Kid Cudi
Words by cosmo soave-smith
According to YahooAnswers.com, Ohio is famous for the following: flowers, football and trees. So perhaps not the first place you’d expect to find America’s latest hip-hop starlet, then. But somehow the state has come good with 25 year-old Scott Mescudi AKA Kid Cudi breaking onto the scene with his critically acclaimed mixtape A Kid Called Cudi and chart-topping debut single Day ‘n’ Nite.
Credited for bringing emotionally conscious lyrics to his music (If I slip away, if I die today, the last thing you remember won’t / Be about some apple bottom jeans with the boots with the fur / Baby how I dream of being free since my birth / Cursed, but the demons I confronted would disperse), he represents a voice not often heard in hip-hop — the boy in the corner. ‘When I grew up I always felt like the outcast, but instead of being worried about that I kinda embraced it. Ever since I made that change within me, shit’s been good.’
So how does a boy go from the Ohio urban scene to being on Kanye West’s own label? ‘There’s not a rulebook to this,’ says Cudi. ‘But I did make sure that I put myself in the right positions’. Having gained popularity in his home city of Cleveland, at 20 he moved to the big city lights of New York. ‘In Cleveland I would get a little bit of love and I really wanted to capitalise on that and make it massive because I understood that the shit I was making at that time wasn’t easy to grasp’. Referring to the fans of more traditional bad-boy rap he says ‘I understood that my niggers wouldn’t necessarily get it. You know what I mean?’
With his album set to drop this spring the question is how much of it will be ripped directly from his mixtape and how much of it will be new material? Whatever the outcome, with Kanye West overseeing the whole process, the industry is braced for what should be a sensational debut album. If that weren’t credit enough for the boy, Cudi has had a hand in no less than 3 tracks on Kanye’s latest album, 808s And Heartbreak. ‘To be involved with Kanye’s stuff, its like the stars are lining up.’ he proclaims. So should every aspiring MC follow his path as a blueprint to success? ‘Like I said, there’s no fucking rulebook to this shit. Nobody told me ‘hey you should move to New York’ or ‘you should do this’. When I told niggers I was moving to New York to do music, niggers looked at me puzzled. And those same motherfuckers will be at the show tonight!’
Posted Tue, April 21, 2009