It’s his chance to turn the theme of loneliness in the big city into pop gold, while also streamlining the melancholy aura, deepening it and making it clearer. The transitional song from the darkness to the light is, appropriately enough, “Day ‘N’ Night”, the song that also basically marked his transition from mixtape rapper to major-label artist.
He sing-raps them all, sounding as emo as a rapper can be, though much less angry than anyone else who has been tagged with that dreaded word.
They’re internal songs, where his mind-state is the subject. Actually, references to both drugs abound throughout, but these three songs carry the blind-to-the-world quality of the former. This is the weed section of the album, as opposed to the later section where he’s on psychedelics. He’s stuck in obscurity, and the music sounds appropriately obscure. He eventually gets recognized as the star he always knew he was, and lives the superstar life… or maybe he’s still dreaming about that stage of his life, and we’re just witnessing what his dreams sound like.Īfter the opening three-song introduction, we get the three-song section of the album where he’s trapped in his solitary world. He uses drugs to calm his fears and fend off night terrors. The plot is this: lonely guy sits in his room and dreams of success. Narrated rather unnecessarily by Common, reading in his best “deep thoughts” voice, Man on the Moon is structured as the story of a man. Kid Cudi’s not exactly the Beat Happening of hip-hop, but he doesn’t care if he rhymes “girls” with “girls” or drops an awkward couplet. Like that album, it could be taken as claiming a place within hip-hop for feeling over virtuosity. His rap-singing is related to the sort-of singing style of Kanye West’s last album, 808s & Heartbreak, for which Kid Cudi co-wrote two songs. The method of rhyming Kid Cudi displays on those two songs is of a piece with his style of singing: colloquial and messy, languid but piercing. The two-and-a-half minute pop song, similarly stage-ready, but with an outer-space style (in part due to an OMD sample), introduces Kid Cudi’s willingness to experiment. The third song, actually, is part of the second half of that introduction. And then there’s a much spunkier, much more sparkly theme song where he shows off his rapping style, proclaiming, “This is the soundtrack to my life”.
There’s a murky interior monologue about success, the lack of it, and his inner conflicts, where he welcomes us: “you’re in my dreams”. The first two tracks on Man on the Moon: The End of Day are a one-two introduction to Kid Cudi and what he’s up to.