When I first sat down to do a Spoon blog series, I did so because of their work in the 2000’s. While I do appreciate their 90’s projects, particularly A Series of Sneaks, Spoon to me has always been a band that has defined my adolescence. The modern Spoon, as I know and love them, started with their 2001 project, Girls Can Tell. Where A Series of Sneaks shows the band at their most playful and experimental, Girls Can Tell is the moment where Spoon go from indie band to full-fledged pop-rock icons. By changing their sound and creating much more polished and accessible music, Spoon grew up without sacrificing any of their artistic credibility. While I don’t think Girls Can Tell is their best album by any means, it is the moment where Spoon defined just what their music was. They would go on to build upon this style, and become one of the most consistently excellent rock bands in music. Girls Can Tell is the sound of a band coming into their own; blazing a new path forward that would lead to both commercial and critical success.

As I was mentioning last week, after A Series of Sneaks bombed commercially, Spoon was dropped from Elektra, the major label that discovered the band and released the vastly underrated project. Looking back, dropping Spoon was a somewhat baffling decision on Elektra’s part. While its certainly true that the album underperformed, A Series of Sneaks shows a band very clearly at a transition point. Those critics who did listen to the project loved it, and gave praise to Spoon’s songwriting chops, as well as their ability to experiment. One has to imagine that nowadays, a label would give the artists some wiggle room to create a few projects before completely dropping them. However, this is back in the 1990’s, when the music industry was still a big business. Even just twenty years ago, labels had far more power over artists than they do now. Regardless, Spoon’s failure was crushing to the band. Instead of immediately resigning to a new label, the band retreated into the studio, and began to craft the songs that would later show up on Girls Can Tell. The band wouldn’t sign to another label for two more years, until inking a deal with Merge Records. Merge really was the perfect home for Spoon. Merge was a huge label in the indie rock scene, releasing albums by Superchunk, Neutral Milk Hotel, and The Magnetic Fields; all bands who were very similar in style and ambition to Spoon. Since they had been working on the project for three years beforehand, very soon after signing with Merge, Spoon dropped Girls Can Tell, and became darlings of the indie rock scene.

Perhaps the main reason for Spoon’s success in the 2000’s was their ability to concentrate their musical abilities on one particular sound. While A Series of Sneaks is a fantastic, perhaps the largest thing holding the album back is the band’s lack of cohesive sound identity. A Series of Sneaks is so indebted to the band’s influences that it can often come across as Spoon playing like Pavement, or Pixies, or Gang of Four. Girls Can Tell differs in that Spoon has defined their style. While the album is still certainly still experimental, as a whole the project is much more cohesive. On Girls Can Tell, the band focus in on what made them a success, namely, the groove. The key weapon on any Spoon track is the rhythm section. Drummer Jim Eno is immensely talented at creating drum patterns that are equal parts large and tight. Take for example the track “Believing is Art”. The track is driven predominantly by Eno’s drums, with help from bassist Joshua Zarbo. While the guitar comes in and out with the frequency of a vocal line, the drums play the role of the melody in the track. While many bands have thrived on their rhythm sections, Spoon’s take an even larger prevalence over their music. Girls Can Tell drives this point home, focusing on the underlying grooves of the track to the point of the rhythm section driving the song writing. It’s a much different kind of rock music than artists at the time were using, and helped to make Girls Can Tell the hit that it became.

If A Series of Sneaks was a playful, experimental indie rock freak-out, Girls Can Tell is a meditative, dark reflection on the future of Spoon and Britt Daniel. The tone of the music on Girls Can Tell is desperate, of a band that can craft great hooks, but still realizes that they may have just squandered their chance. Throughout Girls Can Tell, Britt’s lyrics are focused on loss and contain a sense of urgency that Spoon had not shown before. For instance, on “Lines in the Suit”, Britt sings “How come I feel so washed up/At such a, such a tender age now?”, referencing the band’s failure to make a splash at Elektra. But while the band’s reaction to getting dropped by their label is certainly of disappointment, Britt is still able to look at the reality of the situation, noting that “Tough break had you send me back home to ma/back to cow town and the fish shop and the mall”. Britt Daniel is easily the most improved member of the band as a whole. The singer sounds significantly more accessible on Girls Can Tell, perhaps predominantly because he is no longer trying to imitate other singers. Instead, Britt has clearly found his own distinct voice and style. From the first track on the record, “Everything Hits at Once”, you can immediately tell that Britt is much more focused on doing his own thing, and has taken on the mantle of being a much larger role in the band. The harmonies on “Everything Hits at Once” are incredibly pleasing, but even when Britt sings the hook of the song, the singer shows a much larger range and poise. On the track “Me and the Bean”, Britt also brandishes some emotes to great effect, rather than relying on yelling or lyrics. There is much more emotion packed in his voice than ever before, particularly on some of the album’s softer and more sensitive songs. On “1020 AM”, Britt uses a much softer tone to convey the message of the track as opposed to the more hardened voice he uses on tracks like “Believing is Art”. The dynamism of Britt’s voice is clearly his strong point, and by using that to his advantage, the singer clearly takes a huge step forward on Girls Can Tell.

In many ways, the fact that A Series of Sneaks was Spoon’s major label debut seems like a perfect irony. For most bands, coming out of the indie scene means streamlining your sound; creating a distinct approach that will let more mainstream audiences latch on to the band’s personal voice. Rather than follow this path to success, Spoon took a huge chance in releasing A Series of Sneaks. Instead, Spoon waited until after they were dropped from their label to release the album that would function as their de facto debut to the mainstream. Girls Can Tell may be dark, but there’s no denying the hooks packed onto this album. Songs like “Everything Hits at Once”, “Me and the Bean”, “Fitted Shirt”, and “Anything You Want”, all pack punches that seem like the band was destined for mainstream success. Where other bands might have retreated into further experimentation and pursued indie rock stardom, Spoon was never a band that could be held back by their aspirations. At the time, some people in the indie rock scene looked at this record as some kind of betrayal, because of just how accessible and simplified the music is. I tend to vehemently disagree with this view. Spoon is a band that has never taken the easy way out. There is nothing simple about Girls Can Tell’s hooks. Often, they rely on the instrumentation as opposed to Britt Daniel’s singing. Part of what keeps me coming back to Spoon is that their hooks rely on the song building upon itself. Take “Anything You Want”, perhaps the most overtly pop driven track on the record. The hook on this track does not hit nearly as hard if you don’t allow the time for the instrumentation to build, or for the listener to find the groove. Instead what makes a track like “Anything You Want” work is the establishment of the songs underlying rhythm, so that when it does transition to the song’s hook, the audience is both relieved by the switch and anticipatory of the return to the safety of the already established groove. This kind of dynamic is at the essence of pop music, but very few indie rock bands have been able to translate the structure in a way that maintains their indie rock aesthetic. Spoon is a band that will go on to perfect this, and it all starts here, with Girls Can Tell. By the time Spoon would release their follow up to their breakthrough the following year, they would be creating songs that would be as respected by the indie community as they were by the main stream, and even have a full-fledged hit song to show for it.

Thanks for reading today, I know it’s been a while since my last post. Some personal issues prevented me from posting last week, but I’m happy to say we should be back to your regularly scheduled Discblography programing from here on out. Next week I’ll be discussing Spoon’s 2002 follow-up to Girls Can Tell, Kill the Moonlight. Since it is a holiday, you can expect to see that next post on Tuesday. As always, follow me on Twitter, @benpoc, and send emails over to discblography@gmail.com. I’ll see you all next week!

While my last two blog series have been about hip-hop artists, rock music has always been my greatest passion. Rock was the first way that I got into music seriously, first delving into the classics and then moving into alternative music in my elementary school days. Rock music, and especially rock-pop, has always been a genre that spoke to me personally, through the intensely emotional, heart-stirring choruses and layered instrumental textures. One of the first bands to get me into the indie rock scene was Spoon, predominantly via their 2007 single “The Underdog”. The bands strong choruses, light but pervasive experimentation, and strong grooves drew me in intensely, and took me down a long rabbit hole of indie rock musicians, who were at their popular peak when I was growing up. Perhaps it’s because of this nostalgia that I find Spoon to be the most consistently underrated musical acts of the last fifteen years, but I would say that it goes beyond even that. Spoon is an utterly fascinating band, able to craft amazing pop hooks while still rocking and maintaining their indie aesthetic. Through this blog series, I hope to show that Spoon is a band that has not only gotten better with age, but has always stayed one step ahead of the curve, creating brilliant songs that push rock music forward in bold, challenging directions. Today I’ll be talking about Spoon’s work in the Nineties, specifically their debut album Telephono and their major label debut A Series of Sneaks.

Spoon is the brain child of two Austin area musicians, singer and guitarist Britt Daniel, and drummer Jim Eno. Eno and Britt are the only two members of the band who have stayed through the entirety of the bands run, while numerous other artists have acted as guitarists and bassists for the band throughout their career. The band grew up listening to artists like Pixies, Wire, and Can; experimental rock groups that, while untraditional and different, still knew how to make compelling hooks and choruses. On their early works, the band wore these influences on their sleeve, especially on their debut Telephono. While I’ll get to that record in a second, I want to briefly touch on what the indie rock scene looked like in 1996. After the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind, the rock music landscape was no longer quite so distinctly separated between indie and mainstream. Indie bands were getting poached to major labels left and right. Indie groups from the 80’s were getting signed to huge deals, and then seeing the ramifications of what those deals would do to them. Bands like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Pavement, and Pixies all saw huge changes throughout the decade, with many of them splitting up or buckling under pressure. By 1996, indie rock was starting to become almost oversaturated, as A&R reps started to look more and more across the pond at Brit-Pop, towards post-grunge artists, and even electronica DJs. While indie rock was still big business, labels were looking more for cheaper versions of established artists, so that they could put the label of “the next Pixies” on a band, instead of distinguishing the artists. Amidst all that, Spoon released Telephono, a project that was equal parts exactly what they needed for the time, and yet also their main undoing from their label.

The main reason I wanted to discuss all of Spoon’s 90’s works in one post was because of how completely inconsequential Telephono is to their discography. As I mentioned above, in the early days, Spoon wore their influences on their sleeve. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is Telephono, which essentially functions as Spoon doing their best Pixies impression for forty minutes. While it is an entertaining listen, there’s really nothing groundbreaking happening in the project. Songs like “Cvantez” and “Nefarious” sound like straight up Pixies songs, with very little personality or intricacies to the music itself. In fact, on songs like “Not Turning Off”, Britt even does a very clear Frank Black impression, to varying degrees of effects. This kind of obvious style similarities makes the album tough to differentiate in any way, even though it is performed well. Despite this, Spoon shows clear promise on the album, especially when it comes to their ability to craft some catchy hooks. The last two tracks of the album, “The Government Darling” and “Plastic Mylar” see Spoon moving away from their roles as Pixies sound-alikes, and instead crafting some great indie pop hooks and choruses. “The Government Darling” is a fun, rocking groove with a simplistic yet still catchy hook. “Plastic Mylar” instead finds the band using interesting quiet-loud dynamics and multiple choruses to create an interestingly structured pop song with a fantastic guitar line. These two songs showed enough promise that Elektra Records signed them to their first major label deal. Appropriately enough, Elektra was also the label that Pixies were signed to as well. Unlike the Pixies, Elektra would not be kind to Spoon, even after the release of A Series of Sneaks in 1998.

A Series of Sneaks was the first great leap forward for Spoon. Despite Elektra’s wishes for Spoon to become the next big indie rock band to cross over into the mainstream, the band created one of the weirder indie-pop records of the nineties. A Series of Sneaks is built upon a collection of relatively short song, focused on rhythm and groove rather than the choruses and lyrics themselves. Most of the tracks hover around the two-and-a-half-minute mark; tight tracks that still manage to stick in your head, with absolutely no wasted measures. The band also experiments with different song structures, like in “30 Gallon Tank”, the lead single from the album. In it, Birtt’s vocals are almost unintelligible from behind the groove of the bass and drums, and doesn’t really contain any semblance of chorus. Instead rather, the groove itself is the hook of the track. There are a number of other interesting experiments on the album, including the dreamy “Metal Detektor” and the aggresively lo-fi “Staring at the Board”. Yet despite all of this, the band can’t help but create incredibly fun and catchy melodies and choruses. Songs like “Car Radio”, “Reservations”, “Quincy Punk Episode”, and “Advance Cassette” all feature some incredibly catchy song writing, with superb hooks and fantastic melodies. Spoon are able to meld together all of their influences into a unique sound, clearly showing a defined personality that they would continue to build on in the future. Personally, I hadn’t listened to this album in a while, and I was surprised at how close this album was to what Spoon would become by the 2000’s. Coming into this series, I had no clue how I would rank the Spoon albums, and while I’m still struggling with the order, A Series of Sneaks has really snuck its way into being much higher up on the list. A Series of Sneaks has no business being as adventurous as it is, while still maintaining a high level of pop accessibility. Yet despite what I think of it, A Series of Sneaks would actually be one of Spoon’s earliest setbacks, leading to a complete re-tooling of the band’s approach.

Despite the album’s greatness, A Series of Sneaks was both critically and commercially overlooked when it was released. The album sold miserably, and despite the band’s indie hype, Spoon were soon in the dog house at Elektra. The A&R man who signed Spoon, Ron Lafitte, actually quit his job at Elektra only four months after the album’s release. Soon after that, the band was dropped from their first major label, effectively sending Spoon back into the wilderness. Later on that year, Spoon actually recorded a fantastic two-sided single called “the Agony of Lafitte”, effectively skewering both the A&R man and the label that dropped them. The two songs were added to the album itself on the remastered addition, finding their way to the end of the album, acting as a great sort of epilogue to the story of the album. While getting dropped from Elektra was a huge blow to the band, it ended up being exactly what the group needed. By the time they followed up A Series of Sneaks, Spoon were well on their way to becoming indie rock stars. A Series of Sneaks was one of the first times that Spoon would be overlooked by the music community as a whole. However, the album effectively became a blue print for how indie bands could become pop stars without sacrificing the things that made them so interesting. Bands like Modest Mouse, The New Pornographers, and the Shins would all take cues from A Series of Sneaks, crafting fantastic pop songs while maintaining a level of experimentation and creativity that would prevail throughout their music. Spoon in the Nineties were a band of modern creativity that clutched to the past. It was only when they would move beyond their inspirations, in the 2000’s, that they would find commercial success. And it was with their next album, 2001’s Girls Can Tell, that they would go on to become one of the driving forces behind indie rock’s dominance in that decade.

Thanks for reading about Spoon in the Nineties. It was fun to take a more narrative driven approach with this blog, and focus more on the story behind the music. Next week I’ll be getting back to the typical Discblography format, focusing on Girls Can Tell. If you haven’t given any of Spoon’s albums a listen, Girls Can Tell is a fantastic place to start. As always, please follow me on Twitter @discblography, and keep sending me emails at discblography@gmail.com. I’ll be seeing you all next week, as I continue along with the Spoon blog series.

When I first started out this Kid Cudi blog series, I had no clue how the story was going to end. Kids See Ghosts was released just prior to my first post, and for all I knew, it could have been a disaster on-par with Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven. However, like all great redemption stories, Kid Cudi’s last/most recent act is incredibly uplifting. Kid Cudi had been in the wilderness, in what is most likely the darkest chapter in his life. By finding peace within himself, he was able to craft a beautiful album, perhaps the best of his career. By working with his estranged mentor, Kanye West, Cudi was able to find the soul of his music, and get back to making dominant, innovative, and perhaps most importantly, insanely listenable music. Kids See Ghosts is nothing less than twenty-five minutes of pure triumph. Due to the length of the album, I wanted to change up my discussion. Breaking from Discblography tradition, I’ve decided to give you all a little bit of background, and then actually go into a track-by-track breakdown of the album, giving you all a bit of information about each and every moment of the album. I know this is an unexpected change-up, but I’m interested to hear all of your reactions, as this is a new form of discussion for myself as well.

Kids See Ghosts is the third Kanye West produced album to come out of the infamous “Wyoming Sessions”, where West produced five albums in a row, releasing them all within a week of each other. Each one of these were seven-track-long projects, each with their own unique stories behind them. The first, Pusha T’s Daytona, was praised by almost everyone, and created maybe the most entertaining hip-hop story of the year, the Pusha T and Drake beef. Next was West’s own ye, an album that was met with a much more mixed reception. Kanye has always been a divisive character, but now even more so. Just speaking musically, ye is a bizarre record. Kanye is at perhaps his most avant-garde, crafting some really interesting productions, while turning in some very uninspired vocal performances. The album is intensely dark, and focuses on West’s struggles with his own bi-polar disorder and his relationship to fame. While the album is far from perfect, and certainly pissed off a fair amount of people, it is still an incredibly interesting album. Next was Kids See Ghosts, followed by Nas’s underwhelming Nasir and Teyana Taylor’s fantastic K.T.S.E. Out of all these projects, there’s something particularly special about Kids See Ghosts. Two artists who were at some of their lowest points in their lives created an album about looking back on struggles and depression, crafting an album of ethereal positivity, all while crafting some fantastic, experimental hip-hop. Nothing else has really sounded like Kids See Ghosts before. Here’s my track by track breakdown of what is probably my favorite hip-hop album of the year:

“Feel the Love”: this is probably my favorite song on the album. By opening on Kid Cudi singing “I can still feel the love”, the album clearly puts the spotlight on Cudi as opposed to the other half of the project. This is definitely for the projects benefit, because for once, Kid Cudi seems like the more stable artist on an album. After an awesome verse from Pusha T, over a pretty haunting bass line, the song explodes into a cacophony of noise, with Kanye yelling out sound effects matched to thumping, explosive drums. All the while Cudi’s singing continues, as if Cudi’s finally understanding that his personal self-love is more important than the craziness surrounding him. After a breakdown with spacey guitars and a quiet bridge, Cudi comes back in to sing over the drums, creating an amazing, driving refrain. The song is clearly meant to show that Cudi has found inner-peace, and that despite the stress and hardships he may encounter around him, he can still “feel the love” that is inside. It’s a pretty moving song, and a fantastic opener/thesis statement for the album.

“Fire”: part of why I love Kids See Ghosts so much is because of how strange some of the structures of the songs are. “Fire” is a great example of that. In many ways its incredibly simplistic, with two verses followed by a Cudi sung chorus. However, by playing with these structures, the listener has no clue what to expect, and the entire album becomes incredibly re-playable. The song is dedicated to atoning for mistakes, and pleading with a higher power to be forgiven for those missteps. As with the majority of the project, the song is designed for Cudi to shine, with his singing and humming sounding better than ever. “Fire”’s beat is a little more simplistic than the rest of the project, but it’s still fantastic. It may be the shortest track on the album, but it still packs a wallop, and shows just how great a hip-hop project can be when it’s tight and concise.

“4^th Dimension”: The main focus of this track is the Louis Prima sample that is used to haunting effect in both the intro and throughout the track. However, what I like most about the track is Cudi’s verse. This might be the slickest Cudi has sounded since Indicud, rapping with a flow that is incredibly listenable and smooth. While the song isn’t quite as meaningful as others on the record, it’s also pretty funny, with Kanye’s verse being a throwback to some of his earlier projects. The Louis Prima sample also works incredibly well. Leave it to Kanye West to turn a song about Santa Claus into one of the coolest sounding samples of the year. Again, the track is produced impeccably. In particular the drums on the track hit particularly hard, especially the snares. Of particular note on this song is the way that Kanye ends his verse, where he cuts himself off on “If I get locked up, I won’t finish the sent-“. It’s another one of those small moments that has always made Kanye West such an interesting artist.

“Freeee (Ghost Town Pt. 2)”: “Freeee” opens with a Marcus Garvey sample, where he discusses what it takes for a man to be intellectually free. It’s an interesting move to begin the song, which discusses being free from both criticism and in particular for Kid Cudi, being free from the prison of one’s own mind. For both of these artists, they have been the cause of their own undoing. This song feels like the moment when both of these artists have accepted their own personal freedom, and finally feel uplifted. The only verse on this song is shared between both Kid Cudi, Kanye, and Ty Dolla $ign, who puts in a fantastic vocal performance. The beat is another genre-bending feat, mixing psychedelic rock influences with a gospel tinted refrain, creating something wholly original. The second half of the song is dedicated to another great Cudi vocal performance. I particularly love the bridge, where Cudi sings “Feelin’ out of my past life/Died and came back twice/Now I’m free”. It’s a simple lyric that shows how good Kid Cudi’s bluntness can truly be when it’s used for the proper effect. The song is works great at this point in the album. After “Freeee” the album takes on a touch more serious tone, and this track works well to bridge the gap between the two halves.

“Reborn”: “Reborn” is probably the easiest way to get into Kids See Ghosts, and is the best Kid Cudi moment on the project. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that “Reborn” is the best Kid Cudi song since Man on the Moon. I don’t mean to discount Kanye either, because this is probably the best Kanye verse on the album as well. Kanye’s verse details his struggles with mistakes he had made while off of his bi-polar medication. It’s equal parts revealing and confident, the same dichotomy that Kanye has been playing off of his whole career. However, the star of the song is still Cudi, who turns in another fantastic vocal performance. The hook on “Reborn” is fantastic, and guaranteed to get stuck in your head the minute the song is over. The beat is a classic Kid Cudi production, with swelling synths and a fantastic driving melody behind it. I’ve been critical of Cudi’s hums in the past, but here they fit in perfectly, in large part because of how in-tune they are. Cudi also turns in a great verse as well, detailing his recovery process. It’s a beautiful song, with a fantastically uplifting message behind it. “Reborn” simply makes me happy for Cudi, because it finally feels like he has found his way, and is the happiest he’s been in a long time. Those kinds of moments in music are rare, and it makes me pleased that an artist who I truly care about can rebuild what he had lost.

“Kids See Ghosts”: After the beauty of “Reborn” Kids See Ghosts takes a darker turn with the title track. “Kids See Ghosts” is an interesting track, because it shows the difference between Kanye and Cudi. While Cudi takes an introspective approach on his verse, Kanye spends his time addressing critics and the expectations of fame. Both approaches work well, but I think the most telling part of the song is the title itself. I believe “Kids See Ghosts” is in reference to the fact that everybody sees darkness in their life. Acting like young people don’t deal with dark feeling and emotions is fruitless, as these “ghosts” need to be dealt with in one way or another. For Cudi those dark feelings came from within, while Kanye brought these emotions on from outside influences (i.e. his medication and his reaction to intense media scrutiny). Yasiin Bey details some root causes of these feelings on the bridge. In particular the line “stability without stasis” seems like one of the most interesting ideas to me. Both Kanye and Kid Cudi are in relatively stable situations, but they continue to be in a constant form of artistic and occupational movement. While they may be stable, they cannot relax into stasis, and this eats them up inside. While the lyrics are interesting, the song also has one of the coolest beats on the whole project, and does a good job of increasing the impending sense of dread the song purveys.

“Cudi Montage”: Kids See Ghosts ends on another high note, again moving the spotlight back over to Kid Cudi. “Cudi Montage” is built around a sample of one of Cudi’s heroes, Kurt Cobain. The song is an ode to ending cycles of violence, with Cudi focusing on the cycle of depression and addiction that he found himself in, and Kanye dropping a verse about the prison-industrial complex in America. The song ends with Kanye, Cudi, and Mr. Hudson singing for freedom from a higher power, the second such spiritual reference on the project. Back before the projects release, Kanye proclaimed that The Life of Pablo was going to be a gospel record. While that album may not have really been too focused on religion, Kids See Ghosts seems like a much more spiritual successor. The album is full of these appeals to a higher being from both Kanye and Cudi, and in many ways, ending Kids See Ghosts with the gospel influenced outro to “Cudi Montage” does not seem like an accident. It’s also another one of the truly beautiful moments on the album, and a great way to close out the project.

Kids See Ghosts is a fantastic project, and has me very excited to see what Cudi has in store for the future. But most of all, Kids See Ghosts makes me so happy because of what it means for those who are struggling or have struggled before with depression or other mental health issues. A part of what drove me to do this blog series about Kid Cudi was because of my own personal struggles with depression. As I said earlier, before I started this blog series, I had no clue how Cudi’s personal story would end. For all I knew, Kids See Ghosts could have been another Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven, and Cudi could have been even more irrelevant than before. Instead, Cudi showed that redemption is possible, that no matter how dark some of your days or how hard the struggle might be, you can come back and be better than ever. For someone who has been fighting a similar fight for a long time, Kid Cudi’s story hits me particularly hard. Kids See Ghosts is a truly cathartic journey for me, and has already helped me so many times since its release just a couple months ago.

I wanted to thank all of you for sticking with me this month. I know that Kid Cudi was a rocky choice of discography, but I hope that you all found his story as interesting as I do. Next week there’ll be another short palette cleanser. I’ll be ranking Kid Cudi’s albums, share what I’ve been listening to recently, and reveal who the next blog series will be about. I’m pretty excited to reveal my next series, since I’m planning on changing up the genre on all of you. As always, follow me on Twitter @discblography, and keep sending emails over to discblography@gmail.com. I’ll see all of you next week!

A large part of how Kid Cudi found success was by creating innovative, game-changing hip-hop. The Man on the Moon series were so well-received in large part because nothing had sounded like those before. Even though his music became less appealing, and in turn less popular, Cudi continued to drastically change styles from Indicud and Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven. Even though the music may have suffered, there is a lot to say for an artist who takes such artistic leaps. However, when an artist starts to lose listeners because of their adventurous music, it is always tempting to create those moments of “getting back to basics”. It’s a move that’s particularly popular with rock bands, but that doesn’t mean that hip-hop hasn’t seen the exact same move. Just look at Eminem’s Relapse or some of the recent Ghostface Killah albums (discounting Sour Soul). While some of these projects can find artists back at the top of their game (Nas’ Stillmatic or Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx Pt. II), too often they can feel like rehashed attempts at the same music they have already evolved past. Unfortunately, Kid Cudi’s Passion Pain & Demon Slayin’ falls much more in the latter camp than the former. By trying to conjure up the spirit of Man on the Moon era Kid Cudi, Passion Pain & Demon Slayin’ ended up creating an album with a much better sound, but without the trademark heart and soul that Cudi has always put into his projects.

Passion Pain & Demon Slayin’ was initially intended to be Man on the Moon III. However, after releasing Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven, Cudi felt that he did not have another Man on the Moon project in him, and therefore, he changed the name of the project to Passion Pain & Demon Slayin’. However, he still promised a return to the old Cudi, and released two singles, “Frequency” and “Surfin’”. Both of these songs are two of the best tracks on the project, yet also showcase the problems that Cudi found in this album. “Frequency” is a dark, foreboding tune about opening your mind to Kid Cudi’s style. It’s produced expertly, with help from Plain Pat and frequent Kanye associate Mike Dean. Dean’s style is found throughout this album, emphasizing melodic darkness. Dean’s contribution actually tends to work against Cudi in many ways. Where Cudi is usually much more experimental in his production, Dean often makes Cudi sound much closer to Travis Scott, and many times throughout this album it feels like Cudi is doing a bad Scott impression. It happens for a minute in the bridge to “Frequency”, but there are many songs in the album that have an even stronger Scott influence. “Surfin’” is a much more interesting track, in large part because Cudi enlists the help of Pharrell Williams. The beat probably the most outwardly fun that Cudi has used since Man on the Moon II, relying on real drums and a funky guitar line. The chorus is also the catchiest on the album, and the song rides out on a pretty spectacular breakdown. However, it finds itself at a weird point in the album, closing out an hour and a half of Kid Cudi’s work. As singles, these were enough to get Kid Cudi’s fans back on board, which is entirely understandable. After Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven, even I was happy to see Cudi back in hip-hop mode. However, in the time since Cudi had released Indicud and Passion Pain & Demon Slayin’, so many rappers had been using Cudi’s style, that these singles did not make much of an impact.

When Passion Pain & Demon Slayin’ was released, it was generally billed as Kid Cudi’s comeback. And when it comes to production, Kid Cudi is certainly back in a big way. Ever since Cudi first began taking over producing reins, he had been clearly struggling to figure out what his signature sounds would be. Satellite Flight was clearly a Kid Cudi production test run, full of spacey synths and extended instrumentals. Cudi has done a good job of taming back the experimentation and tendency towards over production that plagued his last two hip-hop productions. There are no moments on the album that are ruined by the production, and while Cudi is certainly not breaking any new ground here, he is still doing a more than serviceable job, and a large part of that can be attributed to finding help from outside sources. I strongly believe that Cudi has always ignored his limitations, and tried to make his own way, even if he doesn’t have the required ability. On Passion Pain & Demon Slayin’, Cudi finds assistance for the first time in years, and it truly makes for a more rewarding listen. By getting help from people like Plain Pat, Mike Dean, Pharrell, and even Mike-Will-Made-It, Cudi is able to craft a much more diverse listen, and one with a consistent theme and vibe. As I was saying earlier, sometimes that vibe can get a little too adjacent to other artists, especially on the Mike Dean assisted tracks. There are a few beats on here that straight up don’t match the persona that Cudi has made for himself. For instance, “Baptized In Fire” actually features Travis Scott, and features typical trap 808’s and a very Scott influenced keyboard line. The beat sounds really strange for Cudi, and he finds himself rapping like someone he’s not. However, for the most part, the mixing and production on Passion Pain & Demon Slayin’ works well, and makes for a fun listen.

Where Passion Pain & Demon Slayin’ really falls apart is Cudi’s performance itself. Typically, when I am writing about an album, I’ll sit down and listen to it all the way through with no lyrics or commentary open. However, for this album, as soon as I heard Cudi’s new flow, I had to immediately open up Genius. I consider myself a fan of mumble rap, and even I couldn’t understand what Cudi was saying for most of this album. This is the most accurate snap-shot of Cudi’s performance on Passion Pain & Demon Slayin’; everything he does sounds pretty good, but it doesn’t really seem to be reaching for anything or stand up to deeper analysis. Passion Pain & Demon Slayin’ suffers heavily from the fact that Cudi simply doesn’t seem to have much to say. Cudi relies heavily on his humming throughout this album, and I’ve made it abundantly clear in the past how I feel about that. It seems like every bridge on the album is simply a breakdown where Cudi will emote for twenty seconds, and every time it happens, any momentum Cudi has gets erased. This is a very real problem on this album, because of how massive the project is. Clocking in at an hour and a half, this is easily Cudi’s longest album. I don’t want to harp on the albums length too much, but when Cudi really doesn’t seem to have that much to say, this long of an album makes absolutely no sense. For the most part, the songs are not showing any new sides to Cudi, and rehash many of the same topics that Cudi has already spoken on before. To get a sense of how bored I was by the album, listen to “Dance 4 Eternity”, which is about midway through the album. Now just imagine listening to this song after having listened to the album for forty-five minutes, knowing that you still have forty-five minutes to go. I’m sure you’ll also find Cudi singing about how “this feeling is so awesome” to be pretty aggravating.

I’m being pretty tough on Cudi during this post, but I do want to emphasize that I don’t find this album to be bad. I definitely think Passion Pain & Demon Slayin’ is frustrating, because it is incredibly close to being great. If most of the songs in the middle were removed, and Cudi maybe annunciated more clearly, I think this would be a fantastic project. Of particular high-light are the two Andre 3000 features. It’s always great to hear post-Outkast Andre, and these two features are pretty great. On “By Design”, Andre raps a pretty darn catchy chorus, and actually helps to elevate Cudi’s performance a lot. Andre also drops a pretty hot verse on “The Guide” which is an otherwise just ok song. Most of the other features on Passion Pain & Demon Slayin’ typical Kid Cudi features, meaning they are pretty minimal. What is perhaps most interesting about Passion Pain and Demon Slayin’ is what happened after the album’s release. A few weeks after the project came out, Cudi checked himself into a rehab clinic due to his depression. While this news was certainly sad, it was far from shocking. Anybody who had been following Kid Cudi for his career knew how much his mental health had been affecting him. What I find most interesting about this is how far we as a culture allowed Cudi to continue down this path. Mental health and hip-hop have always had a very strained relationship. The list of rappers who have destroyed themselves because of their mental health is long, and yet we as a community continue to do nothing to support these people with their problems. When Kid Cudi released Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven, which is essentially an artistic cry for help, we simply wished that he would stick to hip-hop. Kid Cudi had been detailing his struggles with mental health for years, so when we as a hip-hop community began dismissing his music entirely, what exactly did we think was going to happen? I’m grateful that this story has a happy ending, but far too often, hip-hop fans continue to push artists into further and further dark corners. While I think hip-hop is becoming better about assisting artists with their struggles, there is still a lot of work to be done. I think Kid Cudi stands as a prime example of how we as a culture can affect artists, and hopefully Passion Pain & Demon Slayin’ is the last moment in Kid Cudi’s career where he will be in that dark space.

I wanted to thank all of you for reading about Passion Pain & Demon Slayin’. Next week I’ll be finishing off the Kid Cudi blog series with one of my favorite records of the past few years, Kids See Ghosts. After that I’ll be taking another palette cleanser, and then I’ll be moving on. I’ve got a few different ideas of who to cover with my next series, and I might be sharing some ideas on Twitter, so follow me there at @discblography. As always, keep sending in emails to discblography@gmail.com. Otherwise, I’ll see all of you next week.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Kid Cudi is one of the most important hip-hop artists of the last ten years. Albums like Man on the Moon are very rare, in that they are definite before and after points in the life-time of a genre. Artists like Kid Cudi live to push forward music, and strive to set standards for both themselves and their fellow artists. Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven is very similar to Man on the Moon because of Cudi’s dedication to this artistic sentiment. In the history of music, Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven can be viewed as one of the biggest artistic swings and misses of all time. By continuing Cudi’s pursuit of challenging the status quo of his genre, he ended up making one of the most bizarre, poorly executed projects of the last ten years. Instead of capitalizing on what he does best, Cudi instead crafted something inherently limiting, forcing himself as he often did into a corner which he is very lucky to have survived. While I do appreciate the ideas and thought that Cudi put into the project, Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven is a mess, and one that would have ended the career of almost anyone who touched it.

What I find perhaps most interesting about Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven is that it almost never happened. Indicud was an almost entirely rap driven album, with Cudi focusing much more heavily on his own production. After that project was not as successful as his Man on the Moon series, Cudi made the logical decision to begin working on Man on the Moon III. In between he released Satellite Flight, which was initially intended to be an EP. Now if Cudi was a more traditional hip-hop artist, this progression would be entirely reasonable, and one which would have most likely would have resulted in higher album sales. However, Cudi is not a normal artist. Satellite Flight became a full-fledged album, and Man on the Moon III was put on hold. Instead Cudi promised Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven, and confirmed that it would not be a rap album at all. After Satellite Flight, which could hardly be described as a rap album either, many fans began to ignore Kid Cudi, and even more would follow after the release of Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven. However, when you listen to the album, one thing becomes really clear: this was the album that Cudi felt like he needed to make. Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven is clearly made by a person with intense mental health issues. The album is essentially Cudi’s personal therapy session recorded. The intensity of the album is generally regarded as the main reason for its failure to capture an audience, and this is a fair read on the situation. However, it’s clear that Cudi’s decision to focus on a completely different path is one that he made very consciously, and with his own best interest at heart.

As mentioned above, Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven is decidedly not a hip-hop album. Instead it’s made up completely of Cudi’s version of alternative rock or punk. I say that it’s Cudi’s version of these genres, because it does sound inherently unique to Cudi. The guitar on the album is very heavily riff based, for the most part likely because Cudi himself is playing the instrument. Cudi is clearly not a great guitar player, because he relies heavily on these rather simplistic riffs to carry the majority of these tracks. If Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven had a band, it would be made up of three players, a guitarist, a drummer, and a bassist that only plays on about half of the tracks. The actual music behind the album is all very straightforward and largely sedentary. There is not a whole lot of musical movement around the tracks. Rather than relying on standard musical song structure, Cudi instead opts to rely on one musical motif for the majority of the songs. For the most part, this really does not work. The motifs that Cudi calls upon for his songs are largely too simplistic to really craft a song around, and as a result, by the end of the tracks, the listener is left feeling like they just listened to a five minute track, as opposed to a three and a half minute long song. What I find most interesting about the music is how much Cudi is clearly trying to imitate a punk style without including the aspect of punk that is perhaps most important. One of the main reasons punk works is because of the energy that punk musicians exude when they are playing a track. To a certain extent, the guitar playing by Kid Cudi on this album is just as accomplished as the guitar playing on Anarchy In the U.K. However, while the Sex Pistols feel like they are putting their all into their music, Cudi feels constantly dragging, plodding, and generally uninteresting to listen to. The guitar sound on this album is increasingly small, and more of an accent as opposed to the focus of the songs. This is made even worse by the production of the album. It’s clear throughout this project that Cudi simply doesn’t understand how to produce rock music. The mixing on the project is all over the place, especially with the drums. Often they feel at once both tinny and muddy, and often feel simply forgotten about in the mix. Cudi often feels like putting vocal effects on his lyrics, which make them even harder to understand. But perhaps what is most frustrating is his production of the guitar. Cudi makes no efforts to make his guitar tone bigger, and instead almost plays the production of the guitar straight up, which is almost never done in rock music. Instead of putting the guitars in the forefront or into the background, they’re far too often simply placed into the middle of the mix, where they have little to no effect.

I think a large reason as to why the music sounds so unfocused on Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven is because it’s straight up not the focus of the project. Instead, the music is simply attempting to be the medium for Cudi’s performance. However, Cudi’s performance on this project is probably the worst performance of his career. Cudi has always been a very emotional and personal lyricist. Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven pushes this to the utmost extreme. As I said above, Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven is like a personal therapy session for Kid Cudi. This is not exactly accurate however, because a therapy session usually involves working through an idea until a resolution or solution is found. Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven offers no solutions to the problems facing Kid Cudi. Instead, the album is much more interested in painting the picture of how Kid Cudi feels currently. Usually when I describe the themes or main topics of the lyrics in an album, I will say that the album “deals” with a certain theme or motif. However, this cannot be said of Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven, because Cudi never truly “deals” with any of the themes he discusses on this album. Instead most of the lyrics are almost stream-of-conscious. When Cudi starts talking about suicide, he simply talks about it as the feelings come to his head, and then moves on to talk about his low self-worth. The lack of true wrestling or discussion on any of these topics are indicative of someone who is truly undergoing serious mental problems. When someone is suffering from depression or bi-polar disorder, it’s nearly impossible to really analyze one’s own feelings. Instead the feelings or thoughts simply exist, and simply fighting the urgency of these feelings take all of your energy out of you. This is the exact same pattern we see in Cudi’s performance. This is part of why listening to Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven is so uniquely hard. There are none of the resolutions and metaphor that we come to expect from songwriters. While I do understand the sad reality behind the lyrics, that doesn’t mean that I appreciate them or find them enjoying to listen to. I personally listen to music to provide context and meaning behind emotions, and that is simply not accomplished here. Similarly, the actual singing behind Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven is simply not good. Perhaps the most aggressively painful listening on the album is whenever Cudi tries to do some classic punk screaming. But even outside of those painful moments, Cudi is still woefully inconsistent. At one moment he can sound like he truly belongs on a punk track, and then the next like he’s completely out of his depth. However, once again, Cudi commits the cardinal sin of being simply boring. Cudi often can’t help but sound like he is simply reporting the news of his mind, which is another issue of making music under such intense emotional anguish. When you combine Cudi’s performance with the dreary state of the music behind him, you end up making an album that is often interesting, but at the same point barely listenable.

Hip-hop fans are always a fickle bunch. Partially due to the depth of personality that all hip-hop artists have, fans in the hip-hop community have a different kind of connection to their favorite artists than in any other music genre. Hip-hop fans feel like they know their favorite artists; like they share a kind of mutual assistance relationship with rappers. This can often lead to disappointment when it becomes obvious that we don’t know artists the way we think we do. There are a bunch of different examples of this, like Kanye’s Trump support, Lil’ Wayne’s rock album, or Lupe Fiasco’s Lasers. However, Kid Cudi is still the rapper who I think separated himself from his fans the quickest. When Kid Cudi delayed Man on the Moon III for releasing a punk/alt-rock album that was devoted to his depression, even Kid Cudi’s biggest fans found themselves reeling. I think a large reason why Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven is so much more derided than his earlier WZRD project is because of this almost bait and switch that Kid Cudi pulled on those who were still following. 2015 was a pretty impeccable year for hip-hop music, and Cudi’s window for pop success had all but evaporated. Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven was a commercial disaster, but that was never really the intent of the project. What was even more troubling was the critical reaction, with Cudi getting trashed from all angles. That being said, Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven has seen some very real effects on the hip-hop industry. Young hip-hop artists today are much more open to talking about mental health issues, and some of the newer rappers have music that sounds just about as dark as Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven. The alternative rock influence on hip-hop has become even more prevalent, with some hip-hop acts sounding more like Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven than Man on the Moon. Love them, hate them, or be somewhere in between, artists like XXXtentacion, Lil Peep, and nothing,nowhere all sound very similar to the sounds of Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven. While I still think the album is awful, there’s no denying that Kid Cudi made a bold artistic statement with Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven, and I would not be surprised if ten years from now we talk about it as one of the most important albums in hip-hop.

Thanks for reading all, I know I’m a day late with my posting, but it’s been a pretty busy week for me personally. I’ll be back on schedule next week with the next Kid Cudi album, Passion, Pain, & Demon Slayin’. I’m coming up on the end of this blog series, and I’ve got an idea of who I want to write about next, but I’d still love to hear about any artists you’d like to read about. As always, email me at discblography@gmail.com, or tweet me @discblography. I got a lot of great reactions from my top albums of the year posts last week, so I’m thinking of doing a few more special features from here on out, so keep an eye out for those as well. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see all of you back here next week.

As I’ve been writing about Kid Cudi, and especially as I’ve been getting into his later career, I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes rappers, and especially solo or independent rappers, successful. The hip-hop community continues to be a very insular, self-protective group. It is difficult to break into the rap game, but once you’ve found your niche, fellow artists will continue to support you and stand by your side, whether you deserve it or not. So, in a certain sense, success for a hip-hop artist is very much dependent on how your fellow rappers treat you, as well as how you treat them. In that sense, Kid Cudi was at his most powerful before he released Indicud. Cudi had an insane amount of very talented artists featuring on that project, and artists were vocal in their support of him. However, right before that project dropped, Cudi split from G.O.O.D. Music, and essentially told his friend and mentor Kanye West that he didn’t wat to pursue the same direction that Kanye was headed in. This was the real beginning of Kid Cudi’s downfall, as he would continually deny help from other artists, focusing on the ideas that were within his own head.  It’s tough to truly fault Kid Cudi for these decisions, in part because of how different his style of music is. However, the hip-hop community is not always one to admire lone wolves. Cudi’s next two projects would show just how cut-off Cudi was from the rest of the hip-hop community, as he would circle deeper and deeper into the strange mix of self-absorption and depression that would ultimately nearly destroy his career. While Cudi’s worst mistake was still on its way, Satellite Flight: The Journey to Mother Moon is a great example of what it looks like when an artist has insulated himself from those who may shoot down ideas. Satellite Flight is a weird, confusing project that has largely become forgotten, and probably deserves to be.

Satellite Flight should never have been a full-length album. I feel like before I can really discuss the project as a whole, I need to clarify that off the top. Satellite Flight was originally intended to be an EP, serving as a bridge between Indicud and Man on the Moon III. The Man on the Moon series is obviously incredibly important to Cudi fans, if not hip-hop fans in general, so hearing that Cudi was finally focusing on the follow up was really invigorating. As I said last week, by no means was Indicud terrible, but it was clearly a step down from both of the previous Man on the Moon recordings. Hearing that Cudi was going back to that prestigious series had many fans intrigued by what Satellite Flight might sound like. Of course, as we now know, Cudi has confirmed that Man on the Moon III will never be released. While after the success of Kids See Ghosts, I wouldn’t be surprised if Cudi does go back to that well sometime soon, as of right now it doesn’t seem like Man on the Moon III will be released any time soon. It’s right around the time that Cudi confirmed that Man on the Moon III was not coming out that he also announced that Satellite Flight would instead become a full-length release. This is certainly a detriment to the album, as it never should have been anything other than an EP. Four of the ten tracks are extended instrumentals, with little depth and a plodding pace. “Too Bad I Have to Destroy You Now” is a four-minute song with a two-and-a-half-minute outro that feels tacked on. Yet even with all of these clearly tacked-on additions, Satellite Flight is still only forty-one minutes, barely full-length. Cudi could have really benefitted from reducing the number and length of tracks, and focused his efforts on delivering more complete, succinct lengths. Instead, Satellite Flight becomes a slog, feeling significantly longer than its short run-time.

While Satellite Flight may not really be a complete album, there are definitely some pretty strong moments and good tracks to be found on the project. The thing that really stood out for me on this project was the production. Cudi seems to have learned considerably in the time between Indicud and Satellite Flight. Cudi’s tendency to overproduce largely falls to the wayside, and instead he relies on appropriately spacey, atmospheric keyboards. The whole album features a space-oriented concept, and Cudi’s production definitely helps to set the mood. I think the best produced track on the album is “Going to the Ceremony”, which is Cudi co-produces with his WZRD companion Dot da Genius. The track does a great job of mixing the spacey synths of the rest of the project with the alternative rock guitars that Cudi has used frequently throughout his career. While Cudi does a good job at producing the performance tracks on the record, he does make a mistake by including four instrumentals on the album. While I do like “In My Dreams 2015”, which is a re-work of the track “In My Dreams” from Man on the Moon, I think a few of the instrumentals were simply lengthened for time’s sake. For instance, “Return of the Man on the Moon-Original Score” is a track that could have used some heavy editing, and runs into the problem of being at once predictable and simplistic. Similarly, the track “Copernicus Landing” can’t help but be repetitive and dull. However, as I said previously, when Cudi is producing his own performance, he certainly has achieved a very consistent and relatively successful production sense. What surprised me the most was how consistent the mixing in the album was. In a lot of modern hip-hop you tend to have really muddy and unclear back ends within songs, where the bass is so overpowering that you can’t hear the distinctive elements of the lower pitched instruments. While Satellite Flight has a few moments of this throughout the project, for the most part the album is much clearer than other albums. While that may not sound like much, having clear mixing can really make an album feel like a much more cohesive unit. So even when Cudi is overextending his production abilities, at the very least he is still able to make all of those songs sound good.

While Cudi’s production has really stepped up, unfortunately his vocal performance on this project is one of his weakest. After Indicud, which is definitely more rapping oriented than any of Cudi’s past work, Cudi decides to focus much more on singing on Satellite Flight. The problem with this is that Cudi cannot seem to find the right pitch on almost any song. Take “SATELLITE FLIGHT”, the third track on the project. On the choruses Cudi does a good job of staying on pitch, but whenever you get to a verse or bridge, Cudi can’t help but sound truly terrible. Then there’s “Internal Bleeding”, where between the affects Cudi puts on his voice and the incredible inaccuracy of Cudi’s voice, he sounds like he can’t make up how he wants to sing the song. It’s unfortunate that his singing is so pitchy on “Too Bad I Have to Destroy You Now”, because that song actually features a pretty good rap verse from Cudi, the only real rapping he does on the project. While his singing isn’t always terrible, almost every song on the album does feature at least one moment of cringe, where I can’t help but just feel bad for Kid Cudi. The other major issue I have with Cudi’s vocals on Satellite Flight carries over from Indicud. Satellite Flight doesn’t seem to be about anything. It clearly seems from the general production oeuvre and last two tracks on the album that he was gearing up for a return to the darker and introverted tone of the Man on the Moon series. However, I think the only song that really gets across that feeling very well is album closer “Troubled Boy”. This track features the most emotion from Cudi’s voice, and really gets across the despair he is feeling at discussing his inner emotions again. However, as far as I can tell, the rest of these tracks are mostly hollow, featuring a largely mediocre mix of bragging, positivity, or simple addressing critics. Kid Cudi is truly talented at discussing his mental health and his personal experiences. But when he goes for really broad topics and ideas, he continuously misses. I’m not saying that all of Cudi’s work has to be negative or troubled (I think he made a great album full of positivity this year with Kids See Ghosts). But I do believe that Cudi, at this point in his career, didn’t quite know how to get across positive emotions in an accurate or revealing way.

In today’s modern hip-hop climate, we are constantly dealing with projects that feel longer than they should be. A large reason for this is that artists are now being paid properly by streaming services, and the Billboard charts are finally verifying that streams do account for an artist’s popularity. As a result, many rappers have taken to producing much larger projects, so that they can take advantage of the metrics to increase the popularity of a project. For instance, Drake’s Scorpion is twenty-five songs long, mostly in order to increase the likelihood that at least one of the songs will be continuously streamed. The same can be said for artists like Migos with Culture II and Chris Brown, who released his 45-song long Heartbreak on a Full Moon last year. While this strategy does produce some great sales numbers, it also can frequently result in encouraging quantity over quality. Kid Cudi found himself falling into this trap in a much more backwards way. By deciding to artificially lengthen Satellite Flight, Cudi’s project, which I do believe could have made an interesting albeit flawed EP, was made into a clearly over stuffed mess of a project. It’s hard to see Cudi’s reasoning behind making this project the way that he did, but one has to imagine a large part of it must be due to trying to get his own label off the ground. However, Satellite Flight was both a critical and commercial disaster. 2014 was a strange year for hip-hop, with the biggest album of the year being J. Cole’s 2014 Forest Hills Drive. There were some really great projects from more underground or less popular artists like Freddie Gibbs, Run the Jewels, Isaiah Rashad, and Royce da 5’9”, but for pop rap, 2014 was a bit of a down year. Outside of the J. Cole project and YG’s My Krazy Life, rap was not nearly as successful as it had been even the year before. Kid Cudi’s project did not even make a blip on the rader, and in large part I think that’s very understandable. Satellite Flight is the definition of forgettable, going right in your ears and leaving just as quickly as it appeared. While his next project would be much more memorable, Satellite Flight is properly remembered as a strange footnote in Cudi’s career arc.

Thanks for reading this week, I know that this wasn’t the most exciting album to write about. Next week I’ll be taking a quick break from talking about Kid Cudi, and instead talk about my top rap and rock albums of the year so far. After that, I’ll be right back on the Cudi train, as I discuss Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven. I don’t normally say that you need to listen to the projects before you read my posts, but for this one, I truly think you won’t be able to grasp just what I’m talking about until you give this project a listen. As always, if you want to share your opinions, or have any other artists that you’d like to read about, you can send me an email at discblography@gmail.com, or follow me @discblography. Thanks again for reading, and I’ll be back next week with a little break from our regularly scheduled programming!

One of the main reasons why I decided to do a blog series about Kid Cudi was because of the rapper’s fans. Outside of maybe Kanye West, very few artists seem to have the cult-like worship that Kid Cudi inspires out of his fan base. I do think that much of this hype is deserved. The Man on the Moon albums were both great, era-defining moments for hip-hop fans, especially among my generation. To this day, playing songs like “Pursuit of Happiness” will bring back memories of high school for me. But by 2013, no other fan base had become quite as confusing as Cudi’s. Leading up to his 2013 release, Indicud, Kid Cudi had made a series of strange, career altering decisions; decisions that would almost certainly set any artist up to fail. Indicud is the moment in Cudi’s career where he really began to shift perspective, and many of his fans weren’t up for the change. The Kid Cudi fan-base would quickly become one of the more tortured group of hip-hop fans, as Cudi continuously moved forward in his own direction, leaving quite a few people who previously admired him in his wake. Indicud is far from a terrible album, but many of the decisions Cudi makes are frustrating and confusing, and seem to be done more to prove a point than anything else.

In between Man on the Moon II and Indicud, Kid Cudi released an album with his side project WZRD. Their self-titled project was an alt-rock album, with Cudi on vocals and Plain Pat producing the instrumentals. I decided not to cover WZRD for a few reasons, most importantly because it is not a Cudi solo album. However, I also feel like WZRD is a record that is the definition of inconsequential. While the project sold well, it hardly left a mark on either the rock scene or the hip-hop scene. The project as a whole is pretty bland and by-the-numbers, but if you’re interested, give it a try and let me know what you think. The other really big change for Cudi was that he left G.O.O.D. Music. Kanye West’s record label has always been a very polarizing hip-hop company, given that so much of its decisions are overseen by West himself. G.O.O.D. Music has done a lot of good for some of their artists, such as Pusha T, Big Sean, and West himself. However, the label has also been known to be a hindrance for some. CyHi the Prince was sidelined for seven years by the label, being forced to work primarily as a ghost-writer. Common was with the label for six years, and released one great project and two atrocious ones. Kid Cudi had been discovered by West, and while he certainly owed much of his early success to Kanye, I also completely understand why he felt the need to escape. I’m sure Cudi was eager to remove himself from Kanye’s shadow, especially at this time. While he may be even more troubled now, in 2013 Kanye released Yeezus, an album that owes much of its inspiration to Kanye’s rage and reclusiveness at the time. By the time Cudi released Indicud, he had very few expectations of him, given that he had spent the previous two years working on and promoting a confusing rock record. Similarly, he was working independently, no longer having the oversight of G.O.O.D. Music to support him. As I mentioned in my last post, Cudi was also no longer working with his main collaborater, Emile Haynie. Instead Cudi self-produced Indicud, was his own manager, and was met with low expectations. All of this would help to make Indicud the interesting, confusing mess that it is.

As opposed to the Man on the Moon albums, Indicud is produced entirely by Kid Cudi. Emile Haynie’s influence is nowhere to be seen on this album, and Cudi’s lack of experience in production clearly shows on this album. While some songs are actually produced quite well, especially in the beginning and latter part of the album, Cudi often has the problem that many young producers face: over-production. On many of the tracks, it feels like Kid Cudi can’t make a definitive statement of where he wants his production to go. I certainly appreciate some of the creative decisions he makes, but unfortunately, a large part of the album feels like Cudi discovered certain sounds and wanted to force them in to particular songs. A great example of this is “King Wizard”, a song where Cudi can’t seem to reach a decision on what he wants his song to sound like. The beat switches every 20 seconds or so, and while he raps perfectly adequately on the track, too often on the song it feels like he’s trying to save a track that is otherwise somewhat tedious by constantly increasing the amount of production. Similarly, on “Immortal”, Cudi takes a relatively interesting sample of an MGMT song played backwards, and then adds so many layers to it that the inherently interesting sample gets completely buried. The mixing on Indicud is another really big problem. Take “Young Lady”, a song built around a Father John Misty sample. This song was probably the most disappointing track on the album for me, and a large reason for that was because of Cudi’s production. There are so many layers on this track that the guitars, drums, and synths all get muddled in the track. The sample is so far forward in the track that all of the production that Cudi adds completely muddles the back end, creating a really muddy, messy sound. I’ll get to some of the points where Cudi actually does well later in the post, and to be fair, for a first-time producer, it’s not the worst effort I’ve heard. However, perhaps rather than diving in head-first, if Cudi had instead peppered in some of his own production while getting some assistance, Indicud would have been a much better album and inspired some hope for his future projects.

Cudi himself also sounds very different on Indicud. For this album, Cudi mostly drops the concept idea that he used to strong effect on his previous projects. Instead of focusing on his inner thoughts and his demons, Cudi instead focuses on positivity and getting back at nay-sayers. It’s a pretty natural progression for Cudi, and makes sense that this would be the album where he would want to go for a victory run. I don’t have a problem with this approach per se, but throughout the album, it still feels like he doesn’t really have much to say other than that. For example, on “Lord of the Sad and Lonely”, Cudi seems really close to getting at something deeper in his rhymes, but unfortunately it just seems to be a song that is just about how dope he is. While this is a common topic for rappers, Cudi simply isn’t a good enough rapper to make 18 tracks of boasts and positivity interesting. What I find most interesting about Indicud is just how much more of a rap album it is than any of Cudi’s previous work. Cudi still frequently sings his own hooks and choruses, but there are no moments on this album like “Mr. Rager” that are solely devoted to Cudi singing. Kid Cudi’s rapping is definitely better on this project than it was on his previous albums, but it is still very inconsistent. There are still many moments where he seems to lose his grasp on the beat, and stops himself mid-verse or mid-bar. These moments really take you out of the flow, and can be really aggravating. That being said, Kid Cudi’s singing is even more hit-or-miss on this album than any of his others. Cudi’s issues with pitch are even more prevalent on Indicud than ever before. “Immortal” is the worst example of this. On the chorus Cudi sings completely out of his range, and sounds like a bad karaoke singer. There are still some good moments of Cudi singing, but it definitely is his biggest weakness on the project, and to that extent, he does a good job at minimizing it.

While both Cudi’s production and his performance are both really inconsistent, on many tracks he finds able to create some pretty good music. When Indicud works, it works well, and has some tracks that are real high-lights. “Just What I Am” is the main single from the album, and is probably the best track on the album. The track is easily the best produced beat on the album, teetering just on the edge of being over-produced, while featuring the best hook on the album. It also features a pretty good verse from Cudi’s most frequent collaborator, King Chip. Part of what makes Indicud so different from his previous works is that Cudi does a much better job of sharing the spotlight. In fact, two of the tracks on the album don’t feature Cudi at all, “Red Eye” which is a spotlight for up and coming band HAIM, and “Beez”, a song rapped entirely by RZA of Wu-Tang Clan. With the album’s length, having these two tracks as short breaks between the rest of Cudi’s work is pretty refreshing. There’s also the track “Brothers”, which features verses from King Chip and A$AP Rocky, and also has some of Cudi’s more understated production. “Brothers” is another one of my favorite tracks from the album, in part of how great Cudi does on this track at playing third fiddle. Cudi also has a pretty interesting three song movement in the back half of his album, from “Burn Baby Burn” to “Cold Blooded”, where he drops three of his most traditional rap songs of his last three albums. While I’m not a fan of “Lord of the Sad and Lonely”, I think “Cold Blooded” works well. Cudi’s mixing of synth-pop drums with minor chord piano and heavily synthesized bass works well in the beat, and Cudi’s rapping on the song is some of the best on the album. The song also has one of the few definable hooks on this album. All of this is to say that Indicud is by no means a bad album. While I think there are some truly terrible songs on this project, (“Young Lady”, “Immortal”, and Afterwards (Bring Yo Friends) are the best example), there are also some really great moments in this project. Indicud is a great example of a very average album. And given the circumstances that lead to its creating, the fact that Cudi was able to make anything more than mediocre should be seen as a success. However, given how good his previous two works were, it’s still hard to be anything less than disappointed with this release.

Indicud is maybe the first album of Cudi’s works that really seemed to have no effect on the hip-hop community at large. 2013 was a very good year for hip-hop, and I think it’s the moment when the older generations of rappers of the 2000’s really gave over to the rappers who would define the 2010’s. Outside of Kanye’s Yeezus and Pusha T’s My Name is My Name, the hip-hop world was dominated by younger artists. Drake’s Nothing Was the Same solidified him as a pop music sensation, A$AP Rocky released his first studio project, and Chance The Rapper released the small slice of near-perfection that is Acid Rap. I’ve mentioned it before, but Cudi got successful at a very strange time for hip-hop, when this transition between older rappers and newer rappers was just beginning. I think this transition was a huge problem for Cudi’s pop aspirations. Cudi’s persona and style were quickly taken and used by more successful up-and-coming artists even faster than what is expected. By the time Indicud was released I think the overall pop potential for a Kid Cudi album was not nearly as high as what it had been just three years before. Going forward to 2018, Indicud seems to be a forgotten album. The next few releases for Cudi are often seen as his dark years, when he was making regrettable, bad music. Some of that was, but in the case of Indicud, there’s nothing truly offensive going on. Cudi has created an incredibly tough situation for himself, and tried to make out of it the best way he could. While Indicud is far from a great album, it should not be treated as negatively as I feel like it is.

Thanks for reading everyone. Next week I’ll be covering an album that I had a hard time remembering existed, Kid Cudi’s fourth studio album, Satellite Flight: The Journey to Mother Moon. Originally intended as an EP, this project was given proper album release, so it should be interesting to see how it works as a long-play. I think this blog post has me coming very close to pin-pointing where Cudi went wrong in his career, and I think I’ve found the thread that would lead to Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven. If you want to share any thoughts on Kid Cudi, the blog, or just give me some music recommendations, keep sending emails over to discblography@gmail.com, or tweeting me @discblography. I apologize for the rockiness of this post, I didn’t have the time to edit as much as I typically do. But fear not, because I’m back to my normal schedule, and will be all ready to go for next week. See all of you then!