It would be wrong not to call “Expensive Pain” the most serious album of Philadelphia-born rapper and social justice/prison reform activist Meek Mill’s nearly 20-year-career, a vocation that started with a score of locally loved mixtapes before dropping a debut studio album, “Dreams & Nightmares,”2012 Mill was serious and even stern. His frowny-face hovered above the holy roll of “Amen,”The rough portraiture of a family “Otherside of America,” or the aspirational desires of his album debut’s title track.
Mill is a bellicose, earnest person. Mill also has no problem goofing off or rhapsodizing about hip-hop’s gold standard of getting paid and maintaining power. Somehow, though, both states of being — the concerned citizen-activist and the carefree carouser — couldn’t really coexist in one place. Even after he had released “Champions”His records felt unbalanced seven months after his release from jail in November 2018. This came after a controversial five-month sentence for violating probation.
But “Expensive Pain” is Mill’s best, most fully rounded recorded effort: an album that finally portrays all sides of the rapper’s rise, fall, struggles and revivals, to say nothing of his skills as a writer and as an aggressive flow-acist. As pugnacious as Mill has been in large-scale concert situations (as recently as his surprise pop-up at September’s Made in America festival) or small-club rhyme battles, such truculence has rarely come through on even his best albums, like 2015’s “Dreams Worth More Than Money.”For the exacting “Expensive Pain,” every rap, rhyme and curt stanza comes at you like a confident punch in the face, one where its executor knows just how the knuckle sandwich will land, including when Meek gets all vulnerable and brings up tender issues of mental health (a rare topic in rap) and the gore-without-the-glory of prison life.
The superficiality of moneyed braggadocio (the slippery superficiality)“Sharing Locations” with feature guests Lil Baby and Lil Durk) is a ripened part of Mill’s “Expensive” décor. Even more, the sadness and rumination over lost, artist-friends (“Angels (RIP Lil Snupe)”) and the ruined reality that the good life doesn’t last forever (“Outside 1000 MPH”) also fills Mill’s fifth studio effort. For every diamond and every death, for every feeling of loss and insecure emotion, Mill comes out with hope and real brio on his side – a confidence that goes way beyond any mere humble-brag or boast. “Put it on my soul,” raps Mill atop “On My Soul”Its lovely jazzy backing track. “Ain’t nothing that I can’t hold, and everything that I aim for. I’m getting everything that I aim for.”
The entire work – from its coming-of-age trap music single, “Blue Notes 2,”Lil Uzi Vert is a fellow ATV enthusiast. The quick, sharp last-minute addition “Flamerz Flow” – feels like an actual album, all the way to its mod-Cubist cover art, crafted from an original work by Afrocentric painter Nina Chanel Abney.
“Donda” “Certified Lover Boy”Sold more than “Expensive Pain”Will, but Meek Mill would be a billionaire if he had a focused fury and quirky humor disguised as solid tall-tale telling, dollars and streams.