Is Kid Cudi serious? This is the first thing I asked myself listening to Speedin' Bullet 2 Heaven, and it's not as snide a question as it sounds; it's genuinely hard to tell. While his diehard fans await his long-delayed Man on the Moon III*,* Cudi opted instead to release *this—*a 90-minute, double-disc rock album, unfiltered and unpolished even compared to his 2012 side-project WZRD. Cudi is not a very good singer or guitarist, and his artlessly blunt lyrics are even more exposed in this context. So what are we to make of this? It's tough to guess the motives of someone who commissions Mike Judge to wedge painful "Beavis and Butthead" skits in between songs about self-harm with nihilistic lines like "I’m feeling I’m a goner."
There is something morbidly compelling about the tenacity of this project: "Wedding Tux" plods along for two-and-a-half minutes on two chords and has a hook that goes, "everything, everyone sucks" until it almost grows mesmerizing. "Judgmental Cunt" sounds an awful lot like self-laceration ("look at you, dumb stoner little boy") with Cudi breaking his voice while screaming. On "Trauma," he offers this: "When I was eleven I saw my dad’s corpse." The discomfort level might be high enough to inspire rubbernecking from people who wouldn’t otherwise care about a new Cudi record.
But Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven is interesting the same way a friend getting a dramatic bad haircut is interesting: Once the shock wears off, you still have to look them in the eye and level with them. The album is a failure, and not even a noble one. Cudi insists on calling the album "alternative," and with the "Beavis and Butthead" narration, the shout-out to Cobain on "Man in the Night," and a flat drawl that curls into awkward Layne Staley or Scott Weiland impersonations, it’s clear his approach to making a "rock album" is even more dated than Lil Wayne’s, grounded in ideas and sounds that are now two decades old.
There are fleeting moments, here and there. On single "Confused!," he manages one of the album’s more memorable lines, repeating "hate the drugs but I love the numb." When he hits on a nice guitar tone or melody or lyric, the songs are so simple that they assume a semi-meditative quality. The title track is the best song here, with a nostalgic breakbeat and Cudi softly singing about manic depression: "If I crash, or when I land, no matter the case, I’m all smiles." It’s a simple but effective tone poem.
And sometimes the songs are so uncomfortably direct it feels wrong to be evaluating them at all: How do you judge the value of "Fuchsia Butterflies"' chorus "I’ll be happy getting shitfaced by myself?" It might be a confessional, but again Kid Cudi undercuts himself: If he is committed to this direction, and the album’s flaws are just the result of his limited voice and guitar skills, why include "The Nothing," a song that’s a riff on "Mary, Mary Quite Contrary"? Moments like this only reinforce the impression that the whole project is one long failed joke, a comedian bombing onstage trying to will it into performance art. So again: is he serious? Either way, Speedin' Bullet is a remarkable flop, and there is a certain amazement whenever something this self-indulgent and messy gets released on a major label.
