Meek Mill just dropped one of the best posthumous releases since Tupac.
On Saturday, the Philly rapper unloaded 4/4, a surprise four-track EP, onto his SoundCloud. Aside from its laughably inane album cover, which features three marks with a slash across it—you only use the slash mark when it’s five, not four, Meek!—it’s an impressive collection of songs that finds the emcee back on solid ground after being buried by Drake.
“Pray For Em” is perhaps the standout—a vitriolic track that sees Meek spitting venomous lyrics over a pulsing, operatic beat. “Meek put a rapper on CNN / Niggas said I wouldn’t eat again / Just counted 5 mil’ in cash / I’m a real nigga they won’t see again,” he spits. But the track that will undoubtedly garner the most ink is “Im Da Plug Freestyle,” which hits back at Drake following their one-sided feud over the summer. Putting his own twist on Metro Boomin’s beat to “I’m the Plug,” Drake’s track off his mixtape with Future What a Time to Be Alive, Meek starts things off in “Jumpman” mode, a la Kanye West on his recent single “Facts.”
“Jumpman, Jumpman, Jumpman / Ain’t nobody tell ‘em this ain’t what they want, man / You ain’t really write it, I’m like ‘who’s your stuntman?’” he raps, re-referencing the accusation he levied over the summer of Drake using a ghostwriter that kicked off their little tiff.
Elsewhere on the track, Meek spits, “We really started from the bottom, unlike we them niggas,” and then ends things with a direct nod to “Back to Back”—the Meek Mill diss track released on July 31 that seemingly ended his career.
“Was that my girl’s tour or the world tour? / I do not know what you pussy niggas goin’ for / This that hundred K a night when you perform tour / Swimmin’ in that good pussy while you’re on tour, oh!” says Meek.
If you recall, following Meek’s accusation that Drake uses a ghostwriter—namely Quentin Miller, who’s credited as a writer on multiple Drake songs—the Toronto native unleashed a pair of diss tracks aimed at Meek: “Charged Up” and “Back to Back.” The latter contained the vicious line, “Is that a world tour, or your girl’s tour?”—a jab at Meek over being the opening act for his much more famous girlfriend, Nicki Minaj.
Despite being sneak-released to his SoundCloud, “Back to Back” ended up becoming a huge hit on the airwaves and in the clubs, culminating in a performance at Drake’s OVO Festival where the rapper performed the tune in front of a bunch of Meek-bashing memes ginned up by his fans. Meek retaliated with the tepid diss track “Wanna Know” and then retreated into the arms of his girl, seemingly willing to take the L. In the months since, Drake’s single “Hotline Bling,” which was released to his SoundCloud with “Back to Back,” has become his biggest hit yet.
“This is a discussion about music, and no one’s putting forth any music?” Drake said of the feud. “Nobody told you that this was a bad idea, to engage in this and not have something?...It was weighing heavy on me. I didn’t get it. I didn’t get how there was no strategy on the opposite end. I just didn’t understand. I didn’t understand it because that’s just not how we operate.”
Well, Drizzy, here it is. Better late than never, I guess.
