Contact CU Independent Music Staff Writer Thomas Roller at thomas.roller@colorado.edu.
Welcome to Roller’s Stone! This is my brand-new shiny music column. For the foreseeable future, all posts by me will fall under the blanket of this column. Now, let’s get into the new offering from Maryland rapper Logic.
Logic has been active since 2010 and has received a fair bit of praise in the underground rap scene for his mixtapes, including his Young Sinatra series. Last year’s debut album, Under Pressure, was a massive success, debuting at No. 4 on the Billboard charts. The Incredible True Story is his sophomore effort.
The concept of this album is unexpectedly and awesomely geeky. I almost want to give it a recommendation for that alone. It’s set 100 years in the future, after Earth has become uninhabitable and all the surviving humans live on a space station. Two of these humans, Kai and Thomas, are traveling to a planet named “Paradise,” and as accompaniment on their journey, they are listening to Logic’s album.
“You know this is the album that changed everything, right?” says one character to the other as the instrumental intro track draws to a close. As much as I want to roll my eyes from hearing a musician congratulate himself before the album’s even started, Logic does have quite a bit going for him.
His flows are intricately constructed and agile, and pretty tight to the beat on top of all that. That already puts him on a level above a lot of the rest of the depressing slop bucket that is the mainstream hip-hop scene. He expertly weaves this highly technical lyricism with a lightness of tone and a sense of fun. I admire him a lot for this; not every lyrically driven rap record has to be grittier than a sandpaper sandwich and it’s good to know that some rappers realize that.
The production of this album is also pretty good, if a little inconsistent. That might be because Logic himself handles a lot of the music on this album (alongside producer 6ix), and his influence is kind of scattershot. There are flavors of both East and West Coast production, plus elements of soul and Latin jazz.
The upshot of this kitchen-sink approach to production is that it offers a lot of musical diversity and plenty of rich, textured sounds. It’s a breath of fresh air from the dry, soulless climate of minimalist production present in much of hip-hop today. Every element of this album is executed incredibly competently.
So why do I not like it that much?
The problem here is a general lack of direction. In The Incredible True Story, Logic has all the ingredients for greatness, but he doesn’t have the recipe, which is to say a sense of personal identity. His flows, while fast and technically skillful, don’t really have a message behind them. In fact, the writing is by and large pretty forgettable. I feel like any other rapper could have delivered his words with the same amount of impact, which in turn makes his writing come across as insincere.
This casts the musically varied production in a bad light as well – Logic no longer comes across as a man with a rich musical background blending his various influences to create his own style, but as a man who can’t decide whether he wants to sound like Kendrick Lamar or Mos Def and ends up sounding inferior to both, a man frantically rubbing different genres together in the hopes of generating a spark of individuality.
My spirits are not heightened by the general dip in song quality on the second half of the album, and once you start to hear Logic’s lack of focus it makes his constant self-congratulatory remarks all the more irritating. In addition to the aforementioned, “This is the album that changed everything,” comment, one of the tracks is actually called “I am the Greatest,” which isn’t even the best song on the album. The final insult is the outro skit that brings the album to a grinding halt in its last five minutes to compare Logic’s song construction to Quentin Tarantino’s skills as a director, and you can almost hear the slapping sounds from Logic patting himself on the back so hard.
Now, this is not a bad album. It is by no means the worst rap album of 2015 (that honor will probably go to Hopsin for the gut-wrenchingly awful Pound Syndrome), but it disappoints me because it had the potential to be so much more. Logic is perhaps too logical in this album’s construction. He’s excellent at extracting all the best parts of hip-hop and putting it all together in a cohesive package, but this particular creation lacks heart, and without a heart, you can’t get the blood pumping.
