58 Minutes With...Meek Mill

The rapper is out of jail and making new music, but is he #free?

- Dee Lockett

MEEK MILL’S LIFE can be split almost down the middle, into BP and AP: before probation, after probation. Lately, moments from the first half don’t come to him so easily; he’s spent more of the past decade bound to the system than he’s spent out of it. Struggling to recall his last memory of freedom, he says, “Maybe not since I was 10 or 12, sitting at home playing a game all day.” But his snap response feels more truthful: “I’ve never felt free, coming from where I came from.”

Once thought of mainly as a skilled battle rapper, Mill, 31, was raised in North Philadelphia (“Millidelphia” to his fans). Ever since he was sentenced to probation in 2008 for brandishing a gun at a cop during a drug raid—both Mill and witnesses maintain he didn’t do this— he has been at the mercy of local judge Genece E. Brinkley. Every few years, like clockwork, she has had him jailed or put under house arrest at her sole discretion. These days, he legally cannot be away from his hometown for more than 30 days at a time.

He’s about halfway through his current stint away. We’re currently on set—a barren lot in Baltimore’s Green mount West neighborhood—for Mill’s acting debut. He’s playing the leader of a revered dirt-bike gang in an adaptation of the documentary 12 O’Clock Boys, which is named for the group. Street art decorates the exteriors of the otherwise dilapidated buildings. Mill has been splitting his time between Baltimore, Miami, and New York, where he’s recording his forthcoming fourth album, Championships. Since he was released from prison in April, Mill has become something of a criminal-justice reform activist, but the rapper has long been a fixture in hip-hop, first as a member of the Philadelphia group the Bloodhoundz and later as a solo artist.