Wiz Khalifa and Logic Announce Co-Headlining Vinyl Verse Tour
Logic
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Logic Announces That He’s Working On A New Album Called ‘Vinyl Days’
Logic’s last album arrived in 2020 with No Pressure, a project that was billed as his last album after he announced his plans to retire from hip-hop. That retirement was quite short as Logic returned with new music the following year. Over the course of 2021, he released a collection of singles like “Tired In Malibu,” “No Vaccine,” and “My Way.” He also released three songs with Madlib as the rapper-producer duo MadGic. With that being said, it was safe to say that Logic is back in action, and for his first move in 2022, the rapper returned with an announcement for those hoping for more music this year.
In a post to Instagram, Logic shared what he’s been working on so far this year. “I’m working on a new album called Vinyl Days,” he captioned the video. The post itself captures Logic working on a beat. “This is JAY-Z‘s microphone,” he says to start the video as he removes the microphone from its case. “No I.D. gave it to me.” Logic then begins recording sound effects with his mouth before adding them to a beat as it plays. His longtime producer 6ix also joins him in the video.
Logic also shared a snippet of the title track from “Vinyl Days” in a later post. “From dawn to dusk,” Logic raps to begin the snippet. “Hit the homie Mac Demarco like, ‘What up, my man?’/ I need some raw sh*t.” It remains to be seen when Logic will release Vinyl Days, but based on the snippet, the project seems to hold a sound that’s similar to his early Young Sinatra mixtapes.
You can view Logic’s posts about Vinyl Days in the videos above.
A New Study Finds That Logic’s ‘1-800-273-8255’ Actually May Have Prevented Suicides
For as much flak as Logic took — and probably still takes — for his earnest 2017 suicide prevention anthem “1-800-273-8255,” it turns out that the song was actually pretty effective in its stated purpose, according to a study in The BMJ (British Medical Journal). While correlation by no means equals causation, the study found that during three key periods of the song’s popularity, suicide rates among 10- to 19-year-olds in the US dropped by 5.5 percent. A corresponding model of the same time periods in different years shows that this comes out to about 245 fewer suicides.
The three periods examined included the first 34 days after the song’s release, after Logic’s 2017 MTV VMAs performance, and after his 2018 Grammy Awards performance. The study also found that the number of calls made to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, from which the song takes its title, rose by 6.9 percent, or 9,915 more calls than usual — something that was reported previously but bears repeating.
The study’s author, Thomas Niederkrotenthaler, an associate professor in the department of social and preventive medicine at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, told CNN, “Celebrities but also non-celebrities can have an important role in suicide prevention if they communicate about how they have coped with crisis situations and suicidal ideation.” Meanwhile, Logic himself seemed pretty enthused about the analysis, saying, “To know that my music was actually affecting people’s lives, truly, that’s what inspired me to make the song. We did it from a really warm place in our hearts to try to help people. And the fact that it actually did — that blows my mind.”
Lil Wayne And ASAP Ferg Offer A Lyrical Assist To Logic On The Trunk-Thumping ‘Perfect’ Remix
All of Logic’s time hanging around with Juicy J is clearly rubbing off on him if the beat from his newly released “Perfect” remix is any indication. Featuring a trunk-thumping, throwback Memphis beat, the percussion-forward production wouldn’t have been out-of-place in the Birthplace of Rock ‘n’ Roll during the cassette tape era. Naturally, that makes ASAP Ferg, a fellow adherent of the OG crunk sound, a perfect feature along with Lil Wayne, who can and will rap over anything and everything (check out his verse on Run The Jewels’ “Ooh La La” remix, as well).
The track is part of Logic’s unexpected but not entirely surprising comeback, which arguably started in January with the Doctor Destruction project. Logic’s “new artist” fooled absolutely no one with the voice-changing tech the project employed to disguise Bobby Bullet’s distinctive, dulcet tones, and sneaking an MF DOOM poster onto the cover art was probably a dead giveaway, as well (DOOM was well-known for his vast array of alter egos). Logic followed that up with a duo release alongside longtime DOOM collaborator Madlib as MadGic (kinda catchy, right?), then straight-up dropped a Michael Jordan homage to announce what everybody already knew.
And although he helped proved that rappers are really bad at retiring, he did use the downtime productively, finishing up his memoir, which details the effects of fame on his mental health.
Listen to Logic’s “Perfect” remix with Lil Wayne and ASAP Ferg above.
Logic Reveals “Tsunami Of Hate” From “1-800-273-8255”
Maryland rapper Logic is taking time to reflect on his biggest song. The hip-hop star dished out on backlash he got from taking the stage with hit track “1-800-273-8255”. Logic Reveals “Tsunami Of Hate” From “1-800-273-8255” In new book and memoir “The Bright Future,” Logic says he dealt with a “tsunami of hate” that he […]
Logic Reflects On The Backlash Against ‘1-800-273-8255’ In His Upcoming Memoir
Logic, who recently returned to rap after retiring to become a professional gamer, is set to release his second book next week, a memoir titled The Bright Future. Today, GQ published an excerpt from the upcoming tome, a chapter in which Logic addresses the impact of — and the backlash against — his suicide awareness mega-hit “1-800-273-8255.” The track, which earned him a Grammy nomination in 2017 but also resulted in what he called the “lowest point” of his life in a recent interview, was the smash hit he thought he’d been looking for his whole career. Instead, it brought him to the brink with hateful comments from both fans and peers after his record-breaking performance of the song on the 2018 MTV VMAs.
The song and I were both trending on Twitter the entire night and the entire next day. Within hours the video was getting millions of views on YouTube. Everyone was talking about it on every entertainment show, every celebrity gossip blog, everywhere. It was a life-changing moment. Ellen even invited me on Ellen, and I’d wanted to go on fucking Ellen for years. I got all the press I’d ever dreamed of. I got a hit song bigger than any hit song I’d ever even imagined I would have.
… It felt good to feel good enough. It lasted at least a good twenty- four hours or so, and that’s when I got hit with a wave of hate unlike anything I’d ever experienced in my life.
The blowback and abuse I’d experienced in the wake of the VMAs was like nothing I’d ever experienced. Everything I’d seen up to that point was mild in comparison. It was a tsunami of hate, and I couldn’t turn it off.
Or, more accurately, I couldn’t not turn it on. Nobody was making me check my phone except me, but I couldn’t put it down. It was like the fucking thing was glued in my hand. I’d wake up and check it first thing. I’d eat my morning cereal looking at it. I’d take my morning shit looking at it. Lenny would drive me to the studio and I’d be looking at it. I’d go in to record, come out for a smoke break, and look at it. It was every day, because this thing in my hand was like my home. It was where I lived, in this world of the RattPack and all my friends online. I didn’t know how not to be there. Only my home had gone from the place where I was loved to the place where I was hated. The love was all still there, of course, but I was so accustomed to it that for the most part it faded into the background. All I could see was the hate.
Logic explains that even his longtime supporters turned on him because of the sense that he was “too mainstream,” and how the resulting depression sapped his enjoyment of the tour for Everybody, the album from which the song hailed. Even among those who felt that the song helped them, the impact led to a deluge of painful revelations that Logic absorbed for the better part of a year. He notes that he even contemplated a fatal solution for himself but that prospect of becoming “a meme about how the Suicide Guy killed himself” took that option off the table.
It’s a stark look into the negative aspects of fame, how fans’ habit of dehumanizing stars for the sake of jokes and gossip has real-world impacts on the people at the center of pop culture. It’s a reminder to be kind, because you never know what someone is going through on the other side of that screen.
The Bright Future will be out 9/7 via Simon And Schuster Publishing.
Rappers Are Really Bad At Retiring
Logic is back — and we never even had a chance to miss him. Just a year removed from the declaration of his retirement, the Maryland rapper turned video game streamer (technically) bounced back last week with the release of his return mixtape, Bobby Tarantino III. Though technically, he did work out some of his itches to rhyme earlier this year with Planetory Destruction, the thinly-disguised, Kool Keith-like endeavor he dropped as Doctor Destruction, and the YS Collection Vol. 1, a collection of older songs cut from the Young Sinatra mixtape series that he was able to clear after a decade.
And look, we understand. When you have a long-lasting love for a thing that has been your whole life — literally, your job, your hobby, and your semi-living arrangement — for over a decade, it’s hard to let go. Logic is hardly the first rapper to have gone through separation anxiety upon realizing that retirement would upend his entire way of being. It was Jay-Z who first coined the bar, “Can’t leave rap alone, the game needs me,” nearly 20 years ago on “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” from his career-defining album The Blueprint. Yet, just two albums later, Jay had decided to gracefully bow out with The Black Album, only to return two years later with Kingdom Come.
Rappers, it seems, have a hard time committing to retirement in general. While they love to announce that they’re stepping away from the hustle of the rap game and hanging up their mics for good, they’re rarely able to stay on the wagon for very long. Here’s a short list of the rappers who have retired only to unretire shortly thereafter when they realized that while the game may not actually need them, they most certainly need the game.
The Game
The Compton rapper said he was done with the rap game with his 2019 album Born 2 Rap (a threat he’d already made once before), but it looks like he may have taken the title pretty literally. His manager Wack 100 recently told AllHipHop that Game’s been back in the studio working on a new album titled 30 For 30. He also dropped the single “A.I. With The Braids” in November of 2020, implying more material on the way, which would bring his total collection of projects to 30, including studio albums, mixtapes, compilations, and independent releases.
Jay-Z
The most infamous rap retiree on the list, Jay-Z famously delivered his swan song, The Black Album, in 2004, accompanying the farewell project with a massive show at Madison Square Garden, a documentary titled Fade To Black recording the creation of the album, and a press tour that saw him collecting his flowers ahead of his final curtain. However, it didn’t take long for him to feel the hunger again. After remixing a number of his songs for the Linkin Park mashup album Collision Course, Jay began popping up on other artists’ songs to find his sea legs before dropping the uneven (but still criminally underrated) Kingdom Come, garnering plenty of both fanfare and criticism, as the brevity of his retirement made it seem more like a gimmick to sell records.
Nicki Minaj
Midway through 2019, Nicki decided that she was finished with the rap game, deciding to trade in her lucrative career for the family life, despite a number of recent examples of women in music who have apparently been able to do both, such as Beyonce and Teyana Taylor. However, it took her all of a day to begin backtracking, posting on social media that she was “still right here” before making her unofficial return in February 2020 with “Yikes.” Although that song didn’t make much of a splash, she renewed her cultural ubiquity with appearances on Doja Cat’s “Say So” and Tekashi 69’s “Trollz,” and recently began teasing a new album after re-releasing her breakout mixtape Beam Me Up Scotty to DSPs for the first time.
Young Dolph
March 2020 was an eventful month for the Memphis mogul, who recanted just 15 days after making his initial retirement announcement by teasing the upcoming release of his album Rich Slave. Then, he followed up the release of his joint project with protege Key Glock, Dum And Dummer 2, with another retirement in March of this year before coming out and admitting straight up in a July interview that he can’t commit to it. “I can’t do it, real talk,” he said. “I’m the spokesperson for all of the street n****s.” His most recent release wound up dropping the same day as Logic’s own comeback, with the Paper Route Empire compilation album Paper Route Illuminati.
Meanwhile, even more rappers, from Denzel Curry to NLE Choppa to T.I., have announced their own intentions to walk away from the rap game after releasing a few more projects. T.I. is said to be working on Kill The King, his final album, while Denzel Curry said that he had three more releases planned before punching the clock for good. NLE Choppa wants to switch to selling natural health products, Chika and Noname are over the poor treatment they feel they’ve received at the hands of the industry, and even DaBaby gave himself a five-year limit — although recent events may have forced him to unwillingly accelerate those plans.
Time will tell whether any of those names manage to stick to it, or transition into other outlets for their creative faculties. But as long as rappers’ retirement announcements make headlines, it seems that they’ll keep making announcements — even if they can only stay retired for a few months at a time.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.