Throughout, Cudi's issues could not be rendered in a more clumsy or obvious way, blowing up every slight perceived or real ("had mad jobs and I lost damn near all of them") into trials of such mythical proportions that it needs a bogus four-part "plot" (Cudi is sad, does mushrooms, starts to get famous, is still sad) and narration from Common.Ĭudi also slathers his verses with a flat warble that Auto-Tune was made to salvage. "I got some issues that nobody can see," goes the hook to "Soundtrack 2 My Life", and it's a boast as grandiose as you're likely to hear in 2009. The problem is how these two impulses feed off each other in all the wrong ways, with Cudi inverting the songwriting process so that a supposed pursuit of honesty is rendered predatory and manipulative. And we won't play the hipster card, since this record lives and dies by its lyrics as much as any document of spit-these-bars formalism. Now, I still check for Atmosphere projects and I've got a functioning knowledge of the Get Up Kids' discography, so I can't knock Man on the Moon for skewing emo.
But whereas 808s was a record about a very public figure attempting a retreat he'd be incapable of sustaining, Man on the Moon uses quotidian, lonely stoner turmoil as a means of introduction. Cudi co-wrote several tracks on 808s (most notably guesting on "Welcome to Heartbreak"), and combined with hits in Drake's "Best I Ever Had" and Cudi's own "Day 'N' Nite", the commercial resiliency of that album proved that fad or not, this sadsack backpack stuff is here to stay.
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