Bustown Logic: illogic

During the second ground swell of underground rap towards the end of the last millennium, Illogic made space (everyone said grace) amongst the crowd with his thoughtful, but not difficult raps alongside the production of Columbus superman Blueprint. The pair has worked together on a frequent basis, with Illogic releasing all of his proper albums on Blueprint’s Weightless Recordings. But with Blueprint more and more frequently being called away for work on a number of other projects, Illogic has sought others to work with – but that’s getting ahead of the rest of his tale.

My understanding of Illogic comes through the guise of my few years in South Eastern Ohio, where while attending school, I became inundated with the flurry of West Coast rap that was bubbling up in the likes of J5 and Dilated Peoples. But as with every locale, there’s some minute local scene – and Illogic was part of the one nearest me. Finding his albums and sharing the pretty solid pair of his initial discs (both Unforeseen Shadows and Got Lyrics) with folks around town allowed me to assume a sort of librarian stature – I was the keep of that good shit.

By 2003 with Write to Death, Volume One and the following Celestial Clockwork, I simply lost interest. It wasn’t due to a dramatic fall off in quality, but simply just the glut of hip hop records I found myself drowning in. When Illogic basically resurfaced – or at least started rearing his head on the interwebs – within the last year or so with One Bar Left, my expectations remained high. Unfortunately, that EP didn’t quite meet those lofty guesses as to what would come next.

But to write of a performer because of few releases that weren’t exactly up to snuff doesn’t seem fair. So the impending Diabolical Fun could either be a remarkable return to previous heights, or a continuation of so-so rap feats. There hasn’t been a lot leaked as of yet, but a few tracks have made it out.

“I Know You” covers the travails of orphaned kids. Illogic relates the path from abandonment to alcoholism in rather stark terms. There’s a female and male character that, pretty quickly after the track begins, listeners can figure how they end up together. It’s an uncharacteristically un-astute foray into story telling. Granted, not every lyric can be a poem and not every poem can be a polemical rant on the current state of the United States. But while this one track, lack luster as it might be, is buoyed by some intrepid ’70’s soul production, it surely can’t demarcate the end to a career that began a decade ago.

To have chosen a track such as this to basically advertise a new release either points to the over all jive of the disc or the fact that Illogic wasn’t really in control of this track – it was posted by the producer Ill Poetic after all. So, perhaps in that latter’s mind, that soulful throwback sound was enough to get the track over. That’s just not the case.