As the track winds down, DJ Drama, the mixtape’s host, calls for a moment of silence, and then the tape actually fades to silence. I’d never heard of him before the news stories about his murder, but that extended freestyle makes it clear that this kid had a lot of talent. The voice we’re hearing belongs to Lil Snupe, the 18-year-old Meek protege who was murdered in Philly in June. The sound-quality suddenly turns muffled, and we hear three chorus-free minutes of excited mush-mouthed rapping, all done seemingly off the top of some kid’s head. But then, after those three tracks, there’s an abrupt change. Meek himself wails through Auto-Tune in that post-Future style but still explodes with energy while he does it.
Nicki Minaj delivers her hardest verse in recent memory. Diddy and Birdman yell about how superior they are to everyone else. It’s so good.ĭreamchasers 3 opens, the way you’d expect: Three tracks of churning, epic, guest-heavy triumph-rap. It’s a beautifully put-together rap album, and we are lucky to get it at all, let alone for free. But Dreamchasers 3 is the moment where Meek puts it all together, where the big, slick production style of his Maybach Music crew finds a way to mesh beautifully with his own all-out intensity. And honestly, Dreamchasers 2 had some of those same issues. It was front-loaded, moving from the frantic badassery of the amazing “ Dreams & Nightmares Intro” to the various radio-targeted widescreen triumph-rap songs that moved Meek further than he’d ever been from the electric Philly street-rap that had first helped Meek build his name. Dreams & Nightmares was a strong album, but it had issues. But Dreamchasers 3 is Meek’s first tape since his first proper album Dreams & Nightmares came out, sold well, and proved that he could thrive in that commercial sphere. They both produced a ton of radio hits, and they’re what turned Meek into a star. Those tapes were among the most popular and important rap mixtapes of the last few years.
I mean, it is an album, just like the first two Dreamchasers tapes were. On his new Dreamchasers 3 tape, Meek refers to himself as the “last of the street niggas,” and the tape makes two strong arguments: First, that this is true, and second, that this is an important thing to be.ĭreamchasers 3 probably shouldn’t be a mixtape it should be an album. When Kenrick Lamar provocatively rattled off a list of his peers’ names on his landmark “ Control (HOF)” verse, Meek was the only one of those names to respond by, more or less, threatening to murder Kendrick. And now that he’s a famous rapper with famous-rapper concerns, those things are persistently refusing to go away. Even at his most relaxed, on a song like the great churchy Drake-collab hit “ Amen,” he has things that he wants to get off his chest. And yet he brings a ferocious urgency, a demons-chasing-me fury that’s all but disappeared from the highest levels of the game. Meek has risen to stardom at a time when peevish fame-laments and pill-gobbling luxury-rap are the order of the day for rap stars. There’s a really great twitter, that meme-ishly collects all-caps comparisons for Philadelphia rap star Meek Mill’s delivery: “MEEK MILL RAP LIKE HE STEPPED ON A LEGO PIECE,” “MEEK MILL RAP LIKE HE TRAPPED IN A ELEVATOR,” “MEEK MILL RAP LIKE HE ORDERING FOOD FROM THE PASSENGER SEAT.” There’s a reason this Twitter exists: Nobody, and especially nobody at the A-list rap-star level, raps like Meek Mill.
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