CONTENTS

ur story starts out in New York’s South Bronx,
where a young rapper named Scott Mescudi
is crashing at his uncle’s place after arriving
from the suburbs of Cleveland, OH, where
he’d been trying, to no avail, to get the locals
interested in his quirky, yet larger-than-life
new persona he calls Kid Cudi. Like anyone
who has ever heard the call––whether it
be from Grandmaster Flash & the Furious
Five or Ben E. King––New York, NY, is the
birthplace of hip-hop, and on Broadway is where you come to see
your name in lights. Which is exactly what Mescudi, or Cudi, did in
October 2004––with only a demo tape and five-hundred bucks cash
in his pocket.
After getting a job at American Apparel he hooked up with Plain Pat
and Emile and recorded “Day ‘n’ Night,” a single that would not only
change his life, but the notions of what kind of artist he is. Hip-hop?
Pop? EDM? That’s the way Kid Cudi likes it. And while he may brush
off his collaborations, he earned a Grammy for his work on Kanye
West’s “All of the Lights” (which also features Rihanna and Fergie).
Cudi was there for West, helping
him in the studio on several cuts, and
in turn West was there for Cudi when
he signed him to his own G.O.O.D.
Music label. But now the social media
savvy rapper (according to The Hype
Machine, he is among the top 10 most
blogged about artists of all-time) has
stepped out to release his third album
Indicud (which debuted at No. 2 on
the Billboard 200 album sales chart)
in conjunction with G.O.O.D. Music,
Republic and his new imprint, Wicked
Awesome Records.
We catch up Kid Cudi in between
gigs as he winds down The Cud Life
Tour, a spectacle that has Mescudi-cum-Cudi transforming into the
“Moon Man,” who’s somewhere between David Bowie and Tony
Stark.
Music Connection: Was there a hip-hop scene in Cleveland when
you were coming up?
Kid Cudi: Yeah, there was a very small scene that was a dope collection
of hip-hop heads, but you had to know about it and ask around. It was on
the west side, and it was hard to get a ride over there, but I was always
there trying to do these freestyle battles. [There was another competition
where] you’d give them an original song and they played it with other
original songs, and if you win that you get to come back next week and
perform the song in a 15 minute set; so you know that was my goal: “Shit
I gotta have this dope song, then I gotta go perform!”
MC: Did the scene take to you right away?
Kid Cudi: I would win some competitions and lose some, but when I lost
everyone looked at me like I was fuckin’ crazy. They were like, “what the
fuck am I listening to?” And, “Who is this dude?” I was always pushing
the envelope and trying new things, I went out of my way to find my own
voice, and I think that’s how I developed my sound. I was about growth
and adventures and living life and seeing what was out there, but I always
felt trapped in Cleveland. I’m gonna tell it to you like this, and this might
come off crazy, but I was like, “This town ain’t ready for me. Who I am
don’t fit here. I need to go where I fit, where I find inspiration.”
MC: But why the Big Apple? Did the fact that it’s the birthplace of
hip-hop play a role?
Kid Cudi: Something told me that to start a new chapter I needed to
be in New York. Call it instinct or intuition or God looking out for me, I
don’t know. I was heavily influenced by New York: its cinema and its hiphop.
And I knew it was a place where I could grow and meet interesting
people, because that’s what I was really yearning for. I was pursuing a
career in music and going into acting; I wanted to be around people who
were like me and there were no people like that in Cleveland. New York
is definitely where I shed my skin. New York was like me coming into
manhood. I had done road trips, but I was very sheltered and I realized
that when I came to New York it was like culture shock. It was intense, but
I needed that. I experienced a lot of shit early on that I never experienced
in Cleveland that made me a beast in with my business and my hustle.
MC: Can you walk us through your first moves? Was there a
strategy or a plan?
Kid Cudi: I didn’t have a plan at all. I didn’t know what I was doing and
it was probably the craziest thing I could have ever done. I stayed with
my uncle for bit, and I told myself that I would find a job, get on my feet
first and maybe I would get enough money where I could afford some
studio time. That was the extent of my plan. I was walking up and down
Broadway dropping off applications everyplace you can imagine from
McDonald’s to Foot Locker, and thank God I found a job because it was
enough to get me a Metro card and some studio time.
It’s crazy when I think about it, because there are certain events that
lead to these things to happen, and I never went out of my way to make
them happen; it’s like the stars lined up. Meeting [then manager and still
producer] Plain Pat and forming that alliance was probably when the shit
started to become real; because I aligned myself with someone who had
the information that I needed to be able to create music, to create an
album. And there was his professionalism. And he knew not only what
people wanted to hear, he knew that I was
a true artist and he guided me, and I think
that was a turning point.
From there I would say signing the
deal with A-Trak and Fool’s Gold is when
the music came out officially, and that’s
when he suggested the Cookers remix;
and that’s when things really started to
happen, you know what I’m saying?
MC: Can you give any advice on
taking that first step?
Kid Cudi: I’m not big on giving advice,
because I feel like a lot of kids right now
get it twisted, like they have to be some
kind of opportunist to get what they
want. I don’t like throwing out lines about
how to get into the business, because
there is no real way to know, especially
nowadays with the Internet.
I feel like the best advice I can give
anyone is to just create and put it out
there and have faith in your art and keep perfecting it and pray to God
that someone hears it and likes it and you get a deal. I can’t say to run
to a label, or to stand outside in front of Hot 97, or to align yourself with
people in the business, because that’s creepy, that’s not how you do it.
That’s not how I did it. I ran into people. I stumbled into muthafucker’s laps
and they stumbled into mine.
I met Kanye several times before, but he didn’t sign me until he heard
my mixtape and learned about my body of work. It was always based on
my work, my art and my product, not getting in someone’s face or chasing
someone down or kissing someone’s ass. So I would say to kids just focus
on your craft and if you build it they will fucking come. And that is the truth.
MC: So it’s fair to say that the mixtape is still a great calling card?
Kid Cudi: Oh yeah, definitely and I love doing those songs at the shows
because kids get so excited. I start the show off with “Down and Out”
(sings intro which kicks off his debut mixtape, A Kid Named Cudi). Think
about it: that was the first time people heard my voice. I was a shot in the
dark, I wasn’t very confident with that mix tape, I knew it was the music I
wanted to make but did I know that people would like it? I had no fucking
clue. But people really liked it. Thank God. I’m very blessed that I had
ears in the world that were ready to hear some mature music. You know,
some shit with some substance, some authentic energy. That was real
and from the heart.
MC: What did you learn from Kanye West and Jay Z? Any key
conversation you may have had?
Kid Cudi: I can’t pinpoint one conversation, because there were many of
them, but there are things that I see in Kanye and Jay Z: people who stay
true to their art, people who stay true to themselves, you know, do things
their own way. There’s beauty in that, especially for a young black man who
came from an environment where niggas were doing nothing but getting in
trouble, getting killed and thrown in jail.
Jay Z and Kanye are once in a lifetime artists. Like Michael Jackson,
November 2013 musicconnection.com 37