“Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” Logic’s fifth studio album (and his second release of 2019 after his debut novel, “Supermarket,” and its grungy alt-rock-hop soundtrack), does its very best to combine the light and the dark - the hard lines and the soft shuffle - while looking at the social side of social justice and righteousness.Īn overarching aspect of Logic’s outlook now - the big concept behind “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” - is that everything that is great and ghoulish about the world and its mental and spiritual health stems from social media. So he saved the light-hearted raps and more languid tones for his strutting mixtapes, such as those within the Bobby Tarantino series, and held a hard, overeager line for rapier, fast-rhyming-filled albums like “YSIV.”
Slowing things down from his stalwart sonic companion of hyper, musically complicated soundtracks, the lushly orchestrated “1-80” (named for the number for the National Suicide Prevention Hotline) turned things around for Logic and transformed him from an observational comic to the king of pain, an epic representative of those in need, especially where millennial mental health was concerned.įrom that success forward, everything Logic did had to be writ large and cut mightily. To go with that, Logic’s music was (and still is) complex, celestial and snaky as it serpentines spryly through low trap rhythms and big break beats.īy the time of Logic’s more dramatic breakthrough, 2017’s “Everybody,” the flinty-voiced Maryland rapper-producer took on and brought into clearer focus the ills of those around him and within himself: a violent, racist mother, a drug-addled father, anxiety, depression.
Self-defined and refined to have the soul and swagger of Ol’ Blue Eyes (even going so far as to name his early mix-tape series “Young Sinatra”), Logic started his hip-hop story as a rakish rapper with a deeply sad personal story to tell, a rapid fire manner in which to tell it and a novelist’s approach to its overall conceptual-ism.