“Rock star lifestyle might not make it…” – Gucci Mane, “Wasted”
This may be a vastly inappropriate statement, but I actively want Scott Mescudi to never stop using cocaine. One of the benefits of the drug, as compared to the marijuana he feted on debut album Man on the Moon: The End of Day is a pronounced mental acuity, a sharpness of thought that accentuates every emotion and makes highs higher, lows lower and all experienced with a hyper reality, a “really realness” that makes all expression truly intense. Kid Cudi made a very conscious decision to embrace his own popularity, and to in many ways, become a rock star in hip hop’s clothing. However, in living a lifestyle of celebrity, he became a star in the universe, a vast vacuum that sucks you in and never lets go. When days and nights don’t exist but are instead all moments trapped in a parallel universe of fame, your world view is eternally altered, and the result is this album. This is not the cocaine rap of the Clipse. This is the cocaine rap of Kid Cudi. The Clipse listened to Biggie and never got high on their own supply. Instead they sold it all to the Cleveland native Cudi, who alongside a plethora of producers from all realms explores the perils of fame and addiction with a premium on truth and honesty on an album that approaches perfection.
This album opens with the gospel bellow of Cee-Lo Green on “Scott Mescudi v. The World.” This isn’t Tupac advocating a “fuck the world” attitude, this is the battle of a man against his own sanity, aware that he has done untold damage to it, but aware that in choosing to be a rap star in 2010, there’s next to nothing he can do to escape. There is an airy helplessness to this album. Cudi, a rapper, doesn’t even really rap. When he does, on tracks like “Ashin’ Kusher,”he comes off like a XXL freshman mixtape emcee instead of a Vitamin Water sponsor and featured actor on a HBO drama. This album is intentionally underwhelming in many ways, a de-evolving portrait of the artist as a young man instead of a dope release. There are two schools of thought here. If you like Cudi as an emcee, don’t buy this album. If you are a fan of him as a person, and want to journey into the depths of his soul, or are a nerd and enjoy the place where psychology and sociology blur lines, this album will be a favorite.
Lead radio single “Erase Me” features Cudi’s mentor Kanye West outshining his student at delivering an effortlessly dop sixteen bars about the vapid nature of nightlife culture. Jim Jonsin’s heavy rock riff production is fun unobtrusive pop, the background music to another night in another Manhattan loft, champagne in the glass, lines of coke on top of the toilet, the smell of reefer wafting through the air. To many, this life would be pointless, but for Cudi, it’s all he knows. Kid Cudi’s manager and lead producer Emile guides this album beautifully. I presume this is because he was there firsthand to watch his artist’s manic descent into “Mr. Rager’s” madness. That track, with Cudi’s empty boasts about his prodigious party lifestyle of excess is a winner, as is most of Emile’s work here as an executive producer ensuring an album that is a guided and focused journey into the void.
On a pure hip hop level, the album’s finest production and track is the intensely emo and self reflective “The End.” Where most emcees do these tracks and they feel like empty songs meant to be “some emo Cudi or Wale shit,” this IS Cudi, on an album where the sounds of cocaine snorting play a prominent role, more emotionally raw than usual. Reach and DJ Syzygy, the young Chicago tandem Blended Babies, infuse this track with the same dusty, kickdrum led soul that makes fellow Chicagoan’s Kanye West’s production of “Drive Slow” an incredible success. GLC and Chip tha Ripper are two of the most underrated guest emcees in hip hop, and Nikki Wray has been extremely busy singing on hooks of excellent productions as of late, her comeback to mainstream success nearly complete.
In fact, Wray’s presence on the album outshines that of Mary J. Blige, who sounds bored on hooks here. These are not the same quality of hooks as the hooks on her own records, or those she famously did with Jay-Z. She’s here on a thematic level because she is a survivor as well, but she has been a survivor for awhile now, and gone from her voice is the truly intense pain of her struggles in the mid 90s. It’s a true shame that will likely be rectified in live performance, but if you’re going to use Mary, it has to be her epically attempting to cover an epic hook of an epic song like U2’s “One,” or, it needs to be as impact filled as “Can’t Knock the Hustle.” “Don’t Play This Song” and “These Worries” are good, but it was frankly an attempt that unfortunately fell short.
Kid Cudi is a bigger blipster than every blipster in the world combined on this album. In perpetuating the stereotype of coke and weed fueled partying and an incessant desire to lead a life of excess, this album is expected. However, Cudi pulls no punches here and is terribly honest about the degenerate path of this existence. With a retinue of top producers ably guiding him down the sonic path to reclaim sobriety, the album succeeds in being dark, sparse and redemptive. However, if wanting a hip hop record where a hip hop artist makes hip hop rhymes about a hip hop lifestyle, this is the wrong album. This is the 21st century. This isn’t about weed, bitches, Hennesey and the club anymore. This hip hop generation is about weed, coke and rehab, rinse, wash, repeat. If that paradigm shift occurred and you weren’t aware, here is a primer.
FOUR STARS
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