“The word ‘Aryan’ is used almost exclusively as a rally cry for the ‘pure blood’ superior white race theory. “Like the Aryan nation?” the rapper OG Maco tweeted. At that point, he hinted that the album would be called AfricAryaN suffice to say that did not sit well with some people.
Cole, Logic has a white mother and a black father.) “It’s about me being black and white, seeing life from two sides, and about that cultural evolution and how you can go from the darkest of skin to the lightest of skin,” he explained ahead of its release. (Like two of his generation’s most popular rappers, Drake and J. If religious persecution, homophobia, and racism could be completed as methodically as a Rubik’s Cube, surely somebody would have solved them long before Logic got there.Įverybody announces itself as a treatise about race in America, often explored through the lens of Logic’s biracial identity. It’s a well-meaning message, and yet the simplification of it all can feel a little cheap.
Logic’s last proper album, 2017’s Everybody, was an ambitious enterprise: He has described it as a concept album about a man (named Atom … get it?) who has died after a car hit him but cannot move into the afterlife until he has been reincarnated as “every human being that’s ever existed.” The aim, of course, is universal empathy and a kind of spiritual Esperanto because “everybody was born equal” a repeated refrain on the six-and-a-half-minute “Take It Back” is “Regardless of race, religion, color, creed, and sexual orientation.” He always ticks them off in precisely that order-“race, religion, color, creed, and sexual orientation”-like a mnemonic for remembering the order of the planets. Photo by Christopher Polk/Getty Images for NARAS
These two activities, under Logic’s command, actually share some DNA: His flow is a swift, clackety torrent of words that click into place triumphantly when the rhyme lands, when the punch line hits, when his seemingly complicated rhetorical point is tidily made. (“Logic look like if Steve from Sex and the City read hypebeast exactly one time” is a year-old tweet that is lodged permanently in my brain.) Rick and Morty, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Ansel Elgort have all had features on his recent albums one of his-admittedly impressive-signature moves is solving a Rubik’s Cube while freestyling. As he rapped on his 2012 mixtape Young Sinatra: Undeniable (directly quoting one of his idols, Jay-Z), “Men lie, women lie / Numbers don’t.”Ī technically gifted rapper with a rapid-fire flow, Logic has an avowedly-perhaps performatively-nerdy aesthetic. (All but one of the other 14 artists to achieve this feat-the Beatles-have done so in the past decade.) Still, it’s undeniable that a lot of people are right now listening to Logic. To be fair, this statistic says just as much about the fickle nature of Billboard’s metrics in the streaming era as it does Logic’s popularity: A record that clocks a lot of streams in its first week, as Bobby Tarantino II did, will inevitably make an outsized imprint on the Hot 100. 1 on the Billboard charts, but he also became one of only 15 artists in Billboard history to have 10 or more songs chart on the Hot 100 in a single week. Last week, this fervent, internet-fueled fan base helped Logic (real name: Sir Robert Bryson Hall II) achieve a career milestone: Not only did his most recent release, the mixtape Bobby Tarantino II, debut at no.
He is either too stunned to remember how to move all of his limbs, or he is taking an iPhone video of the whole encounter. As they hug, the boy’s left arm protrudes awkwardly above them, phone clutched in his hand. The embrace they share looks more like something that would take place on the stage of a megachurch than at a rapper’s promotional Q&A. Logic-who is sporting, like the rest of his entourage, a khaki-colored hoodie emblazoned with the title of his most recent album, Everybody-invites the fan on stage. The boy’s voice is quavering, so much so that both queries come tumbling out at once: “My one question is how do you deal with all the responsibility you have and can I have a hug please?” At that, he breaks down in sobs. “I have two questions, can I ask them?” he says to the subject of this episode, the 28-year-old Maryland rapper Logic.
In the debut episode of Rapture, a new eight-episode Netflix documentary series that devotes installments to nine different MCs, a nervous young boy in a hoodie glances at the iPhone held in his trembling hand.