Meek Mill had a few big singles and a breakthrough mixtape in last year's Dreamchasers, but now comes the hard part. With expectations comes pressure, and pressure in rap means to repeatedly prove one's commercial potential in a genre largely starved for continuous hits. Meek is a street rapper who's beginning to answer to executives, and the new Dreamchasers 2 is his first mixtape that reflects that. Gone are the first volume's guests like Beanie Sigel and Young Chris, stylistically similar rappers from Meek's hometown of Philadelphia that have instead been traded for the likes of Drake, Trey Songz, and Big Sean. The connection to the latter group doesn't go far beyond occupying the same tax bracket, but the strength of D2 is that in collaborating with those artists (and guys like Wale) Meek is still able to tip the scales in his favor. He doesn't so much step out of his own world as merge it with the one that he's about to enter, and the result is a mixtape that will continue his forward momentum even if it doesn't fulfill the wild expectations of some fans.
Not that everything here goes smoothly. "Take U Home" and "Face Down", both of which sport a Wale verse to go along with help from Big Sean for the former and Trey Songz for the latter, roll off the assembly line and into the trash heap. The good news is that those are the exceptions, and the frontloaded first half of the mixtape lays out the blueprint for what a great Meek Mill major-label debut album would look like. Most notably there's "Amen", a track that uses gospel and the soft coos of singer Jeremih to spin 2012's version of Kanye's "Good Life". Meek's celebratory hook is perfectly left-field, and it's here that he shows that he's potentially capable of taking his sound back to the radio without veering straight into predictable soft-serve R&B. There are also two tracks where Meek pulls outside rappers into his world and draws out top-notch work. The first, "Burn", is maybe the best song on the mixtape-- it should be noted that this is the other Big Sean song, and if Big Sean is on the best song of Meek's pretty good mixtape, that means Meek is doing something really right. The other is "A1 Everything", where Meek calls in Kendrick Lamar for an atypically cocky, swaggering verse.
There are good tracks up and down the tape here, but in attempting to streamline his sound, Meek shows that he's still striving for overall tonal coherence. Songs like "The Ride" and "Use to Be" are two of the best on the tape, but their introspection feels like a pittance amongst the barrage of bangers and big names. There are also songs like "Racked Up Shawty" and "Str8 Like That" that feature Fabolous, French Montana, and 2 Chainz that could've come off of any mixtape by basically any popular rapper in the past two years. But, in a way, mixtapes are made for throwing out songs and seeing what sticks-- if Meek can put whatever feedback he gets to good use, it will make his impending big box debut stronger. Sure, the tape would be better if a handful of its tracks were cut, but it arguably would've been a misuse of the form.
If all goes well for Meek Mill, Dreamchasers 2 will be a footnote in his career, the tape where he started to bridge the gap to something close to stardom. It won't play as important a role in his narrative as the first edition, and that's saying something considering D2 currently sits at 2.8 million downloads on DatPiff alone. But it is of equal quality to the mixtape that broke him big, and that can only mean good things.
