For the few weeks after I started my job in Paris, Amanda and I were staying alone at a friend's apartment. Our guilty pleasure was watching the "urban" music videos on French cable TV, and we discovered that many of the sophisticated videos (read: not just women dancing around in hot shorts) showed a more complex understanding of the world in all it's gender, race, and economic complexities than the lyrics did.

And then there was Kid Cudi's video, which was exaclty the opposite.  It was a catchy dance remix with a goofball main character and many women in hot shorts.  But after seeing the video for the second or third time, it was the lyrics that hit me:

The lonely stoner seems to free his mind at night

I've know guys like this.  Sheesh, I've been one of then, the lonely drinker awake at night, listening to my favorite album of the moment on headphones, spacing out in the darkness of my room.  And I've definitely known the stoner variey, the guys who's minds are so wound up they have smoke to ease up their own anxiety - and when they do, they are genius.  Up all night, on their laptops, coding, mixing, creating

I'm not making a case for weed - I'm making a case for Kid Cudi.  I was able to get a promo version of his album, and given that it's a freshman effort, it's amazing. 

I wasn't immediately won over.  I started listening to it on the train ride into work, and the first few tracks were tinny and brittle.  But there was a unique sound to it, and what he does works - stripped down, blending Casio pop and early 90s four-track rap, living in the space between singing, speaking, and rapping.  However, the impact of the lyrics was only felt once Kid Cudi dropped the tough front, and gave us some space.

And that space is filled with lonliness.  It sounds like he's had to prove himself to everyone, and he's had to rely on no one but himself.  And his depression - a depression that so often gets presented as anger and fear and agression in other hip-hop realms - gets boiled down to sadness and lonliness.  And it's deep and heartbreaking and by song three I was almost crying.  White professional guy on a Paris metro crying because a lonley outcast black kid in Cincinatti asks you to embrace the Martian.  Says that if you could look inside his brain you'd commit suicide.  That the lonley stoner stays awake at night.

In my opinion the album is not a success across the board.  It has some songs that go nowhere, and some of the braggadicio-style battle songs don't work for me.  A Maui-Wowie song I skipped even on the first run through the album and have never listend to in it's entirety.  A pair of love songs that don't entirely work.

But ultimately this is a great album. The parts of it that work are awesome, enough to easily paper over the parts I don't like.  As an artist, I'd rather have a hot/cold reaction than "great, add it to the library, next...."  And as a listener I feel his lonliness is genuine.  And genuine is hard to find in music.