The deadly stabbing aboard a light rail car in North Carolina was reimagined as a bizarre life-saving bystander intervention, in an eerie new video dropped Tuesday by rapper DaBaby.
The music video of “Save Me,” by the artist whose real name is Jonathan Lyndale Kirk, had more than 400,000 views in YouTube by Wednesday afternoon and has garnered some backlash across social media.
The song reenacts the brutal slaying of Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska, 23, while she rode a Charlotte Area Transit System train last month.
Chilling surveillance video showed Zarutska sitting by herself with a man seated behind her. Then with seemingly no provocation, the man could 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 plunging into Zarutska’s neck.
In DaBaby’s musically driven, alternative history of the attack, he plays a bystander seated on that 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 not surprisingly the decision to re-enact the young woman’s brutal murder in the form of a music video has gotten some online backlash.
One TikToker, known as 404Breezy with more than than 63,000 followers, summed up much of the blowback on DaBaby by questioning his judgement.
“What in the world made him think it was OK to post that?” the TikToker 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, attempted 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 on the current reactionary setting of American politics.
The professor fears that Americans, with a 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.