The whole album is pitched to his emotional range, and he radiates the image of being a man on a search for meaning. Other than a song or two at a time, I’ve never gotten much out of Cudi. On “Fire,” Cudi uses the bluesy croak in his voice to its maximum effect: “It’s so many days I prayed to God / All this pain, I couldn’t seem to find a way.” (The song sounds a lot like Kanye’s “Black Skinhead,” but Cudi’s actually rapping over the martial lockstep drums from Napoleon XIV’s “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!,” a 1966 novelty hit about being institutionalized.) Later, Cudi sings about spiraling, about coming close to losing everything: “Such a lost boy, caught up in the darkness I had / What’s the cost, boy? Losing everything that I had.” As the short album fades out, it’s with Cudi howling over a loop of Kurt Cobain’s home-recorded acoustic guitar: “On this road, I find / These scars I’ve left behind / Heaven, lift me up.” Throughout Kids See Ghosts, Cudi speaks in self-improvement aphorisms.
(Cudi only appeared on one track from West’s 808s & Heartbreak, but he seemed to be something like a spirit animal for the whole project.) And yet the Cudi of 2018 seems to help balance West, to keep him focused on processing whatever he’s got going on in his own mind. I feel so disrespected.” In the years that West and Cudi have known each other, Cudi has used his influence to push West further out into the ether.
He’s publicly groused about West himself, once his benefactor, causing a breaking-down West to tell a Tampa crowd, “I’m so hurt. He’s launched half-cocked mini-beefs and taken self-destructive career turns. Cudi’s public profile has been erratic almost since we first met him. For that, we can thank Kid Cudi, who’s been publicly battling his demons for much longer than Kanye West. A few Kanye lines from “Reborn” almost work as a thesis statement for the two albums: “I was off the chain, I was often drained / I was off the meds, I was called insane / What an awesome thing, engulfed in shame / I want all the rain, I want all the pain / I want all the smoke, I want all the blame.”īut unlike Ye, Kids See Ghosts is an album with some grounding, some perspective. Why shouldn’t its release reflect those same feelings? Much like Ye, the solo album that West released a week earlier, Kids See Ghosts is an album about the ways that fame and mental illness can feed into each other, turning into one big self-feeding whirlwind. To the extent that the album is about anything, it’s about the mess - confusion and anxiety and delusion. We wondered if we were even looking at the final version of the album or whether this was a chaotically in-process document, West fixing each of the seven songs in real time.Īs it turns out, though, that may have been the perfect way to begin hearing Kids See Ghosts. But this past Friday, Kids See Ghosts, West’s new collaborative album with Kid Cudi, came out slowly, appearing gradually on one streaming platform after another, its songs mislabeled. For a long time, that’s how Kanye West did it, stoking attention expertly, executing one masterful PR stunt after another. Those of us in the music press have gotten used to album rollouts that proceed with metronomic precision. And Kanye West rolls out new albums, week after week, in ways that leave our collective head spinning. In the days ahead, there is a real possibility that Dennis Rodman could emerge as a key figure in international diplomacy. In the final seconds of an NBA Finals game, JR Smith forgets the score and goes tearing the wrong way up the court.
#KID CUDI ALBUMS KIDS SEE GHOSTS MOVIE#
A Star Wars movie comes out and lands with a splat. The President of the United States throws reckless words at Canada. We’re only a week and a half out from Memorial Day, but the news, from every corner of the culture, is messy, disorienting, unstable. There is nothing surgical about this summer.
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