Kids See Ghosts, their debut collaborative album, is the work of two men struggling to shake their demons. Both West and Cudi closed out 2016 in treatment, West in a terrifying hospitalization incident where he was carted off, handcuffed inside an ambulance, and Cudi in rehab for self-harm and thoughts of taking his own life.
Cudi chased his dream of success in hip-hop from Cleveland to New York City, where he toiled in retail until he met West and Fool’s Gold Records founder A-Trak, who joint-released his bleak breakout single “Day N Nite.” Over the next few years, the singer built a strong following off of therapeutic tunes about coping with depression, then a 2010 drug arrest cemented the idea that the depression and dependency stories of “Don’t Play This Song” and “These Worries” were coming from a very real place of inner torment. Kanye is hip-hop’s premier maximalist and egomaniac, but his music and manner have grown progressively prickly and troubled since the loss of his mother in 2007, and we are only this year learning that worrisome reports about his well-being during the rollout of 2016’s The Life of Pablo dovetailed with an opioid addiction and a bipolar disorder diagnosis. Kid Cudi and Kanye West are an effective team because both are Midwest boys with complicated stories, whose music radiates whatever joy or pain they’re feeling in the moment.
You can catch a glimmer of Cudi in fashion-conscious rappers like Travis Scott and A$AP Rocky you can hear his unvarnished emotionalism in the confessional words of young songwriters like Kevin Abstract. 808s is on the short list of the most influential albums of the aughts without the soft drums, atmospheric synths, and wounded vocals of songs like “Say You Will,” it’s possible that Drake would continue trailing the moves of indie rap vets Phonte and Nickelus F, as he did in his early mixtapes, instead of exploding into the pop-rap supernova he is today. Kid Cudi and Kanye West are an unlikely pair because neither one is heralded as a technically gifted singer or rapper, but working together on West’s 808s & Heartbreak, Cudi’s Man on the Moon series, and elsewhere, the pair managed to leave indelible marks on the landscape of mainstream rap. Pusha-T and Malice mixed a malevolent id and a haunted conscience as the Clipse. Outkast’s Big Boi anchored Andre 3000’s offbeat creativity with solid hooks and bars. Chuck D was Public Enemy’s politically charged brain, and Flavor Flav provided comic relief. Hip-hop’s greatest duos are wonders of chemistry and complementary strengths. Compound this upward of 50 times, and you’ve got yourself an earworm that hits the heart.Kids See Ghosts artwork by Takashi Murakami. The howling creep of Pusha-T’s opening verse on “Feel the Love,” Kanye’s emphatic gun sounds, and Kid Cudi’s of-the-soil humming carries a new, spiritual air as the album feeds meaning and atmosphere into itself. “Cudi Montage” bathes us in a cleansing lightness that informs subsequent listens. Where comfort could easily breed a lull, KIDS SEE GHOSTS manages to evolve before our eyes. When you feel you’ve found your place in an album, there’s no impetus to shut it off.
Along with an experimental and hypnotic sonic odyssey, the format of KIDS SEE GHOSTS delivers the enveloping comfort of belonging. The constant cycling and familiar warmth of Cudi’s hums give listeners the sense that they’ve heard this album before, that they know all the words intrinsically. It is all the easier to commit to a 20-minute album three times than a 60-minute album any number of times, no matter how good the music.
The seven-track format is a key player here, too. Ever the over-thinker, while I poured hours into a search for meaning over feeling, the album was quietly doing the legwork in the background, until KIDS SEE GHOSTS and the universe it so effortlessly spun became my unavoidable foreground. This storm of reaction and contradiction was an essential element for the mythos of the album. For each piece read, I opened two more, and all the while the record kept spinning.
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