The Martian author Andy Weir’s 2009 short story The Egg, originally published online, is a sci-fi tale about rebirth, reciprocity, and evolution. When a man is killed in a car accident, he meets a god-like figure in limbo who tells him of his fate and that he is to be reincarnated. The man subsequently learns that not only is time an illusion, but he is the entire universe, and a continuous sequence of deaths and rebirths is all part of a maturation process: The whole universe is an egg, and when it’s fully grown it’ll ascend to the next level of consciousness.
Maryland rapper Logic’s new album, Everybody, is a strangely faithful adaptation of the short story with an emphasis on the endless cycle of reincarnations that’d eventually—hypothetically—cause everyone to be different incarnations of the same person. He weaves his own struggles with race and religion into a complex, panoramic view of humanity, seeking a unified theory of equality, not just for his mortal coil but for the cosmos. If this seems convoluted that’s because it is: Weir’s story was meant as a fanciful (albeit thoughtful) work of fiction, not an intersectional parable. “Every time you victimized someone you were victimizing yourself,” the short story goes. “Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself.” This is Everybody’s central conceit: We are all the same, and every misdeed hurts the human race equally. Logic gets even more literal in the subtext, drawing parallels between this life force balance and his mixed-race heritage. Herein, an existential crisis unfolds.
Never mind the fact that the concept is completely unoriginal, even on a superficial level; Everybody unravels Weir’s tightly coiled micro universe into a nonsensical sprawl. Give an extremely verbose rapper a heady short story and watch it come undone. It operates on a colossal scale, and yet somehow still ends up being myopic.
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, whose last major foray into rap was to wage war with flat Earth truther B.o.B, plays God on Everybody. Logic chooses to name the man in his musical adaptation “Atom,” and when he’s not rapping as Logic, he’s rapping from the perspective of a past life. These winking gestures mixing science and religion are insufferable when paired with meditations on racial inequity and social anxiety, constantly raising the stakes until they mean nothing. Not only is it easy to see the seams in this tangled ideological tapestry, they’re constantly fraying.
Logic’s Everybody is the latest in a string of recent rap releases that consider race and perception—Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN., J. Cole’s 4 Your Eyez Only, and Joey Bada$$’s All-Amerikkkan Bada$$ among them. But unlike those records, which are self-aware and mindful of their surroundings, this is nearly clueless and without subtlety. His raps, even at their most technical, are all empty loops regurgitating predictable talking points, at times mixing messages. Fake deep aphorisms (“Everybody looking for the meaning of life through a cell phone screen!”) share space with half-witted indictments of student loan policies and flex culture. He addresses mental health and wellness on “1-800-273-8255” and “Anziety,” which is admirable, but there are no real revelations or comforts to be found in either. A song like Kendrick Lamar’s “u,” for example, which really bears out the weight of depression and self-doubt, reveals Logic's takes to be entirely without substance.
For a significant portion of the album, Logic stakes a claim to his blackness with receipts, citing his great-grandfather the slave, his cousin Keisha, and saying “nigga” a few times. None of these race raps do anything meaningful. They say very little about the mechanics of racism and they say next to nothing insightful about being black in America. He spends more time denouncing rioters than killer cops on “America.” Trump gets a single bar of disapproval but Kanye gets several for meeting with him. Logic’s calls for civic action seem woefully ignorant to how oppression and white supremacy work—from the role of private prisons and redistricting to stop and frisks. To that end, not once does he consider how being white-passing could skew his perception of what it means to be black. He never even probes what it might mean when people assume that he’s white; either he refuses to engage thoughtfully here or he’s simply irresponsible. This isn’t just lazy, it’s messy. It's the #AllLivesMatter of rap albums.
Aside from its more sociopolitical shortcomings, Everybody refuses to stop and evaluate why it exists in the first place. A lot has been made of Logic’s technical skill, but it can’t really be considered proficiency if it isn’t efficient. Seconds after Killer Mike delivers an impassioned speech on anti-black tyranny (“Confess”), Logic is criticizing web activists and the social media gratification matrix with the nuance of a 4chan thread (“Killing Spree”). “Take It Back” is a six-minute song with only two minutes of raps. Several tracks have long, preachy monologues appended to them. The same verse fragments are continuously rearranged on “AfricAryaN” for no reason, and with winding effect. The song is 12-minutes long.
If you manage to get to the end of “AfricAryaN,” it pans outward to reveal a shared universe where—oh shit—the album’s contents turns out to be merely walking music for the space travelers who dictated the narrative flow on Logic’s last album, The Incredible True Story. The extra layer feels like an even greater slight to the heavy topics discussed within; the further out we venture, the further the issues get pushed into the margins. A final uncredited verse from J. Cole, who is also biracial, unravels the album’s entire cyclical concept: “I’ve been through it before/Can only share with you what I know/To be true, but at the same time, I’ll never be you/And you’ll never be me,” he raps. He seems to know what Logic doesn’t: Equality without identity is merely inactivity. The weight of our experiences shapes us. It is only once we understand why it’s okay to be different that there can be empathy—and change.
