The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Friday, March 22, 2019 — 5

“All things keep getting better,” goes the “Queer 
Eye” theme song, a pulsing, techno-dance anthem 
that always manages to get the dopamine factories 
churning. This is a show about striving toward self-
improvement and recognizing betterment not as a 
stopping point, but 
as a way forward. 
And 
against 
the 
backdrop 
of 
a 
world 
decidedly 
not getting better, 
there’s something 
about that conceit 
that makes it the 
most 
uplifting 
thing on television.
The 
third 
season of “Queer 
Eye,” 
Netflix’s 
rebooted 
version 
of 
the 
2000s 
Bravo reality hit 
“Queer Eye for the 
Straight Guy,” was 
released 
quickly 
after the second, 
which 
aired 
in 
June. 
The 
Fab 
Five — the diverse, gregarious team of lifestyle 
experts unleashed upon average Joes — are back, 
and it’s almost like they never left. (Almost being 
the operative word here: There are the requisite 
number of French tucks, but *gasp!* not a single 
avocado to be found.)
What makes “Queer Eye” so fun to watch is 
that it’s a perfect combination of all the best, most 
cathartic pop culture tropes: part talk-therapy and 
part movie-makeover scene with a little HGTV 
sprinkled in. Each episode follows the Fab Five — 
Antoni, Tan, Karamo, Bobby and Jonathan — as 
they tackle new “projects,” well-meaning people 
whose friends and family members have nominated 
them for life overhauls.
By the end, not only do the clients look better 
and dress better, but they also communicate more 
effectively and sincerely. The Netflix version has 
shuffled off the “for the Straight Guy” suffix, 

allowing the Fab Five to be equal-opportunity 
transformers. And in fact, the most affecting 
episodes this season center around women — “Jones 
BBQ,” about the owners of a Kansas City takeout 
spot, and “Black Girl Magic,” about Jess, a gay Black 
woman disowned by her adoptive parents.
The show reaches graceful, emotional heights 
when the Fab Five let on that they didn’t spring from 
the earth fully self-assured, that they have their own 
vulnerabilities and 
traumas to grapple 
with too. Bobby, 
who often alludes 
to his difficulties 
growing 
up 
gay 
in an evangelical 
Missouri 
household, 
is 
remarkably 
well-
positioned 
to 
comfort 
Jess. 
Jonathan, running 
a comb through the 
hair of a recently 
widowed 
single 
father, recalls the 
depressive episode 
he 
endured 
following 
his 
mother’s 
cancer 
diagnosis.
In 
previous 
seasons, the show struggled to reconcile its feel-
good energies with its risky ambitions to heal 
divides and bring people together. That often 
resulted in tone-deaf moments: Karamo’s clash 
with the Trump-supporting cop made over in the 
first season is a little too neatly resolved. Bobby’s 
discomfort with the church last season — borne 
of his childhood trauma — is chalked up to a mere 
cultural difference. They seem to have abandoned 
that clumsiness this season. But it is frustrating 
that the show has continued to ignore the elephant 
in the room: The time and means required to have 
a tailored wardrobe and a grooming routine are out 
of reach for a lot of people. 
To its credit, though, “Queer Eye” is already 
operating under a premise fraught with racial and 
class politics of its own. The idea that everyone is 
deserving of love and self-care and acceptance — 
what’s more radical than that?

‘Queer Eye’ just gets better

MAITREYI ANANTHARAMAN
Daily Arts Writer

The 
headlines 
about 
21 
Savage’s 
arrest 
and 
deportation proceedings last 
month seemed straight out of 
an Onion article. The whole 
thing has been surreal for 
fans: One of Atlanta’s poster-
boy rappers, alongside artists 
like 
Gucci 
Mane, 
Future, 
Young Thug and 2 Chainz … 
was born in London?
On the morning of Feb. 3, 
rapper 21 Savage 
was 
arrested 
and 
detained 
by 
Immigration 
and 
Customs 
Enforcement. 
ICE 
released 
a 
statement 
that 
day 
saying 
21 
Savage, 
real 
name She’yaa Bin 
Abraham-Joseph, 
is an “unlawfully 
present 
United 
Kingdom 
national” 
who 
came to the U.S. 
in 
2005 
and 
overstayed 
his 
visa that expired a 
year later. A CNN 
reporter 
quoted 
an ICE spokesman 
who claimed “His 
whole 
public 
persona is false. 
He actually came 
to the U.S. from 
the U.K. as a teen 
and overstayed his 
visa.”
The 
most 
bizarre 
part? 
According to ICE, 
21 Savage first came in 2005 
— when he was already twelve 
years old. That’s too old to 
get rid of an accent, right? 
(I happen to know someone 
personally who also came to 
the U.S. from London at twelve 
and can testify to his thick 
British 
accent.) 
Combined 
with zero public knowledge of 
21 Savage’s birthplace, it reeks 
of an intentional coverup. A 
plot twist, if you will.
In the next few days, his 
lawyers 
followed 
up 
with 
a statement that countered 
ICE’s accusations. According 
to his legal team, 21 Savage 
came to the United States at 
seven years old (which would 

much 
better 
explain 
him 
losing his accent), went to the 
UK for one month in 2005, 
then returned on a visa that 
expired in 2006, leaving him 
without citizenship. They also 
alleged that his immigration 
status was not hidden from 
officials as he applied for a 
special type of visa in 2017 
granted 
to 
crime 
victims 
and could help with ongoing 
investigations.
Like a coping mechanism 
to deal with the unexpected, 
the 
hip-hop 
community 

began chugging out memes 
the moment Twitter got word 
of his arrest. In an interview 
with The New York Times, 21 
Savage said of the memes: “I 
been shot — what is a meme? 
A meme is nothing … I look at 
bullet scars every day, so it’s 
like, a meme, bro?” Something 
I 
unironically 
find 
highly 
eloquent.
21 Savage was granted an 
expedited hearing on Feb. 
12 and released on $100,000 
bond the next day. The 21 
Savage saga is still ongoing — 
an immigration court hearing 
is set for April 11, and it 
looks like it might come to an 
uneventful close. He has since 

opened up to many media 
outlets 
about 
his 
ten-day 
detainment and experience 
growing 
up 
without 
legal 
status. But there’s one thing 
that’s stayed on my mind after 
the whole ordeal.
21 Savage went lyrically 
conscious about immigration 
politics prior to his arrest. 
Most 
notably, 
during 
his 
performance of “A Lot” at the 
“Tonight Show ” days before 
his arrest, he added new 
lyrics: “I can’t imagine my kids 
stuck at the border / Flint still 
need water / 
People 
was 
innocent, 
couldn’t 
get 
lawyers.”
It’s not like 
21 
Savage 
has 
been 
dropping 
conscious 
lyrics 
for 
years. 
Even 
just a couple 
years ago on 
Issa 
Album, 
his raps were 
chiefly about 
trap music’s 
lyrical 
holy 
trinity: 
sex, 
drugs 
and 
money. 
So 
when he was 
arrested 
days 
after 
he criticized 
ICE 
for 
their 
(mis)
handling 
of 
children 
at the U.S./
Mexican 
border 
on 
national 
television, an alarm should’ve 
gone off in everybody’s head.
By all measures aside from 
citizenship, 21 Savage is an 
American. That much is clear. 
He may have a felony drug 
charge under his belt, but that 
was expunged and sealed, and 
he’s been a positive influence 
on his community since then. 
So why would ICE suddenly 
pursue him, when the Trump 
administration’s 
priorities 
are 
on 
criminal 
illegal 
immigrants?
It’s funny and surprising 
to learn that he’s from the 
UK. But there is more to 21 
Savage’s arrest than meets the 
eye.

Hip hop’s best plot twist:
The saga that is 21 Savage

DYLAN YONO
Daily Arts Writer

TV REVIEW

NETFLIX

BOOK REVIEW

MUSIC NOTEBOOK

Queer Eye

Season Three

Netflix

The 15 stories in Maryse Meijer’s second collection, “Rag,” 
frequently begin with chance encounters — a high school-aged 
boy working at a pizza parlor has a strange series of interactions 
with a girl who has a miscarriage in the bathroom, a man 
befriends a woman he meets during jury duty for a murder case 
and becomes fascinated with the scars on her arms, a lifeguard 
saves a boy from drowning and feels an attachment to him 
indistinguishable from the visceral memory of the incident.
The plots of these stories stay in this space of plausible chance 
encounter for as long as they possibly can, teetering in the space 
right before decisive, concrete action. In the meantime, Meijer 
recounts the often subliminal reactions her main characters 
have on what’s unfolding in front of them, as they reckon with 
what they want out of the situation and what’s possible for them.
Meijer has written that “while I consume — and seek out — 
quite a lot of explicitly violent and sexual work, I don’t write 
it.” This statement might seem odd in relation to a collection 

where sexuality and violence proliferate fungally in nearly every 
story, but in truth, very little actual violence and sex happens 
in Meijer’s stories. She is instead interested in exploring the 
psychological tendencies that lead up to violence, suspending 
her stories in a space just adjacent of horror. Her stories tend 
to end right at the point where something is about to happen, 
leaving any conflicts unresolved, the plot abandoned at its point 
of maximum tension.
In the process, Meijer fuses sex and violence into an almost 
singular entity, and uses attraction and repulsion as a pair of 
emotions that fuel each other. In her story “The Brother,” a 
teenage boy at once desperately wants to be his stepbrother and 
feels a seething, jealous hatred for him. Other stories often track 
the progression of a dreadful longing right up to the point of 
unspeakable action. “Francis” sketches an uneasy juxtaposition 
between a protagonist’s job euthanizing dogs and his taking care 
of his deaf brother: “The needles rattle in my bag. One full dose 
and they’re done. No convulsions. No knowledge. Just the eyes 
turning to glass. My brother is asleep on the couch, the blanket 
half slipped from his hip.” It’s a situation full of the tense 
potential for violence, but that’s all it ever is. The story ends 
without anything definite happening, and we get the impression 
that things could just as easily slip into violence as they could 
dim back into nothing.
Part of what makes these stories so effective is Meijer’s 
striking prose style. She alternates long, tumbling sentences 
with short, clipped ones, like someone desperately trying to 
avoid thinking about what they’re recounting. It resembles 
a kind of oral storytelling in its simplicity, albeit maybe one 
performed under interrogation lights. The opener, “Her Blood,” 
is particularly terse, the language an integral part of the story’s 
sense of mounting dread: 
“There’d been a trail of blood from the bathroom to the counter 
to the booth to the door, blood on the medics’ blue suits as they 
carried her out. I imagined having what she had, a place in my body 
that could splash an entire room with my insides and then let me 
walk away. I got an erection though I didn’t mean to. I pushed my 
hands into the front pocket of my hoodie and rubbed them against 
my crotch, grimacing, not feeling good at all.”
Her clipped and to-the-point sentences are bolstered by her 
breathtakingly precise word choice. The word “splash” in the 
passage above is a fulcrum around which the rest of it revolves; 
the word “blue” emits a garish, clinical color against the goriness 
of its content.
Meijer’s virtuosic use of language can work against her at 

times, especially when her stories are less than compelling in 
premise or plot. When she abandons the dread that fuels the best 
stories of the collection, I was left with the sense that nothing 
is really being communicated. The rather tedious story “The 
Lover,” which tracks the progression of a relationship between 
a young orphan girl and a pedophile, is a good example of this.
Meijer’s style is one that reads like it’s designed to disguise 
hidden depths, and in a story like “The Lover” in which 
the awfulness is on the surface, it comes across as a kind of 
melodrama. “It was important to the Dane that no one see her 
come into his house, so she came only at night, through the 
back door, with a key he’d given her, worn always around her 
neck. After he fell asleep she would go out into the garden to 
pull weeds or pick snails off the vegetable beds, his garden more 
beautiful than any place she had ever been, even in the dark.” 
The hyperbole of the story is certainly justified given its subject 
matter, but it sticks out in comparison to how meticulously 
restrained Meijer is elsewhere in the collection. “The Lover” is 
also one of the only stories in the collection where the lines of 
desire Meijer cultivates intersect in a meaningful way, and thus 
it feels like a wholly different animal than the more open-ended, 
bristling stories that make this collection a definite standout.

‘Rag’ is unsettling, compelling and so simmeringly sexy

EMILY YANG
Daily Arts Writer

Meijer’s style is one that reads like 
it’s designed to disguise hidden 
depths, and in a story like “The 
Lover” in which the awfulness is 
on the surface, it comes across as a 
kind of melodrama.

By all measures aside from 
citizenship, 21 Savage is an 
American. That much is clear. He 
may have a felony drug charge 
under his belt, but that was 
expunged and sealed, and he’s 
been a positive influence on his 
community since then.

Rag

Maryse Meijer

FSG Originals

Feb. 12, 2019