To say that Kid Cudi has come a long way from the artist he was when he launched his career in the early 2000s is a huge understatement. The rapper, who scored his first major hit with “Day ‘n’ Nite,” a song about being a lonely stoner, now proclaims that he “stopped running to the grave” on his latest single, “Grave.”
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Cudi, whose real name is Scott Mescudi, writes candidly about his struggles with depression and drug use in his new book, “Cudi: The Memoir,” getting right to the point, with a story of him lying on the floor thinking he was going to die of a cocaine overdose. But as he told CBS News in a recent interview, he had a death wish and used cocaine to keep himself from committing suicide.
“The reason why I was doing cocaine was so I could maintain so I didn’t blow my brains out,” he said.
Polar Opposites
The Cleveland native checked himself into rehab in 2016, but walking away from drug use isn’t the only thing that has changed for the rapper. Cudi, who was subpoenaed to testify in the trial against Sean “Diddy” Combs, says he’s also had to look at his relationships differently putting some people, like the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, in the rear view mirror. Signed to Ye’s G.O.O.D. Music label in 2008, Cudi’s association with rapper-producer helped launch his career. But these days, Cudi describes them as “polar opposites who once worked on the same frequency.”
“It’s a sad thing,” he told CBS News. “He said some things that there’s just no coming back from.”
One of the things Cudi says he’ll never forgive was Ye suggesting that he would pee on the grave of Virgil Abloh, former men’s artistic director at Louis Vuitton and one of Cudi’s close friends, who passed away in 2021 after a battle with a rare form of cancer.
“Every time he took a dig at Virgil, it just made me super angry. Virgil was an angel to everyone,” he said. “The man that [Ye] has become, I just don’t know that guy anymore.”
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