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Diddy and Birdman yell about how superior they are to everyone else.
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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.
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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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