Kid Cudi: How He Made It in America

Kid Cudi twirls a neon-red, Darth Maul--style, double-bladed lightsaber skyward, and then catches it, mid-spin.

"I need this on tour, so when motherfuckers run up, I can just be, like, 'Breach!' " He twists his head around and shoots me a devilish look.


Dressed this August afternoon as casually as one can be wearing black leather pants and a gold Jesus piece pendant, Cudi, 26, is hanging at home, a sparse, high-ceiling loft in Manhattan's tony TriBeCa neighborhood. But the reference to defending himself is not quite a joke. Last December, onstage in Vancouver, Cudi picked up a wallet, thrown from the crowd, that he claimed had struck him square in the face. Irritated, he pointed out who he thought was the wallet's owner, a fan named Michael Sharpe, and tossed it to him. But the billfold didn't belong to Sharpe, so he tossed it back onstage. Cudi then leaped over a barricade and confronted Sharpe, who was smiling, thrilled to be face-to-face with an artist he admired. Misinterpreting the smile, Cudi popped the fan in the right eye. A frenzy ensued, bouncers lunged, and moments later Cudi dropped the mic and left. It's all on YouTube, for posterity.

Then, something unexpected happened. Sharpe told TMZ the next day: "I'm not upset, I'm not going to be that person. I just want to meet him and be like, 'I'm the guy you punched.' I'm not going to press charges."

Five months after the incident, a regretful Cudi brought Sharpe onstage at Seattle's Sasquatch Festival during the song "Pursuit of Happiness." Afterward, the two had pizza at Cudi's hotel. "We're good friends [now]," he says.

Typical Cudi. He's a star in the traditional sense--handsome, styled just so, a bit of a prima donna. But he carries a tidal wave of insecurity and empathy with him. It's a vulnerability, uncommon in the preening world of hip-hop, that has made him an avatar for young, plainspoken dysfunction. And despite, or in part because of, these genuinely distressed emotional flare-ups, Kid Cudi has exceptionally loyal fans.

"At least 104,000," he says, leaning against a Bape pillow on a sectional couch and taking a pull on his third weed-filled Swisher of the day. The number becomes a sort of mantra during our interview. Actually, it's the number of copies sold (104,419 exactly) of his debut album, Man on the Moon: The End of Day, in its first week of 2009 release, good for a No. 4 debut on the Billboard chart. Most of the sales were propelled by breakout single "Day 'N' Nite." Even now, nearly three years since it was recorded and four since it was written, the song sounds like an alien outlier. It's all bloops, astral synths, and a remarkable half-sung melody--"The lonely stoner seems to free his mind at night." Like some evolutionary strand of new-age rap, it became a rallying cry for the disaffected and depressed. When the Italian duo Crookers' electro-house remix hit in late 2008, a swarm of antic, active fans--many in Europe--bought in. Jim Jones, Trey Songz, Pitbull, and many others recorded their own versions. The song has sold an astonishing 2.3 million digital singles.

Despite concern from his co-managers--Patrick "Plain Pat" Reynolds, a longtime Kanye West affiliate, and producer Emile Haynie, the rapper's primary musical collaborator--Cudi hasn't been haunted by the shadow of "Day 'N' Nite." "I think he knows he's a star now," Haynie says. "But before we put out the first album, to a lot of people he was just the 'Day 'N' Nite' guy."

In fact, the first thing Cudi wants to do when we sit down is play a song he's just recorded with "Day 'N' Nite" producer Dot Da Genius that he's hoping to squeeze onto his new album, Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager, before deadline. It might be called "Not That Bad," but it's unfinished. As the swaying, sunken beat begins, Cudi taps his retro Air Jordan IV Pure Money $ sneakers on the floor.

The chorus is simple, but considered: "I'm not that bad at all / When you think of the world / It's not that bad at all."

Anyone who has followed the problematic aspects of Cudi's life to this point--his struggle with drugs, his violent outbursts, a recent arrest--will understand why he's giving himself (and everyone, really) a pass. He has to. It's the only way to keep the doubts from consuming him.