Logic’s eagerness to let people know he’s more than just the dour “I just wanna be alive” guy overrides his taste and talent throughout Bobby Tarantino II, which is, at its root, a collection of serviceable, enthusiastic artist’s renderings of preexisting radio hits. This month, a new Logic project was announced via an argument between Rick and Morty about the virtues of “mixtape Logic” and “album Logic.” (The rapper’s petition to showrunners won him a guest spot in the season-three episode where Rick blacks out and sets death traps for all of Morty’s favorite heroes.) This month’s Bobby Tarantino II follows the 2016 mixtape Bobby Tarantino as an exercise in Logic rapping without the weight of his anxieties, his politics, and his action-adventure enthusiast’s eye for a deeply engrossing story. Mixed reviews got inside the rapper’s head, and he’s adjusted the next phase of his career to their criticisms. An appearance on The Tavis Smiley Show last May saw the rapper openly questioning why people hate him the minute Zane Lowe mentioned Everybody in this week’s Beats 1 interview, Logic brought up its detractors. Logic interviews post-“1-80” took on a different tone from the charismatic chats and Rubik’s cube speed trials he used to bring to radio and television. It’s weird to watch a rapper grapple with his own image in public. By the time the dust settled, Logic had developed a reputation as a self-righteous therapy rapper he could neither shake nor understand. It didn’t help that the single “Black Spiderman” served choppy lines like, “I’m as white as the Mona Lisa and as black as my cousin Keisha.” The album’s hit self-help anthem “1-80” is the kind of song that works both as harmless supermarket PA pap and as a tasteful epilogue to a Grammy in memoriam montage, a sad song whose line-drive melody touches even when the lyrics don’t. The album was first announced under the name AfricAryan, which raised the hackles of some rap fans who worried Logic would muck up valuable points about race. He called out political systems that push disadvantaged communities closer to drugs. He chronicled the substance abuse and racism that tore his parents’ rocky interracial union apart, and how they relate to his own issues with identity and anxiety. He spoke at length on struggles he’d previously only pondered in scattered lines and verses.
Last year’s Everybody went for broke and dug deeper than a Logic album ever had. Somehow he’s already written a science-fiction novel, and he seems to be shopping a screenplay.) Commitment to form, technique, and concept made the Maryland native a formidable voice in the class of mainstream hip-hop artists that shot up the charts behind thoughtful, troubled nice guys like J. (The “creation station” inside the rapper’s San Fernando Valley home is plastered from floor to ceiling with stacks of Rick and Morty action figures, Cowboy Bebop concept art, and generations of Star Wars ephemera.
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His sophomore LP, The Incredible True Story, worked nobly at funneling the verbal dexterity of his Young Sinatra mixtape series through the plush sounds the rapper and his producer pal 6ix favored at the time, while adding a dash of outer-space intrigue, because Logic is a serious sci-fi geek. Logic’s music is the beam his debut studio album, Under Pressure, carried out the business of pondering his chilling backstory and tracing his path out of adversity with the zeal of a Sunday morning church testimony. He speaks excitedly about “peace, love, and positivity.” His hands and fingers move with purpose when he’s fired up, gestures that don’t resemble “rap hands” so much as comic-book villains charging up deadly energy beams.
He extols the virtues of rest, self-care, and therapy. He looks, if not happy, then at least deeply invested in psychological wellness as a path to prosperity. He seems to have been served a little more of it than a single body ought to contain. If Logic didn’t rap, he’d have to be a youth pastor, or a popular local car salesman, or a high-school principal who moonlights as debate-team coach - something that would make good use of the upbeat, affable energy he radiates.
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