Okay first off, I’m BACK, Blog #2! Thanks to the Beta Report for lending me this platform where I can freely speak my thoughts. This week I want to talk about one of my favorite artists and his latest release: Logic’s album “Everybody” released May 5th, 2017.
CRACKING AN EGG: The Story Behind EVERYBODY
Everybody is a rap album, heavily inspired by Andy Weir’s short story, “The Egg”. In The Egg a man named Atom dies and meets God in a waiting room. While in the waiting room Atom finds out that he doesn’t just die and go to heaven or hell, but instead is reincarnated into a totally different person in a new life and different time period. Atom won’t reach his perfect God like form until he experiences the life of every man, women, child, color, creed and sexual orientation. Only at this point will he know what it is to live in everybody’s shoes and be able to pass on to heaven.
Making this the concept for a rap album is highly unusual and extremely creative, but also SUPER dope! Logic’s goal, similar to Andy Weir’s short story, is to bring the message of equality to rap with a creative science fiction twist. His heart is heard through the words of all different types of people as well as his personal conflict of being a biracial half-black/half-white man and rap artist. Even though there are several famous biracial rappers, Logic’s outer appearance makes It difficult for him to be as openly accepted considering he looks more like a white rapper compared to those like J. Cole or Drake.
Logic has been quoted saying that he writes each album as if he is constructing a script for a movie. He desires to give the listener an audible cinematic experience by constructing extensive and creative backstories for every album. This is one of my favorite reasons to encourage people to go and listen to Logic’s albums and open your mind to his creative sci-fi universe. So, let’s talk about the 3 things I love about Logic’s #1 album, “Everybody”.
MOS DEFINITELY: 3 Things I Loved about EVERYBODY
I Love the Vulnerability
Logic surprised me on his songs 1-800-273-8255 (Suicide hotline) & Anziety by giving us more than just a generic surface level rap song. In the first verse of 1-800, he took us deep into the mind of someone that simply did not feel the desire to live. Super deep, but his words and structure of the song took us on a journey that went from, “I don’t want to be alive”, to someone proclaiming, “I want you to be alive”. Showing us the power of having people in our lives that can fight for us, as well as the power of music to transform people. The song ended with a beautiful declaration of a person being freed from their pain saying, “I finally wanna be alive”.
Anziety is probably my favorite song on the album because it tells his personal battle with anxiety and creatively tells it from the perspective of anxiety itself. The opening lines are from the perspective of anxiety saying, “I’ma get up in your mind right now, make you feel like dying right now”. Logic tells how anxiety put him in the hospital and gave him a physical feeling of dying, even though it’s known as a mental illness. At the end of the song he tells the listeners about his personal experience and struggle with anxiety, which is pretty cool to see him be open about such a personal life changing moment in his life. He even keeps his nerd cred strong by mentioning it all went down during a screening of Star Wars: The Force Awakens!
I Love the Skits
Logic has a number of different skits on Everybody similar to The Incredible True Story (Logic’s 2nd full length album), which were used to build the world in his stories between songs. I felt the skits were very entertaining and easy to listen to. The voice of Neil deGrasse Tyson as God and BIG Von as Atom, were played perfectly and really brought this creative concept to life. Logic even goes as far as to have a track titled the waiting room which is literally a four minute and forty-three second skit that tells the bulk of the story. This is a bold move that could turn some listeners off, but hardcore fans will appreciate the commitment to the story, which I felt was executed very well.
I Love the Creative Risks
The conclusion to the album, AfricAryaN, was also one of my favorite songs. The reason I enjoyed this song so much is because Logic took 3 special verses and used them in an unorthodox way. He repeated those verses one by one with choruses in between. Than as the track progressed he got more intense and began to combine each verse into one long verse. Almost as an unintentional sign on unity. Once the song gets closer to the end he even delivers the same verse from the start of the song with no ad libs or post production effects on his voice, it’s just raw.
Considering that Logic does a lot of talking on this album with the skits as well as telling his personal stories on songs like “Take It Back” and “Anziety”, one of the boldest risks that logic took was by having the most nontraditional feature from J. Cole. Instead of having J. Cole send Logic a mastered file of his verse, Logic uses a voicemail version of the verse J. Cole sent to Logic as an example of what he was working on for him. Somehow, Logic Convinced J. Cole to let him use it and there you have one the greatest album endings OF ALL TIME! Well maybe not that amazing, but It gave Kendrick’s “To Pimp a Butterfly” a run for its money.
INK BLOT: The Dark Spots
I can’t finish this off without mentioning a few things I didn’t necessarily love about this album. Such as how some of the songs were only about one verse long. Also, how the story and all of the talking Logic did make some potentially great tracks feel under used. I especially wasn’t the biggest fan of the track “Killing Spree”, mainly the chorus. However, the biggest reveal that Logic’s fourth album will be his last was the biggest shock. I am understanding that he will always create music for his fans, as well as continue to produce other forms of entertainment, which keeps me optimistic and excited for what is to come in the mind of Logic. In the meantime, enjoy “Everybody” by Logic, it is truly an album made for you, whoever you are.
Thanks for reading.
-JAC