Near the middle of “Often, I Have These Dreamz,” the first track of INSANO, Kid Cudi recalls a dream of falling back to Earth. The song’s thundering drums fade into the background and guest DJ Drama barks an ad lib (“Cudi, talk to ’em!”) before Cudi proceeds to stumble through the most milquetoast fantasy imaginable. “I have these dreams of me falling through the sky, you know what I’m sayin’?/And uh, somehow, before I hit the ground, I start flyin’... I fly back up to the sky, you know, high as fuck/High as fuck, past the planets,” he says, practically mid-bong rip, before diving into a verse of empty product placement and cliché mythmaking.
Cudi has attempted to sell himself as both an underdog and a superstar since the blog era, but the more he parlays his late-aughts musical clout into the worlds of film, television, and fashion, the harder this image has become to take seriously. His failure to meaningfully evolve as a musician isn’t the only reason INSANO is a bad record. The best Cudi songs have at least enough sense of direction and confidence to convince you to buy in. Even his much-maligned psych-rock album Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven had some passion coursing through it. Here, that yen is gone—he’s never sounded more checked out. Even Cudi doesn’t seem to believe his own hype anymore.
To its credit, INSANO is trying to do something different—that different thing, however, is just having DJ Drama provide thin narrative window dressing to a spate of uninspired Kid Cudi songs. Classic Cudi moments where he grapples with his demons, like “Tortured” or the XXXTentacion-featuring “X & Cud,” are retreads of stories he’s told better and with more conviction elsewhere. What’s left are flex and rage raps that are somehow hollow and overwrought at the same time. On “Keep Bouncin’” and “Cud Life,” his staccato flow is undermined by his drawn-out slur, a vocal affect that doesn’t make the bland boasts about white Benzes or faceless groupies any more interesting. “A Tale of a Knight” is part autobiography and part anonymous bacchanalia, hampered by more annoying vocal tics and production I can only describe as Hans Zimmer trying to recreate the beat for Young Thug and Gunna’s four-year-old “Hot” after hearing it from a passing car at rush hour. The more Cudi tries to spin these songs as effortless and fun, the more labored and rote they sound.
The beats and guests don’t offer much respite, either tripping him up or fully outclassing him. DJ Drama’s omnipresence marks INSANO as a Gangsta Grillz project, but Cudi’s raps are too meandering and generic to earn that title the way bolder auteurs like Tyler, the Creator and Westside Gunn have recently. Travis Scott is the next most prominent presence, and not because of his two forgettable features. Beats are handled by old partners (Plain Pat, Dot da Genius, WondaGurl, Clams Casino) and a handful of newer faces (BNYX, Take a Daytrip), but many sound like they were made with Scott’s maximalist slog UTOPIA in mind. The blown-out 808s and general cacophony of the rage aesthetic don’t play to Cudi’s strengths and tend to drown his voice. In the few spots where things level out, he either sounds out of place (the inexplicably hyphy “Electrowavebaby”) or gets lapped by another artist: On “Rager Boyz,” Young Thug lands the album’s most colorful line (“How your hat say White Sox and you from the Bronx?”) with a shrug.
Though he was far from the first rapper to do so, at his peak Kid Cudi provided an outlet for emotional vulnerability and mental health awareness in the genre. For millennial and younger rap fans, his status as an alt-Black kid who enjoyed indie rock as much as he did Bape and GOOD Music represented a fresh vision of mainstream celebrity. But he’s spent the years since 2013’s Indicud rehashing old ideas to the point of self-parody (when his new ideas aren’t fizzling out in their own ways), creating overindulgent and sloppy albums that have soured much of the goodwill he’s coasted on since 2009. He’s hinted that he may be ready to retire from music at 40, and on the unfathomably boring INSANO—which, coincidentally, represents the last album in his contract with Republic—it sounds like he already has one foot out the door.
