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A star on the rise, Meek Mill has bigger things to think about than nightclub scuffles with R&B singers.

Written By Thomas Golianopoulos
Images By Jimmy Fontaine

During the early morning hours of June 12, Meek Mill left the Bronx strip joint Sin City and headed downtown to the Manhattan Nightclub W.i.P. Drake and Chris Brown were also at the ritzy venue. Drake and Meek Mill are rumored paramours of Rihanna. Chris Brown dated the singer years earlier; he was also convicted of assaulting her. Things quickly got out of hand at W.i.P. Entourages clashed, bottles were thrown and NBA All-Star Tony Parker nearly lost an eye in the ensuing melee. Violence! Rap! Sex! It was a moment made in New York City tabloid heaven.

Barely 36 hours later, Meek Mill, 25, the least famous member of the love quadrangle, sits in a conference room in Roc Nation’s (his management) Times Square offices, bewildered by the sudden attention. “This shit right here is new,” he says. Meek enunciates every syllable in his music, but here, he mumbles and speaks so rapidly that he occasionally trips over his words. “I guess that’s the press just catching on to me because I’m being bigger and getting hotter. It’s some new shit. I was just there,” he says of W.i.P. “I been to a lot of parties where people get shot inside the building. That’s little shit. Being as though maybe it’s Chris Brown, Drake and me, it gets turned into big shit.”

Meek looks out the floor-to-ceiling windows toward downtown Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty in the distance. He wears a striped tank top and shorts. He claims that the chain around his neck cost $50,000 and that the diamond Rolex on his wrist is worth $100,000. He says that he is a millionaire.

Meek denies throwing a bottle that night, as some tabloid reports stated, and says he spoke to Chris Brown immediately following the incident. This is all happening during the most crucial time of Meek’s young career. In the past 18 months, he’s gone from a regional up-and-comer to XXL Freshman and now is a Maybach Music Group signee and the most exciting new rapper in hip-hop. It’s been a meteoric rise. Dreamchasers 2, his latest hit mixtape hosted by DJ Drama, has been downloaded more than six million times since its April release; Maybach Music Group’s Self Made, Vol. 2, on which Meek gets a large spotlight, has sold more than 220,000 copies since its own in June; his official debut album, Dreams And Nightmares, is due this fall.

The W.i.P. incident might have boosted Meek’s Q Score, but it’s troubling. Brushes with the law derailed his career four years ago. He’s familiar with the consequences of violence. He’s from North Philadelphia. His father was murdered in South Philly. He’s not an R&B singer famous for pummeling a female. And he’s not a former child actor from a rich enclave in Toronto. Meek Mill is not a tourist. “It’s crazy to me,” he says. “I been in the hood. If they been had the news on me like this, I would be involved with everything—so they would say. I would be the cause. I’m from Philly. I be at clubs every night. People get killed every night. It’s usual.”

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Meek Mill says he lost his one and only rap battle when he was 12 years old. It took place on his home turf, the corner of 23rd and Brooks in Philadelphia, but his opponent—“His name was Done Did It or some shit like that,” Meek says today—was three years his senior. He had a broader vocabulary and was more seasoned in the art of battle rapping. Meek, born Robert Rahmeek Williams, didn’t take defeat gracefully. He cried afterward. He wanted to fight. “I’m going to be nice one day, watch,” he said through his tears. “All of y’all are going to be playing my shit.”

Even at such a young age, there was never a Plan B for Meek. He wanted fame and fortune. Options were limited. “I always wanted to be something,” he says. “I didn’t want to be the regular person in the street that was on the corner all day or the next person that got shot or killed or the person who went to jail. I wanted to be something big. I never wanted to be basic, ever. ‘Basic,’ in my hood, means being broke or being killed or going to jail or never having been. That’s the basic things that happen in the street. I never wanted to be basic. I loved money. I wanted to make a lot of money. I had to find something that I loved to make money.”

He didn’t want to end up like his father, Robert Parker, who was murdered in South Philly when Meek was just a young child. “Meek’s dad was my oldest brother,” says Meek’s uncle, the radio DJ Parnell “Grandmaster Nell” Parker. “He was different from us growing up. We were DJs trying to get in the industry. I don’t want to get too personal about his dad. His dad was like the black sheep of the family. He was like the opposite of us, certain things that he chose to do. He was around for Meek though, a hundred percent.”

Meek is less circuitous: “He was a street nigga gooning in the streets and doing shit he wasn’t supposed to and things happen.” With Nell in the family, hip-hop surrounded Meek since childhood, and like most aspiring rappers, he started out memorizing popular rap songs, studying flows and rhyme patterns. The Notorious B.I.G’s “Mo Money, Mo Problems” was an early favorite. He began writing his own raps and quickly graduated into Philadelphia’s fervent street battle scene, where he developed an exigent intensity and his trademark yelping cadence. From there, he took advantage of evolving technology (street DVDs, cheap-to-press CD mixtapes) and social media (MySpace, YouTube and Twitter) to release and promote his music. “Meek had that fiery energy that separated him from the pack,” says Philly-to-ATL transplant DJ Drama, “and he was getting a lot of buzz from those Flamers mixtapes he was doing himself.”

His work showcased an ear for melody and a knack for crafting songs, skills that Philly MCs have famously struggled with. After an early mixtape cut, “In My Bag,” jumped into radio rotation, T.I. showed interest in signing Meek to Grand Hustle—but all momentum halted when Meek was arrested on gun charges in 2008.

“My dad got killed in South Philly,” Meeks says. “My mind frame was, I’m not getting killed down there. I wasn’t old enough to have a gun license. I never knew how to get a gun license. People were being killed in that area every day, so I was being strapped every day. I didn’t want to hurt nobody or anything like that; it was just to protect myself. Bad things go on in that area. In Philly, you got monsters running around all day.”

Things have changed and Meek says he’s learned from mistakes. “I don’t carry guns no more,” Meek says. “I have people around me that have gun licenses. I make sure all my homies get gun licenses.”

After spending eight months at Philadelphia’s State Road Detention Center, Meek was desperate to escape the inexhaustible cycle of violence and incarceration. He was on probation. Rap was his ticket out. “I had to go,” he says today. “I had to make a move.” But the Grand Hustle deal fell through after T.I. was sent to prison for his own gun charges. Meek got creative. He reached out to Rick Ross via Twitter, asking the burly Miami star to appear on a remix of his street smash “Rosé Red.” It worked. Ross visited Meek in Philadelphia, recorded with him and, in early 2011, signed him to his Maybach Music Group imprint. The Teflon Don shepherded Meek’s introduction to the national scene, giving him pole position on two singles from his label showcase, Self Made, Vol. 1—“Tupac Back” and “I’ma Boss” became two of the biggest street bangers of the summer.

“My only criticism of Meek was that he was a spitter and had to find a flow and a lane where he could make different kinds of songs,” says DJ Drama. “I think Ross helped him with that in a sense. It made sense for them to make records together.”

His thrilling performances on “I’ma Boss” and “Tupac Back” turned Meek into a star—one who offers a refreshing alternative to the current norm. In an era when rap music is starting to resemble a reality show confessional booth, Meek is a throwback. He doesn’t sing. He is not “emo.” He is blunt and aggressive. He sounds dangerous. And like early DMX or 50 Cent, he can channel that danger, that urgency into the music.

Recent smashes such as “Amen,” “Burn” and Rick Ross’ “So Sophisticated” make Dreams And Nightmares the most anticipated debut album of the year. It should sound familiar once it’s released; Meek doesn’t anticipate changing his recipe for success. He’s still working with favorite collaborators like the producer Jahlil Beats and writing songs similar to his biggest hits. “I like to keep making the same music that people have liked,” he says. “Eventually it’s going to change as I get older. I write with my heart and mind. It’s going to change as it gets older.”

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The incident at W.i.P. happened a few weeks after Meek, Chris Brown and Drake had a tense exchange on Twitter, seemingly over Rihanna—one that slid into an ugly sort of “slut-shaming” of the woman the New York Post dubbed, “The Face That Launched a Thousand Bottles.” Meek alleged that Brown removed him from a song on his album because, “she let me watch da throne!”

Sitting at Roc Nation, Meek struggles to explain his relationship with Brown. “We had words as straight men on the phone,” he says. “He wasn’t feeling this. I wasn’t feeling that, this-that-and-the-third, boom, boom, handled it just like men. That’s how I handle my problems. I don’t need to do no interviews. I wouldn’t even have done this interview. We just talked about it as men, boom, boom. That was it. Then this shit happened the other day, we talked about that, that was it, we were straight.”

“It wasn’t really no problem,” he continues. “I don’t know what he felt some type of way about. It was certain things. I wouldn’t speak about it in a magazine. I felt a certain way about things. He did too. And he handled it. There wasn’t no problem where we don’t like each other afterwards. It’s no big thing.”

There are bigger things, to be sure. Meek’s from a place where the problems go beyond tabloid fare.

“Shit is funny to me. I don’t do nothing but laugh at it. I try to tell you, last time I was at the club, last time I was in Philly, I had my car, I was going to a little cookout, the cookout was supposed to be hot. When I got there, somebody got shot in their head, dead on the ground. Cops seen me out there. I just came through and kept it moving. I couldn’t ride through because the block was blocked off . But it had nothing to do with me because that’s the shit that happened at the time.” ♠

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