Skip to main content
Eddie Rockerz VibeZ - curated playlists, mixes and music commentary

Dig the crates

Every playlist on the blog, sorted by where it takes you.

Browse all 600+ VibeZ

DJ Mixes & Series

The house sets, the Producer Series and the running volumes.

Show all 16Show fewer

Logic VibeZ

Logic is one of the most technically capable rappers of his generation and one of the most divisive, and both of those facts are on display across these twenty-four tracks.

Maryland, the mixtape grind, and the weight of sincerity

Sir Robert Bryson Hall II, from Gaithersburg, Maryland, built his following the mixtape way — the Young Sinatra series established him as a technician with a reverence for 1990s boom-bap, and by the time he signed with Def Jam he had an audience that felt personally invested.

What has always defined him, for better and worse, is earnestness. Logic raps about his biracial identity, his family's addiction, his own anxiety and his listeners' mental health with a directness that leaves no room for cool detachment. Critics have often found it heavy-handed. His audience has found it life-saving, and in at least one documented case, literally so.

What to listen for

"1-800-273-8255" — titled for the then-number of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, with Alessia Cara and Khalid — is the record that defines him. Researchers later published findings associating its release and his performances of it with a measurable increase in calls to the line and a decrease in suicides during that period. Very few pop records can point to anything like that.

For the pure technique, go to "44 Bars," "44ever" and "Homicide" with Eminem — the last being a straightforward display of two rappers trying to out-rap each other over five minutes, which is either exhilarating or exhausting depending on your temperament.

The Everybody material — "Everybody," "Black SpiderMan"-era work, "Take It Back" — is where the identity writing is most explicit. "Dark Place" and "Lost In Translation" handle the anxiety.

Lighter moments exist: "Super Mario World" and "Teleport" show a rapper enjoying himself. "Innerstellar" with Lucy Rose and "Peace Love & Positivity" are the softest landings.

Twenty-four tracks. Bring your own opinion; you will have one either way.

Go deeper

Under Pressure (2014) is the album most listeners agree is his best — tighter, less didactic, and the one where the technique and the emotional content are properly balanced. The Young Sinatra mixtapes are for the purists.

His memoir This Bright Future is unusually candid about the family history the records circle around, and reading it changes how the songs land.

For the lane he came from: Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole are the obvious contemporaries, and the comparison is not always kind to Logic — but Nas and Big Pun are the technical ancestors he is actually reaching for. If you want the earnest-rapper tradition done at its highest level, Lupe Fiasco's The Cool is the record.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more

De La Soul VibeZ (R.I.P Trugoy the Dove)

Trugoy the Dove died in February 2023, weeks before De La Soul's catalogue finally reached streaming after a fifteen-year legal deadlock. Thirty-one tracks, and a difficult kind of timing. Rest in peace, Dave David Jude Jolicoeur — Trugoy the Dove, later just Dave — formed De La Soul in Amityville, Long Island with Posdnuos and Maseo. Their 1989 debut 3 Feet High and Rising , produced with Prince Paul , remains one of the most inventive records in the history of the genre: dense with samples from Steely Dan to Johnny Cash to French language instruction tapes, funny, formally strange, and entirely uninterested in the postures rap was expected to strike. The consequence of that invention was a curse. The sample clearance landscape changed after Gilbert O'Sullivan sued Biz Markie in 1991, and De La Soul's early catalogue — built on hundreds of uncleared fragments — became legally impossible to license. For roughly fifteen years, their most important a...
Post a Comment
Read more