Confessions from West Deer Park
Logic found hip-hop through a film soundtrack—the RZA’s work on Kill Bill—which is a beautiful origin story for a genre usually defined by neighborhood and lineage and hard inheritance. From there he built the kind of influences list that signals serious intent: Wu-Tang Clan, The Roots, A Tribe Called Quest, Nas, but also RHCP, Miles Davis, Frank Sinatra. The range tells you something about how he processes music—not as genre but as feeling.
His background is brutal in the particular way American poverty is brutal: a crack- and cocaine-addicted father who left early and cut all contact, an alcoholic mother overwhelmed by her own addiction, an older brother who ran with a gang and dealt drugs. He grew up in West Deer Park, a rough pocket of Gaithersburg, Maryland, dropped out of high school in tenth grade after chronic absences got him expelled, and used the sudden free time to make music. Which is a euphemism for: music was the only door he could find, and he kicked it open.
His debut album Under Pressure—his real name is Sir Robert Bryson Hall II, if you want the full formality—hit number four on the Billboard charts, arrived with co-signs from Big Sean and Childish Gambino, and got declared best hip-hop album of 2014 by iTunes, MTV, and the Huffington Post more or less simultaneously. All while being genuinely autobiographical in a way that major-label hip-hop rarely allows. The RATTPACK fanbase he built around it has a cultish intensity that makes complete sense once you understand what he’s actually rapping about.
The video for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is something else entirely. After the earthbound autobiography of Under Pressure, this one points upward—out at the planet, out at humanity viewed from a distance. The visual language is expansive in a way that matches the scope of what he’s trying to say. I’ve watched it several times now and I’m still not sure I’ve caught everything in it.