When those guys were attempting to figure out their place in the post-Roc world, Meek was coming up on the battle circuit. In his native Philadelphia, he came up a few years after the whole State Property boom, when just about every promising rapper in the city ended up under the Roc-A-Fella umbrella for at least a few minutes. Meek’s voice is a vengeful, frenetic yawp, and his whole freaked-out attacking style is what brought him into prominence in the first place. In the interests of chasing a hit, it forced its star into situations that didn’t really play to his strengths. Dreams And Nightmares is a solid album with a few absolute bangers, but it has a lot of the same problems that most major-label rap albums had until very recently.
In a way, “Dreams And Nightmares (Intro)” was the worst possible intro for an album, if only because everything else couldn’t help but feel like a letdown after that. A song like that is all I ever wanted from rap music. It’s a staggering performance, and if you hear it in the right mood, it’s enough to make you feel invincible. He’s still the guy in the streets, and he’s rapping like everything good that happened to him could disappear in the blink of an eye. He’s still bragging, but his words take on a murderous bent: “You fuck around, you fuck around, you fuck around and get killed!” The fulcrum point is gone. It’s an immediate change: “Hold up, wait a minute! Y’all thought I was finished?” Out of nowhere, he sounds like he’s ripping car doors off their hinges with his teeth. Meek’s voice all of a sudden lurches into gear, taking on the paranoiac intensity that made him a name in mixtape circles. Or it’s that, anyway, until halfway through, when the beat abruptly switches up into something darker and more urgent. He’s delighting in the money he’s not sure what to do with yet: “When I bought the Rolls Royce, they thought it was leased / Then I bought that new Ferrari, hater rest in peace.” It’s a song about reorienting yourself, figuring out that this is the fulcrum point of your life and all that hardship is behind you.
He’s breathing deep, looking around, taking stock of where he was and where he is now. The song opens with contemplative piano, Meek rapping airly about how far he’s come in the world, remembering past traumas in sharp, concrete detail: “In the matter of time I spent on some locked-up shit / In the back of the paddy wagon, cuffs locked on wrists.” Up until then, it’s the sort of song you expect to hear a newly-minted major-label rap star, which is what Meek was, use to start an album. But if I had to pick one song that best encapsulates what circa-now rap music can be, that song would probably be “Dreams And Nightmares (Intro),” the breathless track that opened Meek Mill’s 2012 album Dreams And Nightmares. Rap music is too vast and overwhelming a thing for any one song to encapsulate all the multitudes it contains.