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Rating: Let's take a little leap back in time, before the war in Ukraine, the pandemic, Trump, and Brexit: it's 2010 and the music industry begins to look at a different audience, more introverted and accustomed to that form of sugary intimacy with pathetically romantic shades that eschews pop language, preferring less canonical musical forms. A segment that regularly consumes the internet and little identifies with the dictates of society.
The spontaneous question that arises for the various labels is how to address that bored and more sophisticated audience in taste? How can a language like rap, which has always been rough, dirty, and crude, be sufficiently softened in tone to engage them? And above all, what could possibly be sold to them?
The music of Kid Cudi thus emerges in this context, absorbing just that form of existential pathos and translating it into music. He is not the first and won't be the most famous, but he is certainly one of the key faces to summarize that historical moment.
The first "Man On The Moon" brought to attention the possibility of eluding the boundaries of rap, sweetening it into a more fluid form of whispering singing and drawing heavily from the most disparate genres. The second chapter of the saga stresses the concept, taking it to extreme consequences.
Less of a concept than the first, although the semblance of a narrative structure still hovers, "Man On The Moon II" is the epitome of Cudi's proposal: clean and guttural rap that blends with a didactic, sometimes out of tune, whispered, and melancholic singing that rises over an extremely varied soundscape. There are samples and references to 90s alt rock (the psychedelic "Marijuana" with its filtered guitars and sacred voices is undoubtedly the album's peak), midtempo nocturnal electronics with almost bluesy tones, traces of psych and obviously pop, showcased in catchy choruses with a remarkable taste for melody (Try it for yourself, the crooked "Erase Me", the first single from the album, is a piece of disarming catchiness in its ostentatious simplicity). There's also space for more unabashedly hip hop episodes, like the nebulous and crepuscular "The End", capable of condensing past and future.
Thus, a discourse of hyper production (around sixty professionals are involved in the creation of the album) aimed at supporting Cudi's psycho-existential dramas, amidst constant references to dependence (drugs and alcohol, always his crosses) and the hedonistic inequalities that accompany the rockstar lifestyle.
Perhaps there's a lack of substance to give form to the work as a whole rather than to the single insights (some truly remarkable, it must be said) that occasionally emerge from the dense and choral tracklist,
Nonetheless, an interesting chapter of the genre, to understand its subsequent evolutions.
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