Our Fallen Hero

As if 2020 couldn’t get worse, this week came as a huge blow to all those who, to any extent, would consider themselves a true fan of hip hop. Logic, a.k.a. Bobby Tarantino, the curator of one of the most monumental songs of the decade, 1-800-273-8255, has announced his retirement from the rap game. His choice to move his focus from rapping to being a father is, without a doubt, nothing less than virtuous, yet a truly saddening moment for the hip hop community. Nothing rings truer now than Lil Wayne’s famous and eloquently written line, “I hate to see [him] go, but I love to watch [him] leave.“ The natural response in this situation is to grieve in devastation, but I’d like to spend this time in a more productive way by discussing Logic’s influence on me, the music industry as a whole, and the world.

I want to start off by shouting out the first song that ever put Logic on my radar. Back in 2015, Logic dropped a song on Youtube - before the era of streaming - called Numbers. I recently went back to this song in an effort to relive those better days, before a global pandemic, before Kanye was poisoned by the Kardashian Kurse, before we had to watch our heroes fall… and boy, did it bring back some memories. Upon hearing this song, you will likely notice that this song gives eerily similar vibes to the song Headlines by Drake. In fact, Logic copied Drake’s entire flow! And let’s make sure to recall that this was a time when Drake could still be considered a good rapper, and he was indeed among the best ever. So if we can appreciate that fact, then we should also appreciate that Logic, playing a 4-dimensional chess move, emulated the hottest rapper in the game in order to jump-start his own career.

Another YouTube video that sticks out to me when I think about Logic is one simply named “Logic - Live On The Air“. As the name suggests, Logic goes on a 2011 (!!!) radio show and spits bar after bar, all straight off the dome, for more than two and a half minutes. Watching the video, you’ll notice that Logic has no phone, and is running on all vibes. Truly a testament to the man’s brain, you can tell that it really is a freestyle in its rawest form, and of the most “lyrical miracle spiritual individual criminal subliminal” nature. The energy in this freestyle is unmatched, as you’ll notice from the show host sitting across from Logic’s own reaction - in fact, you’ll probably find yourself having the exact same reactions as the host when you hear lines such as “you say po-tay-toe, I say po-tah-toe“, “I thought I told y’all I’m the best, d-d-did I stutter“, and “and when I eat pussy, I pretend that I’m speakin’ in Islam“. And as if to manifest it for himself, Logic raps “my future’s lookin’ XXL, they shit is medium,“ and within 2 years of this video dropping, Logic found himself on the front cover of XXL’s 2013 Freshman List.

Fast forward several years to August 2017, and Logic is a well-established name in the rap industry, with 5 mixtapes, 3 albums, and numerous chart-topping tracks under his belt. This particular summer, Logic made a ground-shaking and game-changing move by dropping his song 1-800-273-8255, or 1-800 for short, complemented with an incredibly emotional music video. Before getting into the song itself, I should let you know that this particular summer was an important one for me, as it was the last summer I would spend as a college student, right before entering my senior year, and was the beginning of the end times when I began to realize nothing in the world is good… except for Logic, of course.

1-800 is a song about sadness, negative thoughts about suicide, and growth. You may ask yourself, is 1-800-273-8255 even a real phone number, or is it a joke like Soulja Boy’s “678-999-8212“? In fact, 1-800-273-8255 is the phone number for the National Suicide Hotline. That may come as a shock to you because, of course, suicide is definitely negative vibes. But, in following the nature of this post as a whole, I want to focus on the positive. Logic did something inspirational: by making a song about suicide, he actually single-handedly normalized the conversation around it, which is especially special when you remind yourself that suicide was an extremely taboo subject according to modern society’s norms - but only up until this point.

In the song, Logic tells the story of a young man who hasn’t felt like himself lately. He alludes to this in the song’s introductory pre-chorus, and gets right down to the point in the chorus following that, where he exclaims “I don’t wanna be alive, I don’t wanna be alive, I just wanna die today, I just wanna die.“ However, over the course of the song, Logic does something magical and ties it all back into the chorus, the last of which in this song contains lines that are recited very similarly to those mentioned above, but instead replaces the expressions of wanting to die with lines such as “I finally wanna be alive“ and “I don’t wanna die today“. This extremely subtle yet important artistic choice executed by Logic to show that all it takes is a few minutes of music - 4 minutes and 10 seconds, to be precise - to grow past your suicidal thoughts, is just another illustration of his mastery of the craft.

One part of the song that struck a chord within me as well as within my close friend-group in our last year of college is when Logic sings “It feel like my life ain’t mine (Who can relate? Woo!)“. The importance of the bolded ad-lib-like portion at the end of this line is difficult to put in words, but I will do my best. Firstly, in a general sense and to the average consumer of this song, Logic includes this beautiful moment to emphasize that suicidal thoughts can truly happen to anyone - almost anyone can relate. Furthermore, the way he sings it creates an experience for a listener that simulates the experience of hearing Logic live at a concert, where one can imagine Logic singing “Who can relate?”, pointing the mic at the crowd, and the crowd reciprocating by singing “Woo!” back to him.

But now let’s get to the nitty-gritty - my personal relationship with “Who can relate? Woo!”. This particular part of the song is what had it on me and my friends Dan and Dan’s heads constantly. Every day after this song released for the entirety of the rest of our senior year of college, our waking thought every morning was “Who can relate? Woo!”, and our last thought before passing into sleep every night was “Who can relate? Woo!”. In fact, we found ourselves communicating this line as a message telepathically, where one of us would simply think the words “who can relate?” and one of the others in the group of Dans would think “woo!” back, and the three of us could hear the song in our heads at the same time. Next thing we knew, we would end up in the sinkhole that was my college apartment, discussing the intricacies of Logic’s art over nothing less than the finest wines and liquors, or perhaps even a few cans of Keystone Light.

Naturally, I could go on and on about how important this song is to me, but I will leave it at this point for you, so that you can continue the rest of your journey through Logic’s discography on your own, with me only as a guiding light. Before concluding my thoughts on Logic, I’d like to address one more thing about 1-800, that being its effect on the world now, or as one could refer to the modern age of music, the post-1-800 era. Three years now after its release, the song has accumulated almost 400 million views on Youtube, and most certainly spans farther than just the United States. If aliens exist, then they most definitely know of this song. If there’s only one thing aliens know about humans, it’s this song. Its reach has even gone as far as to cross the Atlantic Ocean to land in the lap of Moroccan rapper French Montana, who in the song Twisted, recruited Logic to make a self-reference to 1-800 through the line “1-800, then I kill the pussy, who can relate?”.

If there was one thing you took away from this post, then I hope it’s that after reading Logic’s self-referencing line above just now, you instinctively replied in you head,

“(Woo!)”