The deadly stabbing aboard a light rail car in North Carolina was reimagined as a lifesaving bystander intervention in an eerie new video the rapper DaBaby dropped Tuesday.
The music video of "Save Me," by the artist whose real name is Jonathan Lyndale Kirk, had more than 400,000 views on YouTube by Wednesday afternoon and has drawn some backlash across social media.
The song re-enacts the brutal slaying of Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska, 23, while she rode a Charlotte Area Transit System train last month.
Chilling security video showed Zarutska sitting by herself with a man seated behind her. Then, with seemingly no provocation, the man can be seen standing up and whipping out a knife in his right hand.
Video of the incident has been cut off, stopping short of the knife’s plunging into Zarutska's neck.
In his musically driven alternative history of the attack, DaBaby plays a bystander seated on the train who grabs the would-be attacker's hand to stop the stabbing.
"Man, we can’t save ’em. You know what I’m sayin’? I might be one of them," DaBaby says during the penultimate scene of the video.
The on-screen hero then quietly leads the potential killer off the train and harmlessly past police officers on the platform.
But the decision to re-enact the young woman's brutal murder in the form of a music video has gotten some online backlash.
A TikToker known as 404Breezy, who has more than 63,000 followers, summed up much of the blowback by questioning DaBaby's judgment.
“What in the world made him think it was OK to post that?” 404Breezy said.
“My first thought was ‘Who let you put that out?’ On your team, who let you say, ‘Ah, that was a good idea?’ They need to be fired.”
A.D. Carson, an associate professor of hip-hop at the University of Virginia, tried to explain the rationale for the video, saying: "It's difficult to think for another artist. But I do believe the read is that it's about the responsibility of everybody, for everybody."
The gruesome murder has already become a political flash point, with even the White House blaming Zarutska’s death on "Democrat-run cities" and the "Radical Left."
Carson, though, expects DaBaby's message to be lost in the current reactionary setting of American politics.
He said he fears that Americans, with preconceived beliefs that hip-hop glamorizes violence, will interpret "Save Me" in that vein.
"It might end up being polarizing because of all of the racial implications and the political implications and the weaponization and people playing this like a team sport between the blue team and red team," Carson said.
