Score: 8/10
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Whether or not you, Logic, Logic’s umpteen producers or your grandpa will admit it, Logic is a big Kanye fan, a fact evident from “BoomTrap Protocol” alone (“Parallel double park that motherfu**er sideways”; “This is my theme song”; to say nothing of like the female genitalia mutilation thing which hopefully isn’t a reference to the prevailing torture mechanisms present in Liberia). But his rapping style is more like Kendrick Lamar’s and this works to his benefit for this reason, as well as the more obvious reason, that Lamar’s style is just dope, natural, fresh and the mark of a man born to be an emcee.
I had heard Logic’s name a bunch of times but had never sat down and listened to him until just early this morning, I was getting a ride home from work from a dude who much to my amusement is all about “Lose Yourself” by Eminem, since that came out right when I graduated from high school, and had Bobby Tarrantino II intro “Grandpa’s Space Ship” played for me, though the guy didn’t actually tell me that this was part of the new mixtape Bobby Tarrantino II. In a way I’m glad about this because had I known “Grandpa’s Space Ship” was part of the tape I might have never listened the rest of it. I don’t find Rick and Morty humor that effective. It’s unfocused and it takes too long to develop. It seems like showy bet-hedging.
Logic’s actual music, then, like on this “mixtape” which as far as I can tell means that there’s a bunch of different producers although that’s also true of every Kendrick Lamar album, is sort of like a melodic reuptake on trap, and so sort of like Rick and Morty draws from the past a lot (meaning that the cartoon characters have a way of mimicking extant vernaculars, although again the way they do so is not only unfocused but multifarious to the point of being self-defeating). The primary bulk of Bobby Tarrantino II consists of banter about just being an everyday dude (at one point he asks “Is it really that hard to be a good person?”) Along with this, a couple of flares which really sell the product well are his coinage of a new term, “BoomTrap,” the style in the music of which jibes pretty well with this terminology, and, I know this is minute, but the trumpet sound that gently graces the end of “BoomTrap Protocol.” Logic one-ups the undeniably gifted and likewise quintessentially urban Anderson.Paak for making a rap album with all the tense uncertainty of jazz very akin to To PImp a Butterfly et. al., rather than a jazz album with none of the fire and good-ol’-boy grit of rap.