Tracking Kid Cudi's Influence

As he's prone to do these days, Kid Cudi went on a Twitter rant of epic proportions earlier this week, talking about crushing "the entire existence" of "clowns" who "be having 30 people write songs for them," singling out Kanye West and Drake, and proclaiming, "I am the culture." Ye and Drizzy, both currently on nationwide tours, responded onstage the next night, with the former taking a more prideful, "I birthed you" approach, and the latter doing things the classic Drake way and making one of the lamest puns I've ever heard. 

Although expressed in typically narcissistic terms, Cudi and West both have a point (Drake, like many, believes that Cudi's "way too high," but there's no way to confirm that). Cudi's influence, starting 2008 in with his A Kid Named Cudi mixtape and his assistance on 808s & Heartbreak, can't be denied in the last eight years of hip hop, although it is often wildly overstated. Kanye did, however, give his former protege an insanely helpful leg-up into the industry, and though I'm not willing to do the necessary research to prove who "wore skinny jeans first," shaped Cudi's style just as much as any rapper who got their start after College Dropout. 

The days of dime-a-dozen Kanye clone blog rappers have come and (very, very thankfully) gone, and while there's little to no traces of Charle Hamilton's Sega Genesis boom bap, B.o.B's pop-friendly Southern charm, or even Lupe Fiasco's conceptual righteousness in young up-and-comers today, the ripple effect of Cudi's sadboy crooning still seems to be going strong. To prove that behind all of the crazy chest-puffing and lackluster recent albums, Cudi does a have a point, we're tracing his influence through various aspects of the rap game. 

Kanye's most drastic stylistic change-up came to be one of the most influential moves in the past decade, and Kid Cudi played key role in the album's creation. In addition to his feature on "Welcome To Heartbreak," Cudi scored writing credits on three more tracks, prompting many to suggest that the album was partially constructed from already-written song of his. Ye keeps his recording process and ever-shifting braintrust under tight wraps, so we may never know if there's any truth to that, but it has been confirmed that Cudi was originally brought in for Jay-Z's Blueprint 3 sessions with Ye, and according to No I.D., “The 808 records came out of doing the Blueprint 3 records.“

It's not as if Cudi had his full Man Of The Moon sound and style intact at the time though. A Kid Named Cudi, released four months before 808s, was about halfway to the spaced-out, expansive place he'd eventually take his music, so although you can give him credit for pointing Ye towards a melodic, mournful vocal approach, you can't act like he was the sole inspiration behind the album. Ye cited '80s synthpop artists such as Gary Numan and Tears For Fears as the primary source of 808s' technology, as well as its poppier sound, and listening eight years later, 808s has much more in common with those artists' music than it does with AKNC or MOTM. As usual, Kanye drew from a wide variety of existing sources to come up with something astoundingly unique, but this is the only one of his albums that rests a good deal of its weight on Cudi's shoulders. 

Drake's So Far Gone, on the other hand, mimics more of 808s' characteristics than the amount that 808s copped from Cudi, but in that path of influence to Drizzy's breakout project, a little bit of Cudi was swept up too. Opener "Lust For Life," which funnily enough samples Tears For Fears, would fit right in with MOTM's most depressing moments, and although the tape is a good deal more R&B-focused than any of Cudi's work, Drake and Cudi's rapping styles were pretty similar at the time. And even though they're both outliers on their respective projects, singles "Best I Ever Had" and "Make Her Say" bear some similarities, from their silly sexual double entendres to uncharacteristically boom-bappy beats. So Far Gone, like a AKNC, also features Drake rapping over some tracks by indie rock and pop artists, which brings us to...

Cudi was far from the first rapper to work with musicians from other genres, but his devotion to cross-genre experiments definitely came to define his career and inform how other rappers would attempt similar collabs in the following years. Kanye was on an indie rock tip too, and it's hard to imagine Cudi sampling Band Of Horses and Ratatat on AKNC, or Drake sampling Peter Bjorn And John on So Far Gone, if Ye hadn't first sampled "Young Folks" on a (very regrettable) track on his 2007 tape Can't Tell Me Nothing. Cudi ran with this though, continuing to work with or sample artists like MGMT, Haim, Father John Misty, Vampire Weekend, and St. Vincent throughout his career. 

While those collabs helped expand Cudi's vision and raise his cool kid status, they weren't doing work on the charts (aside from "Pursuit Of Happiness"). For some of his biggest hits, Cudi would seek out artists from another genre: EDM. Crookers were the first to cross him over into their clubbier world, remixing "Day N Night" into chart success in Europe, and going on to feature Cudi on their aptly-named track "Embrace The Martian." Collaborations with David Guetta, A-Trak, and Steve Aoki would follow, paving the way for the huge amount of EDM/hip hop crossover songs we've heard in the past five or so years. Rap music has undeniably grown more open to the inclusion and influence of indie and electronic genres in the past decade, and Cudi played no small role in that. 

If Cudi has a number-one fan in hip hop, it's Travis Scott. He was quoted in an interview last year saying, "There would be no Travis Scott if it wasn’t for [Cudi]," and went on to share a story about their first meeting, which left him in tears. Other fanboy-esque moments have followed, from Scott Instagramming a pic of him holding an "Indicud" hat, to emotional tweets responding to Cudi showing support for Rodeo, and this was all before they finally appeared on two tracks together earlier this month.

Scott's early work, especially the majority of Owl Pharaoh, but also Days Before Rodeo's more low-key moments, bear clear similarities to Cudi's style, and although Scott's gone on to incorporate the styles of a dozen other popular rappers, it's very clear that Cudi's music is still near and dear to his heart. 

How many rap songs did you hear about depression and hallucinogens before 2008? Not nearly as many as you hear every week in the years that have followed. For one, Cudi and Drake were probably the first two artists called "emo rappers" for being unafraid to get way, way into their feelings, both able to traverse a variety of emotions with their abilities to both rap and sing. Immediately afterwards, guys like Childish Gambino, Danny Brown, Earl Sweatshirt, Tyler the Creator, and Kendrick Lamar would make entire albums that revolved around depression and/or introspective exploration, both of which were pretty rare topics in the two preceding decades of hip hop. 

Then there's hallucinogens, arguably the least popular drug to be rapped about in hip hop until Cudi came along and openly talked about doing shrooms and acid. "Split an eighth of shrooms just so I could see the universe," he rapped on "Soundtrack 2 My Life," and "If you'd like to know, yes, I am on acid" on "Solo Dolo Pt. II." Since then, it seems like every young rapper of a certain artistic background dabbles with psychedelics: A$AP Rocky, iLoveMakonnen, Chance The Rapper, Flatbush Zombies, The Underachievers, Ab-Soul, Mac Miller, Action Bronson, Denzel Curry, and many more have been unafraid to experiment with acid and shrooms. Of course, it's been rumored that Cudi's gotten into some different drugs as of late, but musically, he'll always be most closely associated with hallucinogens. 

Although Cudi hails from Cleveland and ha never made anything that could be considered trap music, his influence seems to have made its biggest mark on the wave of artists that started coming out of ATL about three or four years ago, often dubbed "New Atlanta." For the most part, these rappers blend singing and rapping just as effortlessly as Drake and Cudi, and many have also rapped about the psychedelics we know Cudi loves. But the musical influence is there too, in the forlorn, extraterrestrial soundscapes that are equally informed by ATLiens and the MOTM series. Take Key! and OG Maco's "IDK," or Makonnen's "Down 4 So Long," or Jace's "Trust," or Raury's "Trap Tears." Cudi's influence permeates all of them, from the sound to the subject matter. He's still one of the artists most frequently cited or invoked by young up-and-comers-- a quick search of my email inbox found three rappers billing themselves as Cudi-influenced, and just today, the site Pigeons & Planes introduced a new artist with the age-old "If you like Kid Cudi, check out ____" format. Maintaining relevance for eight years is no easy task, but Cudi's managed to do it by inspiring a generation and living on in their adaptations of his style.