Album Review: The Legacy of Logic is Cemented with Final Album
No Pressure serves as a bittersweet retirement speech for Logic’s turbulent career.
Written by Thomas Galindo
Photo courtesy of Getty Images
On Oct. 21, 2014, Logic released his debut studio album Under Pressure. As a young rapper from Gaithersburg, Md. with four mixtapes under his belt, being a 2013 XXL Freshman, and having toured with Kid Cudi, Big Sean, and Tyler, the Creator, Logic was projected for mainstream success. The album was well received among multiple music outlets and contains songs like “Soul Food” and “Bounce” that are still considered some of his best. Logic’s slick tongue and unique outlook on life in this record made many hip-hop fans optimistic for his career — and then there’s the rest of his discography.
Photo courtesy of Wall Street Journal
Since Under Pressure, Logic has released seven projects that have only defined his career as unpredictable. 2017 LP Everybody and the two-part mixtape series Bobby Tarantino 1 & 2 were certainly highlights. In Everybody, Logic advocates for mental health awareness and delves into racial inequality. While exploring these serious topics, the album also consists of intriguing skits narrated by Neil deGrasse Tyson and chart-topping hits like “1-800-273-8255” and “Black SpiderMan.” However, the public’s main takeaway from the album was Logic’s incessant decrees of his biracial identity and feeling unaccepted by both the Black and white community, which made him the target of countless memes on Twitter. The Bobby Tarantino series sees Logic at his most comfortable. Sonically experimental, lax in songwriting, and filled with quite a few easygoing bangers like “The Jam,” “Overnight,” and “Yuck,” the coupled mixtapes are a solid project. But, with these successes came quite a few outright failures. The consecutive releases in 2019 of Supermarket, a soundtrack for his titular novel, and the album Confessions of a Dangerous Mind rewarded Logic with one the worst years musically a mainstream artist has ever produced. With Supermarket he sought to achieve a soft, indie rock sound with a Mac Demarco assist on production for portions of the album. (Sounds terrible? That’s because it was.) Then, hoping to bounce back, he released his pop-rap mess of an album Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. The album includes lukewarm bars where he took jabs at the modern age of social media on songs like “Clickbait” and included hooks that feel like a punishment on songs like “Icy.”
Coming down from an embarrassing year, Logic’s career was in the gutter in 2020. Not many had faith that he was capable of making quality music anymore. Then, Logic announced that he would be releasing his final album, No Pressure, on July 24; he tweeted, “It’s been a great decade. Now it’s time to be a great father.” It’s not often we get to see a musician formally retire and acknowledge their last body of work. Perhaps this announcement was to stir attention, but Logic is firm is his decision, and as of now, this is his last album ever.
Image courtesy of Def Jam Recordings
No Pressure is an hour-long, 15-song album where Logic tributes the artists that inspired his musical journey through production and sampling, uses his verses as a stream of consciousness to air out his grievances with hip-hop culture and discuss his contentment with retiring.
However, Logic’s unfinished business is laid out in the opening track “No Pressure.”
“This liquor that I'm drinking got me thinking 'bout some other shit
Feeling like I'm sinking like Titanic or some other ship
Word to your mothership, boy, this that gutter shit
Breaking down the weed to get high as Thomas and Kai
But y'all ain't ready for that sh-t, that's more like Ultra 85.”
Ultra 85 was meant to be the final piece to Logic’s saga of albums where his music serves as a soundtrack to life on a new planet. Fictional characters Quentin Thomas and William Kai are the ship captains leading the earthlings to their new planet and discuss Logic’s legacy in earlier albums’ interludes. This is the first of four times Logic mentions Ultra 85 throughout the project, continually discussing how he intended to release it, but decided to go with this album instead. In an interview with Billboard he says, “I had this album I wanted to do for a long time called Ultra 85 which I was teasing the fans with, and then I realized I don’t want to do it. This is that. This album, No Pressure, is that album that all the fans have been waiting for.”
In the context of his retirement, the course Logic decided to take on this album was likely the more proper one. Logic always preached about being a rapper that was a fan of rap. He studied and idolized artists like J. Cole and Kendrick Lamar; he grew up on rappers like Kanye West and MF Doom. When first entering the rap game with his Young Sinatra mixtapes in the early 2010s, he was revitalizing a boom-bap hip-hop sound that prospered in the ‘90s. The shoutouts to his inspirations make this album particularly enjoyable and feel like a request that his listeners recognize what made Logic himself. Examples of this include his sampling of Outkast and Kanye West, where he interpolated the former’s “Elevators (Me & You)” in “GP4,” and two songs from the latter’s 2005 album Late Registration on “Celebration” and “Heard Em Say.” In “5 Hooks,” he opens with “It's what you all been waitin' for, ain't it?” a nod to Kanye West’s own opening line in “Barry Bonds” from Graduation. In the same song, Logic also spits, “No I.D. my mentor, but it's time for the story’s end,” a play on Kanye’s “No I.D. my mentor, now let the story begin” on “Big Brother” from Graduation, also homaged by J. Cole on Born Sinner’s “Let Nas Down.” The line can also be interpreted as a thank-you to No I.D., legendary hip-hop production staple who executively produced this record.
The production on the record sounds like a combination of Under Pressure and The Incredible True Story — a return to boom-bap style beats, with jazz interpolations and piano infused tracks that have historically brought him the most success. This album finally sees Logic finally recognize and master the pocket of hip-hop he should have always aimed to perfect, because his experimental adventures always turned out to be duds.
Fitting for a final album, he comes across as his most mature self. In the contemplative and somber “Dark Place,” he discusses how the negative criticism he faced in his career fueled his depression and eventual exit from rap and its toxic fanbases. The nostalgic “Soul Food II” sees him using the same beat and tempo as his hit “Soul Food” from his first album. He opens the first installment with the bar, “Goddamn, goddamn, conversations with legends / Crazy how one day your idols can turn into your brethren,” and brings it full circle to open the second, spitting, “Goddamn, goddamn, conversations with people / Crazy how one day, the legends forget that they equal.”
Logic was never a fan-favorite in hip-hop. He started his career on the right side of everyone’s mind, but without the ability to keep consistent quality on his projects, the rap community soured on him, and Logic figured now was as good a time as any to step away from a culture that brought so much turmoil to his life. No Pressure was his opportunity to get a lot off of his chest and internalize what his career was made up of. Although he was never the best rapper alive by any stretch of the imagination, his music potentially saved lives and always preached “Peace, Love, and Positivity.”
Logic now looks to interact with his fans more, and signed a deal with Twitch to either game or host miscellaneous chats to engage with viewers more casually. In fact, the night of his album’s release, he streamed for the first time on Twitch and capped off his music career with a closing speech (which is worth a watch), in which he tearfully said, “As always, peace, love, and positivity, I love you, I appreciate you, and I’ll see you in other endeavors, I am off to be a good father. Thank you.”