His music is so bland and workmanlike and generic that I simply cannot imagine anyone getting excited about him. Here’s a typical Logic punchline: “I’m angrier than Kanye when he talking about clothes / That’s a fashion line.” He’s just a guy rapping. And even though Logic tirelessly reps for mass-beloved weirdos like Quentin Tarantino and the Wu-Tang Clan, he never shows any trace of the outsized personalities that make those artists who they are. Mostly, though, this is half an hour of “this flow, this super flow, out of control”-type rappity-raps. (Of course, every Pusha verse imagines the life of an average street solider, and this doesn’t stop Pusha from absolutely annihilating Logic.) There’s some light conceptualism at work on Bobby Tarantino, too on “Wrist,” Logic attempts to place himself in the mind of an aging drug kingpin in the middle of a raid, while guest Pusha T imagines the life of an average street soldier. The Incredible True Story, for example, was a concept LP about refugees from an uninhabitable Earth searching space for a new home - though, in practice, that meant that there were skits in there to loosely organize all the ferociously pedestrian rap songs. Logic’s full-on albums are considerably more ambitious. This is a deliberately low-stakes release, an If You’re Reading This-style retail mixtape that’s being billed as something other than an album even if it costs money like an album. It’s barely half an hour long, and it feels like it’s three times that. Lyrically, Logic is justifiably proud of all his success: “Since the first album, I’m one of the highest earners on the label / Within six months, I put the second one on they table / I’ve played sold-out shows in parts of the world I can’t pronounce / Released then tickets, watch them disappear when we announce.” And he makes a few commendable-if-clumsy attempts to address his status as a light-skinned mixed-race rapper, a guy often mistaken for white even if he grew up with no white-privilege advantages: “I just wanna make the world a better place / Fuck race and the shade in my face.”īut my lord, what a slog this Bobby Tarantino tape is. Logic and 6ix aren’t scared of using Auto-Tune or sinister, gleaming synths it’s not the music of the ’90s-rap fundamentalist I’d imagined. He co-produces his own beats with frequent collaborator 6ix, and those tracks, while not terribly distinct, are fizzy and immediate. He’s got a gift for twisty, high-speed Southern-rap flows, but he enunciates on every last syllable, making sure you know exactly what he’s saying. Last Friday, Logic released his Bobby Tarantino mixtape, and, figuring that I should have some idea of who this kid is, I’ve spent the past few days with it. I’d be a whole lot happier for him if his music wasn’t so fucking boring. And right now, he is well on the way to becoming one of rap’s brightest stars. Both of his parents had serious addiction issues. He’s a high-school dropout who grew up in housing projects in the DC suburbs - an area that, as often as not, is more dangerous than the big city nearby. He’s the sort of American-dream success story that we love to see in rap. He spent years cranking out mixtapes, toured relentlessly, and identified a chunk of the rap-buying populace that, for whatever reasons, wasn’t being served.
That’s a good thing! That should be happening! Logic built up a massive audience, and he did it the right way. A relative rap newcomer with no famous guests and no big co-signs comes through and sells a huge pile of albums, doing it without any big hits or any critical buzz. If you hadn’t been paying any attention - and I absolutely hadn’t been paying attention - this was the sort of thing that takes you by surprise. Last November, The Incredible True Story, the second official album from the Maryland rapper Logic, sold more than 100,000 copies in its first week and landed at #3 on the Billboard charts.
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