He addresses mental health and wellness on “1-80” and “Anziety,” which is admirable, but there are no real revelations or comforts to be found in either. Fake deep aphorisms (“Everybody looking for the meaning of life through a cell phone screen!”) share space with half-witted indictments of student loan policies and flex culture. His raps, even at their most technical, are all empty loops regurgitating predictable talking points, at times mixing messages. But unlike those records, which are self-aware and mindful of their surroundings, this is nearly clueless and without subtlety. Cole’s 4 Your Eyez Only, and Joey Bada$$’s All-Amerikkkan Bada$$ among them. Logic’s Everybody is the latest in a string of recent rap releases that consider race and perception-Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN., J. Not only is it easy to see the seams in this tangled ideological tapestry, they’re constantly fraying. These winking gestures mixing science and religion are insufferable when paired with meditations on racial inequity and social anxiety, constantly raising the stakes until they mean nothing. Logic chooses to name the man in his musical adaptation “Atom,” and when he’s not rapping as Logic, he’s rapping from the perspective of a past life.
It operates on a colossal scale, and yet somehow still ends up being myopic.Īstrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, whose last major foray into rap was to wage war with flat Earth truther B.o.B, plays God on Everybody. Give an extremely verbose rapper a heady short story and watch it come undone.
Never mind the fact that the concept is completely unoriginal, even on a superficial level Everybody unravels Weir’s tightly coiled micro universe into a nonsensical sprawl. Logic gets even more literal in the subtext, drawing parallels between this life force balance and his mixed-race heritage. Herein, an existential crisis unfolds. “Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself.” This is Everybody’s central conceit: We are all the same, and every misdeed hurts the human race equally. If this seems convoluted that’s because it is: Weir’s story was meant as a fanciful (albeit thoughtful) work of fiction, not an intersectional parable. “Every time you victimized someone you were victimizing yourself,” the short story goes. He weaves his own struggles with race and religion into a complex, panoramic view of humanity, seeking a unified theory of equality, not just for his mortal coil but for the cosmos. Maryland rapper Logic’s new album, Everybody, is a strangely faithful adaptation of the short story with an emphasis on the endless cycle of reincarnations that’d eventually-hypothetically-cause everyone to be different incarnations of the same person.