Kid Cudi’s problem is also his blessing: he is a one hit wonder and the one hit is unlike anything else in pop music. “Pursuit Of Happiness”, coming after his string of songs with Kanye West,”Heartless,” “Welcome to Heartbreak,” “Paranoid,” and “RoboCop” which essentially rewrote the story of hip hop one time, brought atmospheric blue blue electric blue to hip hop and when listening, some six years later, to Satelitte Flight: The Journey to Mother Moon, it is hard to see what has changed, or even improved. The songs aren’t as good as songs and aren’t any better as slashes of sound mode mood pieces.
That Satelitte Flight: The Journey to Mother Moon is better than last years overly ambitious Indicud (geddit) is much more a question of focus than any brave new world of Cudi.
The Kid is an interesting case, his father died at the age of eleven, and his Uncle threw him out. The Kid became suicidal and recently claimed “There wasn’t a week or a day that didn’t go by where I was just like, ‘You know, I wanna check out.’”.
So, yeah Kid Cudi has this one brooding, introspective blue note synth deep bass sound and whether he is searching for life on the moon or sex on terra firma, he plays it over and over again and the ten song sudden release newbie does what he does and he does it well but he doesn’t do it exactly memorably. The best songs here, “Balmain Jeans” followed by “Too Bad I Have To Destroy You”, the best rap on the album, are good without really having lasting power. It is ephemera working in the back of your pleasure pitt. It is like Kanye crca 8-8s without the genius. It is all good and interesting, and deeply focussed sounds, but you have to give it too much.
Plus, intellectually, Cudi is a little vapid for his hard pushed intentions for mainstream success. Banal on stage, he is a distressed fuzzy weediness on record: it is like he is smoking medical marijuana and giving up on the pleasure of the high and is at he pace where there is a heavy cloud around him.
Is there life on the moon? with the possible exception of some single cell microbes, no there isn’t.Maybe he needs to move on.
Grade: B
