This book. Man, this book. I went into this a bit curious, but not really expecting much. For those of you who don’t know, Bobby Hall is also known as Logic, one of the most successful, influential and respected rap artists of past couple of decades. He’s known for his lyrical skills and being a proponent of peace and acceptance. He is also known for having a childhood that was traumatic and difficult. He had two parents who were both addicts, and the cornerstone experiences of his childhood were neglect and abuse. His father was never really around, and when he was could be violent and prone to bravado and lying. His mother, who was the parent he actually lived with for most of his childhood, was, in his words, broken. She struggled with bi-polar disorder, was unable to find any kind of balance either in her mind or her life, and completely incapable of providing a stable environment for a kid. To further complicate matters, Hall has a Black father and a white mother. And his mother was prone to racism (including directly against him), despite having multiple children with different Black men.
Hall managed to find ways to handle his difficult circumstances. He was resilient and had the ability to love his mother despite her flaws, and to find places and people outside of his family who were better able to provide stability he lacked at home. He finally dropped out of high school, worked two jobs to support himself, and dreamt of making a career for himself in hip hop. His success would be remarkable under any circumstances, but for him to come through the childhood he had and for it to have left him with a strength of character, sense of self and powerful drive to work hard and grab every opportunity seems nearly impossible.
I knew some of this in broad strokes before reading the book, as he’s been very open in sharing the difficult circumstances of his childhood. I only just found out about this book, and since Logic recently came out of retirement and has just released a couple of new tracks, I figured sure, I’ll give it a go. I was curious to know more about his childhood experiences and how he’s dealt with the trauma from it, but was fully prepared to abandon it if the writing wasn’t that good.
I did not abandon it. I already knew Hall was smart. I knew he had a way with words. I knew he was able to evoke incredible imagery in his music. But I didn’t expect him to keep that up for the length of a book. I also didn’t expect him to recount horrific details about his childhood back to back with deep insight and a lot of humour. His ability to understand his mother’s challenges and to retain a sense of himself as separate from what he went through comes through on every page of this book.
Not only is this a fast-paced, raw, shocking and yet somehow hopeful narrative, but it’s also one I connected to so much. Hall and his mother were a family of two. Husbands and other family members came and went, but he and his mom were constant, for better or (mostly) worse. They were intricately connected, and when he was a child, she was his whole world. Hall’s mother’s mental health issues meant that she was different people on different days and prone to intense angry outbursts. She’d lose it over the phone or in the grocery store – or, often, at him. Her yelling was the soundtrack to his childhood, and it is terrifying. He includes a recording of one of her outbursts on the audiobook and listening to it is really hard. Living with it? I don’t know how he did it. He had to learn to separate out who his mother was from her mental illness, to learn to love the person who was trapped deep inside a volatile exterior. He talks about how she had these wonderful moments, and shares some of the things she did teach him. She taught him to look for answers to his questions, which he has carried into life as an ability to search out information he needs and as a love of learning. She taught him how to memorize text, and he still uses the same strategy to memorize his rhymes to this day. She was artistic, funny, creative and loved to dance and sing. The good memories he has of her – though they are few – are beautiful. He clearly loves her despite who she was because of her mental illness and trauma, and he understands the delineation between the two.
My childhood was nothing like what he had to deal with. And yet I could see some small similarities. The quick switches between things being okay and out of control. The good times that were fantastic but that were always temporary, and the feeling of waiting. Always waiting for that switch to flip again, because it always did. He talks about the anxiety he had later in life, and I can relate to that, and in my case I think it’s largely come from the constant feeling of waiting for that shift to come, fearing it, and then dealing with it. The ground can’t be firm beneath your feet when you’re constantly waiting for the next explosion. You learn to live life in the in betweens, and to never get too comfortable. This can be made extra confusing when there are great memories of an amazing person who loves you. Which almost makes it harder, because teasing out how someone could be both the rock at the centre of your world and the person you trust to love you no matter what, and at the same time a figure of terror and fear is really difficult to reconcile.
He talks about his understanding of her and of what it was like for her. That however hard it was for him, he knows how much harder it must have been for her. That insight takes years to really come to terms with, and it’s such a hard one to resign yourself to. When you love someone who is broken, damaged or at the mercy of uncontrollable internal turmoil, it’s terrifying to watch and impossible to fix. This quote really captures what that’s like:
“My mom did have good qualities. […] Those windows of normalcy did happen, but they were rare and they’d last for maybe fifteen minutes, maybe an afternoon tops. It was like on a cloudy day when the sun breaks through for a second and it feels amazing and you bask in it but then just as quickly another cloud comes along and it’s windy and gray again. That’s what the good moments with my mom were like. They were these glimpses into the person she might have been if the illness hadn’t taken hold of her.
If spending hours listening to a woman scream at doctors on the telephone qualifies a ten-year-old boy to render a mental health diagnosis, I’d say my mom was definitely bi-polar, of that much I’m sure. But whether she was actually a borderline personality or schizophrenic or whatever, I have no idea. All I know for sure is my mom was the crazy woman screaming in the middle of the supermarket. She was a broken person. She screamed, she cried, she laughed, she slept until two in the afternoon. She had issues.
It’s sad to reflect on now, this woman with all this talent and who she might have been but for all the abuse she suffered and the problems she had. It was sad to see her dance these amazing dances but then collapse because her back was seizing up or she was hacking and wheezing and about to pass out because of her COPD, the chronic obstructive pulmonary disease she had from all the chain-smoking and the drugs and everything else.
Because as traumatic as it was for me to live with her, I can only imagine what it was like for her to live with herself. Because we all have brains that are a little fucked up. We all have demons. We all have those dark, intrusive thoughts that pop into our heads, the voices that say scary, fucked up things. We hear ourselves and we’re like, “How in the hell did that thought even come into my head?” But someone who’s sick the way my mother was sick is held captive by those voices, by this other side of themselves. Eventually, they succumb, and those dark, disturbing voices become the only ones they can hear.” p. 60-61
There are a few other things that he points out that resonated with me in regards to what it’s like to grow up with a primary caregiver who has some past trauma or mental health or emotional issues. The first is that when you’re a kid, whatever your life is like is what normal looks like to you. You don’t know to question it, and you don’t know that there’s any other way to live. The second is that you don’t have any options even if you did know that. You can’t leave, because if you’re cut off from family, you have nowhere to go. And it wouldn’t occur to you to leave, anyway, because that’s just life. There’s also this unspoken loyalty that’s really hard to betray by telling anyone what’s going on. And the third is that you love the person who is causing you pain. Because you’re wired to love them, because they’re your family – your father, your mother, your grandparent. So even when they’ve lost it at you and terrified you and made you feel like the world is breaking around you, when they tearfully hug you afterwards and say how sorry they are and how much they love you, you hug them back and say it’s okay. You just do.
There are so many layers to this book, but what really struck me is that all these difficult and horrible things are being recounted with complete calm. Hall has an uncanny ability to truly step outside of the story he’s telling, to then look at it from all sides and recount everything he sees. He doesn’t see himself as broken, nor does he see himself as extraordinary in these pages. He often reflects that he doesn’t know what piece of him kept him believing in the good in the world. What it was that made him stop before doing things that would have set him on a different path, even when literally everyone around him was already walking it. There was just something inside of him that made him draw lines he wouldn’t cross, and to push himself out of his childhood and into a future that was, thanks to whatever that spark inside him was, bright. I’m grateful that he shared this story, because I think there are a lot of people out there who will see parts of their own story in these pages. A lot of young people in particular who maybe need to hear what he has to say. And it offers a lot of real insight into what it’s like to live with (or be) someone with a serious mental health issue like his mother. I picked it up on a whim, but this is, so far, my favourite book of the year. It’s definitely worth reading, regardless of whether you’re a fan of Hall’s music or even know who he is (though I do recommend listening to some of his music if you haven’t – All I Do, Fade Away [this is a live version that I love], 1-800-273-8255 and Dad Bod are some of my current faves, but there are a lot of other great ones). It’s a well written, powerful memoir, and it offers up a story I’ve never heard before. Also, the audiobook is read by Hall, and it’s bloody fantastic.
An explosive memoir from Bobby Hall, the multiplatinum recording artist known as Logic and the #1 bestselling author of Supermarket.
This Bright Future is a raw and unfiltered journey into the life and mind of Bobby Hall, who emerged from the wreckage of a horrifically abusive childhood to become an era-defining artist of our tumultuous age.
A self-described orphan with parents, Bobby Hall began life as Sir Robert Bryson Hall II, the only child of an alcoholic, mentally ill mother on welfare and an absent, crack-addicted father. After enduring seventeen years of abuse and neglect, Bobby ran away from home and—with nothing more than a discarded laptop and a ninth-grade education—he found his voice in the world of hip-hop and a new home in a place he never expected: the untamed and uncharted wilderness of the social media age.
In the message boards and livestreams of this brave new world, Bobby became Logic, transforming a childhood of violence, anger, and trauma into music that spread a resilient message of peace, love, and positivity. His songs would touch the lives of millions, taking him to dizzying heights of success, where the wounds of his childhood and the perils of Internet fame would nearly be his undoing.
A landmark achievement in an already remarkable career, This Bright Future looks back on Bobby’s extraordinary life with lacerating humor and fearless honesty. Heart-wrenching yet ultimately uplifting, this book completes the incredible true story and transformation of a human being who, against all odds, refused to be broken. – Goodreads
Book Title: This Bright Future
Author: Bobby Hall
Series: No
Edition: Audiobook
Published By: Audible/Simon Schuster
Released: September 7, 2021
Genre: Non-Fiction, Mental Illness, Memoir, Family, Trauma
Pages: 384
Date Read: June 9-, 2022
Rating: 9.5/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 4.45/5 (804 ratings)