Before receiving Grammy nominations or plaques for his musical efforts, Logic was a budding hip hop star with a small but dedicated fanbase. Back in 2016, the rapper released his Bobby Tarantino mixtape which included an album highlight with "Super Mario World." The rapper later went to shoot a music video for the song but it looks like he's now facing some issues for how he went about it. Apparently, the rapper pretended to be a high school student in order to skip paying shooting location fees on a historical non-profit ship.
Logic and his team are being accused of pretending to be high school students in order to avoid paying a shooting location fee on the 90-year-old Mary A. Whalen for the "Super Mario World" video, IndieWire reports. Carolina Salguero, the president and founder of New York based PostSide that operates the ship, says Logic and his team pretended to be high school students to shoot the video. Salguero often lets high school students to use the ship for their projects for free. Logic and his team claimed to be doing a "summer school project." Salguero later agreed to let them shoot on the ship for free if they supplied a copy and properly credited those in the video. At the end of the video, the man in the Mario suit actually claimed to be shooting his scene for a project, which Salguero says wasn't staged.
"I looked at Logic; he’s so scrawny, I mistook for him a high school student,” she told IndieWire. “I thought the videographer [Justin Fleischer] was his dad, graying hair at the temples, and his friend was dressed in the [beat-up] Super Mario costume—I was busy and trusted I was helping high school students.”
They later came to a verbal agreement about this which was later confirmed through e-mail with videographer Justin Fleischer. However, she only learned that he wasn't a high school student after the video was released online and she discovered he was a famous rapper. Later on, she requested they donate $5K to PortSide which is roughly estimated as the same amount it would've costed them for a half-day of shooting on the ship. However, the donated funds would go towards programs for disadvantaged youth.
One of Logic's managers, Harrison Remlar of The Visionary Team, was reportedly in contact with Salguero in December 2016. He reportedly told her, "UMG Def Jam, Logic’s label handles all budgets for his video shoot and we can revisit a cost in the new year. Their offices are closed until early January. We are confident we can get some funds your way." However, she's yet to see any compensation.
