Meek remains frustrated by the way he’s been treated by the system. Even the original gun charge, which has haunted him now for years, is a matter of context as he sees it. “My dad got killed in South Philly,” he explains. “Ain’t nobody save him. The cops didn’t save him, and I don’t even think about the cops saving me, so I just took action to protect myself.” Ever since then, he says, he’s been trapped in a structure that makes no effort to appreciate his sacrifices, his worth, or his ambition. “When you’re telling me I’m not shit,” he says, “you got to look at it from my point of view. I always wanted to say this to the judge: ‘Think about your son. If your son grew up in the neighborhood, and his father was dead, but he’s able to rise up above it all and start taking care of you, your mother, and your whole family? He’s taking responsibility.’ So when you got a white lady in a courtroom, who don’t know you from a can of paint, saying I’m not shit and I need to be put in jail? That’s offensive to me. I look at that as racism. I take that personally.”

This is a feeling embedded in Meek’s music, a bleak awareness that his own society doesn’t value him. It’s most upfront in songs like 2013’s “Lil Nigga Snupe,” a chilling track inspired by the murder of the 18-year-old Louisiana rapper Lil Snupe, who, like Chino Braxton, had been discovered by Meek and signed to his label. Instead of pedantry or certainty, Meek offers a profound, deeply human ambiguity: So what’s a nigga ‘sposed to do?/ Tell ‘em put the guns down or tell lil nigga shoot?/ Cause they’ll do the same to me, do the same shit to you. It’s a question that’s often just below the surface in Meek’s music: what are we supposed to do?

The challenge for Meek, going forward, will be to continue producing material like “Snupe”—difficult songs addressing difficult issues that resonate with the community that propelled him to success in the first place—while also reaching for the kind of mass pop-cultural relevance that he, Nicki, and Atlantic Records all believe him to be capable of. Judging by the portion of the album he played in the studio, Meek doesn’t see these worlds as contradictory. There are clear pop efforts, like the two songs that Meek and Nicki argued over that night in the studio, but they are part of a larger texture, no more or less important than anything else. Confessional, wounding songs recount providing for his mother and sister; songs with halting, jazz-like piano riffs and drums fall over themselves and never entirely cohere; hazy, impressionistic ballads feature hooks sung by Future; and there’s an operatic anthem that Meek says he likes because it reminds him of ancient Rome.

“Monster,” a single Meek put out this past winter, finds him reflecting on the darker implications of his current situation—nocturnal, rich, and restless. The money turned me to a monster, he says repeatedly on the hook. I ask him about this song at dinner, and he tells me that he means the sentiment “in a good and bad way. Being who I am, in my position, you can’t just be nice. You have to give people some direction. You got to be a monster.” I tell him this seems surprisingly dark, and he nods. Rick Ross, reaching across the table for another crab puff, agrees. “It’s all dark,” he says.