YMMV / Logic

• Awesome Music: Despite non-fans being pretty mixed on him, most rap listeners tend to agree that Logic's first several projects and his final album are excellent:
  • The Young Sinatra mixtapes feature Logic at his most passionate, with even the most rudimentary bars coming from a place of hunger, with a perfect mix of 1990s production and more modern stylings.
  • Under Pressure is often cited as one of the best debut rap albums in recent years, and for good reason.
  • The song "Wu-Tang Forever" from YSIV, which features all living members of the Wu-Tang Clan. The fact that all Logic did was ask for the song to happen is nothing short of impressive considering it did happen.
• Broken Base: Of the various things Logic is known for in the music scene, his divisiveness is probably one of them.
  • In general terms, one of the more prominent splits in fan opinion was whether Logic's less serious party music should be given as much time of day as his conscious, lyrical music.
  • While most people agree that his first several projects are solid, everything following The Incredible True Story is a different ballgame. Depending on who you ask, he gradually got worse starting with Bobby Tarantino, as his formerly minor flaws became accentuated and many objective criticisms against him were brought forward, such as recycling rhyme schemes, repeating certain lyrics multiple times in a row, and relying on incredibly rudimentary wordplay. The only thing most people can agree on is that Confessions is by far his worst rap album, an opinion subscribed to even by some of his most diehard fans.
  • Supermarket was definitely the center of some of the most intense cuts of this debate. While it being a shift in a completely new pop/indie rock direction was enough to kill the interest of some, its actual execution led many to lambast its sound as heavily derivative and its songwriting as rudimentary and unintentionally hilarious with some of the most vitriolic reviews Logic's ever seen. The album was seen as the near-objective low point of his career upon release, but several additional camps of public opinion have since been built — people who dislike the album but find it nowhere near warranting of the abysmal reputation it has, people who are insistent on defending the album as at the very least not that bad, and people who respect it solely for the creative risk Logic took in trying something different.
  • Despite being his biggest song, "1-800-273-8255" has a considerably mixed-to-negative reception amongst his fanbase. Many believe that it covers the subject matter of suicide/depression from an incredibly surface-level perspective, and that the ad-lib where he says, "Who can relate? WOO!" is delivered way too enthusiastically to not ruin the song, to the point that it's become subject to Memetic Mutation. Others go even further and claim that it's one of the worst tracks he's ever recorded, to the point that it shouldn't be his Signature Song outside of rap circles. Even those who do like it tend to agree that he's made better tracks.
  • The revelation that he didn't actually retire has elicited extremely mixed reactions from fans. Some people shrugged it off, since rappers alluding to retirement but making returns soon after is nothing new. Others felt a bit bothered but believed that he truly wanted to settle down yet couldn't stay away from music, and thus gave him the benefit of the doubt. On the flip side, many think that it was pointless for him to make such a big deal out of his retirement if it wasn't going to stick, with some even going as far as claiming that the impact No Pressure had made completely went down the drain as a result, making the entire thing seem unnecessary at best and like a publicity stunt at worst. Time will only tell if an actual explanation is ever given.
    • A possible theory is that he was retiring in the sense that he was done with being part of the mainstream industry, not that he was actually done making music. This is evidenced by Bobby Tarantino III and Vinyl Days only being made because he owed Def Jam more material due to his contract, the latter of which even reportedly taking less than two weeks to make. If this is in fact the case, it makes far more sense and somewhat justifies the announcement.
• Ending Fatigue: Everybody was criticized for this quite a bit.
  • Instead of isolating skits in their own tracks like The Incredible True Story, this album integrates them as part of existing tracks, which can turn them into easily-skippable extended outros for songs.
  • If it's not skits, it's long-form speeches by Logic at the end of tracks including "Take It Back" and "Anziety" that can border on Author Filibuster levels of making sure the listener really understands the album's messages.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Several lines from early in his career about him prioritizing lyricism and musical value over money were mentioned among online conversations ad nauseam when his albums became routinely criticized for many believing he was doing the exact opposite.
    • From "The Spotlight":
      "Everybody be sure, I'mma always want more
      Does anybody make real shit anymore?"
    • The intro to Under Pressure got it the most:
      "But I'm not defined by the sales of my first week,
      'cause in my mind, the only way I fail if my verse weak."
  • His mentions of his since-ex-wife Jessica Andrea on Everybody and Bobby Tarantino 2 — even getting her painted on the covers of both, taking up a considerable portion of the latter's cover — got hit with this hard when they divorced. To add insult to injury, he then had to perform the songs live, and fan recordings show he either doesn't finish saying lines that mention her or has to uncomfortably change the tense ("I was married, ho!").
  • Minor example: in "Metropolis", he says, "Hope when I'm 40 I'm still in it, one of the few that be killing it." He had only recently turned 30 when he announced his retirement, although he has still been around the music scene since.
• Heartwarming Moments: “1-800” increased calls to the Suicide Hotline exponentially, and Logic later said that he received a letter from Congress containing study data that proved that the song saved lives. Logic performed it at the 2018 Grammy Awards and gathered suicide survivors onstage with him. Also worth noting he went on right after the In Memoriam...specifically, the final shot of Chester Bennington.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Once Everybody made a central theme of Logic being mixed-race, he pretty much became "the biracial guy" in hip-hop communities overnight, with many poking fun at how frequently he talked about it on the album. Even Logic hopped on the meme and lampooned it from Confessions of a Dangerous Mind onward.
  • Anthony Fantano of The Needle Drop has been jokingly called Logic by his comment sections on countless occasions due to his similar appearance. Logic has also played into this meme, wearing a yellow flannel to his interview with Anthony and at one point changing his Twitter header to an old picture of Anthony◊. It got to the point that his infant son mistook Anthony for him once.
• Narm: Given that he was one of the rappers most regularly targeted for being "corny" of his time, people have found a lot to pick on.
  • Any time he jokes about being biracial since the meme of it blew up is either this or ironic Narm Charm depending on who you ask.
  • Any one of his oft-recycled rhyme schemes (ex: "means/dreams", anything surrounding the word "automatic") can get stale and have its effect diminished after you hear it the first time.
  • Everybody:
    • AfricAryaN, the album's original title, rubbed a lot of people the wrong way upon initial announcement, as they found its communication of the album's "humanity being interconnected" concept to be heavy-handed.
    • Logic and co. hyping up the album's story as brilliant and ingenious on Logic's behalf in the lead-up to its release can get deflated with the realization that said story is lifted pretty liberally (albeit with permission) from an existing short story, Andy Weir's "The Egg".
    • Even then, the concept itself can still be quite ridiculous: a man struck and killed by a car is given a mission from God to reincarnate as every human being that has ever existed in order to move on to the afterlife. We know God's about making people work for their salvation, but damn.
    • God being voiced by Neil deGrasse Tyson can also take people out of the story fairly quickly.
    • Also, the protagonist in question has a name that's pronounced "aah-dum". You'd be forgiven for assuming it's spelled like the Biblical character Adam, which is on-the-nose enough for some, but no — it's Atom, like the unit of matter.
    • The album's execution of its concept is anything but subtle, and while this works to its detriment or benefit depending on who's listening, it can come across like Logic repeatedly saying "Can't we all just get along?" for 71 minutes straight.
    • "Killing Spree" spending eight bars looping the exact same line ("Everybody looking for the meaning of life through a cellphone screen").
    • "1-800", for its surface-level approach to suicide and mental illness and/or its inappropriately cheery ad-lib, “Who can relate? WHOO!” Todd in the Shadows made the song a dishonorable mention for his "worst of 2017" list just for the ad-lib.
    • The impact of "1-800" being retroactively weakened with several lyrics Logic put out since that many have criticized as trivializing the same subject of suicide he wanted to spread awareness for. Aside from his reference of suicide doors and being "too alive" on "Keanu Reeves" and his "1-800, then I kill the pussy, who can relate?" line from French Montana's "Twisted", Juicy J ends "Ink Blot" — which is three tracks before "1-800" — by telling the listener repeatedly to kill themselves.
    • See Ending Fatigue above.
  • Bobby Tarantino II:
    • Although Logic is a big fan of Rick and Morty (even getting to cameo As Himself in an episode), the reputation the show has for its fanbase has seemed to amplify the narm people get out of seeing it referenced. Therefore, when the mixtape starts with an entire skit featuring the two characters singing Logic's praises with Justin Roiland personally recruited to voice them, this response was inevitable.
    • The mixtape also ends with the generally-regarded-as-phoned-in pop track "Everyday", a collaboration with Marshmello of all people.
  • His verse on Royce da 5'9"'s remix of "Caterpillar", with which he takes up most of his time complaining about the biracial situation, with it coming out of nowhere and leading into an excruciatingly in-depth tangent.
  • Supermarket:
    • The album contains some routinely ridiculed lyrics, including a reference to Radiohead ("I feel like Thom, I feel like I'm a fucking creep") and the line, "Get litty, get gritty; Rick Sanchez, get schwifty!"
    • Among the album's more conspicuous influences, "Lemon Drop" being a Red Hot Chili Peppers pastiche, down to Logic performing his vocals with an Anthony Kiedis impression, was not something that the Internet was going to let slide.
  • Confessions:
    • "Homicide" got heat from those disillusioned with the borderline-fanatical support of "fast rap"/"real hip-hop" in opposition to "mumble rap" jokingly treating Logic and featured artist Eminem as a Dream Team, and for the song's intro skit between Logic and his dad:
      Logic's dad: Son, you know why you the greatest alive?
      Logic: Why, Dad?
      Logic's dad: Because you came out of my balls, nigga.
    • The section of "clickbait" wherein he hits back against people calling him homophobic, which ends with him saying, "I’d suck a dick just to prove it ain’t that way." While it's formatted in the song so that people who quote that and mock him for it are actually falling for his bait, there's no denying it's still ridiculous.
    • When he compares himself to Michael Jackson in "COMMANDO", he decides to go the extra mile and add a "hee-hee" ad-lib.
    • On "Pardon My Ego", he says that Kid Cudi and Kanye West make him wish he was "crazy" for their heightened levels of creativity and genius, as if they aren't optional silver linings of mental illnesses. For good measure a couple of lines later, he offers one of hip-hop's sparing requests for a rapper's haters to suck his penis instead of his dick.
    • The "I ain't playing games 'less we talking Fortnite" line from "Keanu Reeves" made the rounds online, mainly for the amount of time for the reference to get dated that had passed between the song existing as a snippet and being officially released.
    • "Don't Be Afraid to Be Different". Even before pressing play, the irony of such a song title appearing on a highly commercial-sounding trap album was not lost on many, but then Will Smith's feature somehow raises the album's Fortnite reference total to two with his mention of the Carlton dance being an in-game taunt. The song also contains Logic saying "I don't give a damn 'bout lyrics" (right after a Dr. Seuss bar, no less). While it was in the context of appreciating the vibe and energy of the track over the lyricism, it was pretty inevitable for the line to be shared en masse on the Internet among people who essentially agreed with him or compared the lyric to the Under Pressure intro lyrics in Harsher in Hindsight above to a "How the Mighty Have Fallen" effect.
    • Logic's revelation on Twitter in 2022 that the entire album was reportedly meant as a satirical social experiment, made to be deliberately controversial in order to get people talking, as well as his further statement that due it being his biggest album numbers-wise, the experiment was a success and he "won". Both his claims and his attitude about them did little to sway those not in favor of the album for all of the reasons that Parody Retcons typically fail to go over well, but of additional note was his misspelling the word "satirical" as "satyrical", which got people talking all on its own.
• Never Live It Down: He's arguably most known to the online hip-hop community as "the biracial guy", and in smaller circles, he's still known for the controversies surrounding some of his songs' instrumentals taking conspicuous inspiration from fellow rappers' songs (ex: Kendrick Lamar's "Sing About Me..." for "Metropolis," Travis Scott's "Backyard" for "Stainless," Kanye West's "Amazing" and "Flashing Lights" for "Contact" and "City of Stars").
• One-Scene Wonder: Upon the release of College Park, "Self Medication" became one of the album's most talked-about songs due to Seth MacFarlane's feature on the song, where he sings in a manner resemblant of Frank Sinatra (a long-time muse of Logic) to an almost eerie degree. (He trained with Sinatra's vocal teachers for 10 years, so the comparison is not unfounded.) It became a refrain among fans online to express how stunned they were at MacFarlane's performance, and many further stated that not only was MacFarlane under-utilized on the song, but his feature was proof that he may have genuinely missed his calling by not pursuing a professional singing career, while others more familiar with his singing weren't as surprised.
• Seasonal Rot: The general consensus around his works began declining from the mid-to-late 2010s with each subsequent output, bottoming out with the near-unanimous savaging of Supermarket and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind among fans and critics. The main areas of criticism were his lyricism going down the drain and dedicating more time to superficial, "corny" bars than the witty and introspective bars he was known for. Not helping is the fact that the former style constantly relied on obnoxious braggadocio and hopping in on memes and pop-cultural references that have long died out.
• Signature Song: In case you couldn’t tell, “1-800-273-8255”, at least in the mainstream.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: No Pressure was considered by critics and fans as not only a massive improvement to Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, but his best album since Under Pressure, as he greatly emphasized returning to the lyrical basics that got him this far to begin with.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Logic got some flak around the mid-2010s, when he first began putting out albums, as many believed that several of his songs so closely resembled songs from other rappers that it bordered on plagiarism. Popular examples were "Metropolis" lifting the exact drum sample of Kendrick Lamar's "Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst", "Contact" having tribal drums quite analogous to Kanye West's "Amazing", the first part of "City of Stars" having the same type of beat as West's "Flashing Lights", "Stainless" having similar instrumentation to Travis Scott's "Backyard", and "I Am the Greatest" flipping a sample in a similar way as Oddisee's "Tangible Dream".
• Tear Jerker:
  • The entire depiction of Logic's poor home life throughout Under Pressure is quite grim.
    • "Growing Pains III" starts with an illustration of the violence and crime he saw regularly, but gets extra sad when it segues into how he'd watch TV shows with happy families and pretend that he was a part of them to distance himself from his current situation. Then there's how it ends...
      "I’m able to set the table
      'Till I snap out the fable when that TV turn off
      And I realize I’m back in hell."
  • “1-800”, if you’ve felt that way or lost someone to suicide.
• Win Back the Crowd: After Supermarket and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind alienated his long-time fans and critics, his final album No Pressure was released to critical acclaim by critics and fans alike, as many considered it a good send-off to his career.