to appear on Savage Mode as a featured artist signaled to the broader rap ecosystem that 21 Savage had achieved a level of peer recognition that translated commercial potential into artistic credibility within the Atlanta rap world.
On the Billboard Hot 100, "X" debuted at number 98 during the chart week of October 1, 2016, and then climbed steadily over the following months, reaching its peak position of 36 on December 3, 2016. The track spent a total of 21 weeks on the chart, demonstrating the kind of long-tail streaming performance that had become the characteristic commercial trajectory of critically respected rap projects in the streaming era. The track's 88 million YouTube views by the mid-2020s confirm this sustained digital relevance.
The commercial context of Savage Mode is important to understanding "X's" chart performance. The project was released as a free mixtape initially, distributed through streaming platforms in a manner that had become common practice for Atlanta rap artists, and its chart performance was driven almost entirely by streaming rather than download sales or radio airplay. This streaming-led trajectory was representative of a broader shift in how certain types of rap music, particularly the darker, more lyrically explicit material associated with the Atlanta trap tradition, found its audience in the post-physical-sales era.
21 Savage's biography gave the thematic content of "X" a weight that went beyond conventional street rap autobiography. Born Shéyaa Bin Abraham-Joseph in London before growing up in the East Atlanta neighborhood of Druid Hills, 21 Savage had experienced significant violent trauma including being shot six times during a 2013 robbery attempt in which one of his closest friends was killed. These experiences were not merely background detail but constituted the emotional and moral framework through which his entire early recording career, including his work on "X," was understood.
The title "X" carried multiple layers of potential meaning in the context of 21 Savage and Future's shared thematic universe. It referenced the crossed-out numbers that 21 Savage used in his artistic branding, with the "21" in his name derived from the date of the shooting that killed his friend. It also evoked the pharmaceutical drug promethazine with codeine that Future had helped popularize as both a subject and a cultural symbol through his earlier work, and the "X" marking associated with danger, prohibition, and violence across multiple symbolic systems. The song's imagery operated within all of these reference frames simultaneously.
Metro Boomin's production approach on "X" demonstrated his ability to create beats that function effectively across multiple emotional registers. The track is simultaneously dark and commercially accessible, menacing and melodically engaging, qualities that made it effective both for listeners primarily interested in the street narrative content and for those approaching it as atmospheric music. This dual appeal was one of the defining characteristics of Metro Boomin's best work and explained his crossover success in a period when trap production was simultaneously ascending to mainstream dominance and becoming more internally diverse.
The critical reception of Savage Mode was unusually strong for a project from an artist at 21 Savage's commercial stage. Publications including Pitchfork, which gave the project a highly favorable review, and Rolling Stone assessed the album as one of the year's notable rap releases, and "X" was consistently cited in these reviews as one of the project's highlights. This critical recognition, combined with the streaming-driven commercial performance, created the conditions for 21 Savage's subsequent breakthrough into mainstream chart success.
The Formation of a Sustained Creative Partnership
"X" was one of the earliest prominent documents of what would become one of hip-hop's most productive ongoing creative partnerships. 21 Savage and Metro Boomin continued to work together across subsequent projects, releasing Savage Mode II in October 2020, which debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and generated massive streaming numbers. That sequel's success retroactively positioned the original Savage Mode and its tracks, including "X," as foundational documents of a creative relationship that had produced some of the most commercially and critically significant rap music of the 2016-2020 period, cementing the song's place in the longer narrative of both artists' careers.
02 Song Meaning
Survival Consciousness, Coded Language, and the Trap Gothic: The Meaning of "X"
"X" operates within what critics have described as the trap gothic tradition, a strain of Atlanta-influenced hip-hop in which the conventions of street rap, autobiography, emotional numbness, and dark melodic production converge to produce something that functions simultaneously as party music, confessional art, and cultural document. The song's meaning is inseparable from the atmospheric environment that Metro Boomin's production creates, a sonic landscape of cold reverb, minor-key synthesizer figures, and methodical drum programming that establishes the emotional temperature before a word is delivered.
The thematic content of "X" draws on a vocabulary of street survival, material success, and emotional detachment that characterizes much of 21 Savage's early output. The emotional detachment is crucial to understanding the song's affect. It is not performed indifference but rather the kind of affectlessness that develops in people who have experienced sustained exposure to violence and loss, a psychological adaptation that allows continued functioning in circumstances that would otherwise be paralyzing. 21 Savage's flat, monotone delivery is itself a kind of meaning, communicating something about the emotional cost of survival in environments characterized by persistent danger that no amount of verbal elaboration could convey more efficiently.
Future's presence on the track introduces a different but complementary dimension. Where 21 Savage's emotional register is characterized by a kind of cold clarity, Future's contributions to the song draw on the melodic vulnerability and pharmaceutical-inflected haze that had become his signature. The two vocalists represent adjacent but distinct responses to the same environmental pressures: 21 Savage's response is austerity and watchfulness, while Future's is the kind of melody-drenched self-medication that had made him one of the most emotionally resonant voices in Atlanta rap. Together, they map a range of possible responses to street life's demands that neither artist could represent alone.
The "X" imagery that gives the song its title operates on several symbolic levels simultaneously. In 21 Savage's personal iconography, the X marks loss, specifically the losses of friends and community members to violence, memorialized in his tattoos and his artistic branding. The number 21 in his name marks the date on which one of those losses occurred, and the X that follows in various iterations of his visual identity represents the permanent record of that event and its ongoing psychological weight. The song, in this reading, is partly a meditation on how people carry the marks of what they have survived.
The pharmaceutical references that run through "X," particularly the lean and prescription drug imagery associated with Future, add a dimension of chemical consciousness to the song's thematic landscape. These references are not merely hedonistic but carry a specific cultural meaning within the Atlanta trap context, where prescription drug use had been widely discussed as both a recreational practice and a form of pain management among young men navigating environments of economic stress and physical danger. The drugs appear in the song not simply as status symbols but as part of a survival strategy, a way of managing the emotional weight of experiences that are otherwise difficult to process.
Metro Boomin's production choices for "X" are themselves a form of meaning-making. The gothic atmosphere of the beat, with its dark synthesizer palette and cathedral-like reverb, places the track in a sonic tradition that connects street rap to horror, to noir, to the cinematic traditions of films that deal with violence and its aftermath. This production aesthetic frames the lyrical content as tragedy rather than mere documentation, elevating the street narrative from reportage to something with the formal weight of a more conventionally recognized artistic genre.
The collaborative structure of "X," with two artists who share a broad thematic world but bring distinct vocal personalities, also carries meaning in the context of Atlanta rap's collaborative culture. The song is not a competition between 21 Savage and Future but a demonstration of how different expressions of the same experience can coexist productively in a shared musical space. Their differences, in vocal register, in emotional temperature, in their specific relationships to the subject matter, create a kind of stereoscopic depth, allowing the listener to experience the same thematic territory from two different perspectives simultaneously.
The cultural impact of "X" and the broader Savage Mode project was to establish a sonic and thematic template that subsequent Atlanta rap would return to repeatedly, demonstrating that music could achieve significant commercial success while maintaining the emotional austerity and thematic darkness that had previously been associated primarily with underground or critically oriented rap. This demonstration had lasting consequences for how the genre developed in the years following 2016, making "X" not just a song but a proof of concept for a direction that hip-hop would continue to explore.
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