None of it is particularly overwhelming, allowing Cudi the sonic spotlight. The production is strong throughout, driven mostly by re-verb-heavy kick drums, soaring synths and chopped vocal loops.
#Kid cudi man on the moon album explanation free
Produced in large by Emile (In My Dreams, Soundtrack 2 My Life, Solo Dolo, Cudi Zone), the album also has two tracks by Kanye (The Sky Might Fall, Poke Her Face) Free School (Heart of a Lion, Up, Up and Away), Plain Pat (Simple As, My World), and Ratatat (Alive, Pursuit of Happiness), with Dot da Genius, The Illfonics, and Crada each pitching in a beat (Day 'N' Nite, Enter Gallactic, Hyyerr, respectively). In terms of the production, Man on the Moon is pretty easy on the ears. Sidenote: For some reason, Cudi is a huge Transformers fan, and wanted to get Shia Laboeuf to be the narrator. The album also has a narrator, Common, which I think is awesome (although in actuality it doesn't add much). So despite an A for ingenuity, the chaptering may seem a bit contrived. While MOTM has an undeniable natural flow to it, the sections aren't incredibly different from each other. It is divided into five parts The End of Day, The Rise of the Night Terrors, Taking A Trip, Stuck, and A New Beginning. Kid Cudi is one of those artists.įurther solidifying his peculiarity, the album has a few interesting macro-concepts. There are only a handful of hip hop artists that have the star quality to blatantly defy the norms of the mainstream and still exist within it. But what makes Cudi such a refreshing artist is the juxtaposition between his odd, introverted, and often melancholy content, and his pleasant tonality, sing-song flow, and overabundance of swagger. If most rappers made albums based around such dark material, they would find themselves catering to a small niche in the underground, cornered by the likes of Definitive Jux artists. Mostly he deals with depression and nightmares. But Cudi doesn't touch much on those topics either. Usually when hip hop isn't about the previously listed subjects, it deals with politics or love. On Man on the Moon: The End of Day, the Cleveland native seldom resorts to what we have come to expect from emcees- rapper braggadocio, references to the spoils of fame (scores of women, material possessions, bottles of expensive liquor, etc), how rap music and rappers aren't as good as they used to be, and so on and so forth. But after listening to the debut studio album of Scott Ramon Seguro Mescudi, bka Kid Cudi, I think it is fair to say that he really is quite different. Even in today's rapidly mutating rap game, most emcees fit into one of several prototypes.
Generally speaking, I think it is annoying when rappers pride themselves on how unique they are.