Kid Cudi Talks About His Darkest Hour
I started working on Man on the Moon II a few months before I almost overdosed. The drugs were heavily involved in its creation; they put me in a dark mindset. I felt like I had demons latched on to me. I needed to soundtrack the moodiness I was feeling.
At first, I was doing bumps, but I had quickly worked my way up to heavier and steadier quantities. I’d make lines that were as wide as my pinky and do them back-to-back throughout the day, every day. When I would get after it, I would really get after it. I was a maniac. That’s why that second album was so drug-riddled, because that’s what got me through. I wouldn’t have been able to do it if I didn’t have something to push me.
The fame was getting intense. The attention was starting to get to me, and I didn’t like people having eyes on me all the time. It wasn’t the celebrity I wanted; it was the music career, the influence, the impact. But celebrity came with it. Money was a motivating factor, because I wanted to take care of my family, but I thought I’d have a bunch of cool, critically acclaimed albums and I would still be in the streets, and not have swarms of kids chasing me down the block.
It was hard to get a sense of what people wanted from me, or who they were seeing when they looked at me. I didn’t know what the attention was for. I didn’t know if it was because they genuinely liked me or for my affiliation with Kanye. I hated how people treated me. I hated how I spent years of my life being a regular dude, not being noticed by anyone, being invisible, and then suddenly I was being noticed by everyone. It was a mindfuck. Bitches in my ear and all on my shit. Most of the people in my face were enthusiastic, seeming to want to be around me, but a lot of people around me were there for the excitement, for the hype. Everyone was wearing a mask, and I could see it, but I also didn’t want to be alone.
When will the fantasy end? When will the heaven begin? For years, I’d sought answers to those questions. The lines between the two always blurred. Kid Cudi was built on the back of my dreaming, on my desire to transcend. I was reaching for another world, for an escape.
When I wrote “Mr. Rager,” I had already realized my dream. But the dream hadn’t been all I’d hoped, and the song was about me overdosing as dread was closing in on me, the surreal experience next to that silent West Side Highway. Neither the drugs nor the fame could fix me, and “Mr. Rager” stands as the remnant of that chaotic time, one where all that I had achieved could only be matched by the intensity of my wrath. Eventually, it grew to be too much. Death seemed to be hanging over me. In the thick of it all, I couldn’t tell if heaven or the fantasy was the better option.
