Written by: Jorteh Senah & David Gutcheon for www.idisagreehomeboy.com

Artist: Kid Cudi

Album: Man on the Moon: The End of Day

Coming straight out of the mean streets of Cleveland, Ohio, Kid Cudi is a protégé  of Kanye West who broke out following his appearance on West’s experimental 2008 album 808’s and Heartbreak, for which Cudi cowrote songs like “Heartless” and “Paranoid”.  Since then, he’s made the talk-show rounds, produced music for video games, made a cameo on Jay-Z’s Blueprint 3 album and signed on to appear in an HBO comedy series.  His major label debut, Man on the Moon: The End of Day, is out on Universal Motown.

David:

Listening to Kid Cudi’s record is like getting stuck on a Greyhound bus next to a creepy dude who won’t stop talking to you.  He’s a nice enough guy, but he suffers from arrested development and a compulsive tendency to overshare, which manifests itself in adolescent self-absorption and a discomfort-inducing lack of social restraint.  Song titles like “Soundtrack 2 My Life,” “My World,” and “Heart of a Lion (Kid Cudi Theme Music)” are testament to this juvenile narcissism (some cuts that didn’t make the album: “I’m So Great,” “All About Me,” “My Mom Says I’m The Best”).  Check the grandiosity on the first song when Cudi introduces, um, himself:

“Toward the end of our first ten years into the millennium we heard a voice.  A voice who was speaking to us from the underground for some time.  A voice who ...
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Written By Jorteh Senah & David Gutcheon for www.idisagreehomeboy.com

Most middle-aged rappers would love to have a blueprint to follow as they approach the “golden years” of their lives: unable to sustain even gold sales of their records on a major label, they’re eventually relegated to the obscurity of indie labels and nostalgia-themed music festivals. Even if they still possess the vigor to challenge their twenty-something-year-old heirs, middle-aged rappers usually lack the relevance to connect with the (predominantly teenaged) record-buying audience as they once did.

As he approaches his fortieth year, Jay-Z, the world’s biggest rap star, is a man with something to prove. His Michael Jordan-esque retirement-slash-comeback came off as contrived, and like Mike, Jigga’s first season out of retirement, Kingdom Come, was decidedly underwhelming (critics dismissed the album as “Hip-Hop adult contemporary”). Jay-Z, sensing that his chokehold on rap was waning, went back to the drawing board and returned with the critically acclaimed American Gangster. Refocused on music, Jay also ditched the boardroom, ending his stint as the president of Def Jam Records. With American Gangster, Jay-Z proved that he was still at the top of his game, crafting a “concept” album that allowed him to return to his storied past as a drug dealer. However, at the end of the day, a rapper’s music is only as real as his life—can a forty-year-old multi-millionaire executive still keep it street even if he’s married to ...
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