Bobby boy, Bobby Tarantino, Young Sinatra, Bobby Biracial, Logic. No matter what name you know him by it's impossible to deny the love-hate relationship Logic shares with the hip-hop/rap community. Recently every album he's released (including his experimental Supermarket album) has been met with mixed reviews. But believe it or not, this wasn't always the case, in fact, it was quite the opposite. Logic provided listeners with a unique style that wasn't exactly replicated everywhere, so what happened?
After four mixtapes released (all met with generally positive reviews) it was finally time for Logic to release his debut album, Under Pressure in late 2014. Not surprisingly, this album is all about pressure, and a perilous journey to overcome it. To understand the basis of the album, we need to understand the life logic has lived up until this point in his life. Logic was born on January 22nd, 1990 with an absent father and a mother who would beat, neglect, and negatively impact his life for almost 20 years, all while living in section eight housing. Logic eventually quit high school to pursue a chance to live a life of music, that's the short condensed version.
On top of the obstacles he has to overcome from his personal life, he has to persuade an audience of mostly new people and grab their attention with this album. While the entire album succeeds in showing us the life Logic has gone through, there are a handful of songs that take his idea and expand upon it to epic proportions. These songs are "Growing Pains III, Nikki, and Under Pressure". Growing Pains III, which takes us into the life of Logic in his early life, living by constant shootings, terrible housing, and a terrible family. Towards the end of the song, he hallucinates a life where everything is perfect, his family is setting the table for dinner, asking how his day went, and genuinely feeling wanted. However, this quickly fades and he realizes he's back to the same old hell he's been living in.
The second song, Nikki, is all about his addiction, specifically his nicotine addiction. The song consistently personifies cigarettes and how attached Logic is to said cigarettes. No matter what else is introduced in his life, Nikki is always going to be chasing after him. For the most part, Logic does a very good job at explaining the struggles of escaping a toxic behavior. The line that encapsulates the entire song perfectly said the following "What will they write up on my grave? A free man born as a king, who died as a slave."
The final song I want to talk about is Under Pressure, the whole reason behind the album's creation. Living the life Logic has lived, there's a lot to do and a lot of writes to wrong. His sister's abuse of opioids and abusing partners, his alcoholic dad who wants to re-enter his life, and a mother who isn't there for him anymore are all constantly sifting through his mind, all while he's trying to crawl out of this life to be his own free person. This is all intensified by the phone calls that take up more than half the song. These phone calls provide information that even though Bobby wants to help his family with their problems, he's getting too famous and can't divide his time as evenly as the rest of his family wishes.
His sophomore album, The Incredible True Story, tackles more or less the same obstacles of him explaining his struggles through rhythm and poetry. If you haven't picked up on it by now, Logic was made popular by two things, his vocabulary, and his struggles. For every one song flexing about how much he made and the cars he's driving, there are four songs rapping about his struggle of being a neglected biracial man trying to make it in life. Once he bypasses this struggle, however, is where he begins to decline.
After ΞVERYBODY, Logic seemed to take a different route in how he stylized his raps. Logic seemed to be rapping less about his struggle to overcome obstacles in his life in place of rapping about his immense wealth and women. It's only natural for artists to create based on their surroundings, and with Logic now being more popular than ever, his once detrimental lifestyle has turned into one of comfort. The once poor and hopeless Logic turned into the now wealthy and prosperous rapper we know today. This showed more than ever in his newest album Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.
"Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" (COADM) was originally intended to be an album all about, wait for it, the dangerous thoughts Logic faces now that he's virtually living a whole new life. What we as the audience were expecting was his take on anxiety and people not caring about Bobby Hall III, but rather Logic and completely disregarding him as a person and rather as a vessel to produce rap music. What we got was Logic rapping about Fortnite, his dad's balls, and Will Smith (for some reason). Needless to say, this isn't what we were expecting and much less what we wanted.
With the world once again against him and all odds being stacked against him, Logic has a lot to prove once again. His newest single OCD with both him and Down2Earth seems to be a return to the form of why we love logic so much. The song goes in-depth about what COADM should have been, and it's so much better than anything COADM could have hoped to be. OCD is all about Logic and his constant worry of life, both his and the people surrounding him, and his desire to be treated like a real person like everyone else. Hopefully, this is a hint at the return of the Logic we know and love, but until then, no pressure.
