In 2007, Kid Cudi rode MySpace fame into the Top 8’s and hearts of music fans everywhere, and pretty soon the rapper and musician was dropping singles onto music blogs and collab’ing with Kanye. Hit records, huge tours, and two Grammys followed, but everything wasn’t OK inside Cudi’s head. A Man Named Scott (Amazon Prime) looks at the artist’s life and career while offering perspective on chronic depression and the evolving nature of creativity.
The Gist: In the mid-2000s, by the time Kid Cudi (real name Scott Mescudi) had migrated from his native Cleveland to Brooklyn and begun to post tracks on MySpace, the Internet had already become our culture’s most vital medium of expression. But it was the worldwide success of his debut single “Day ‘n’ Nite” that was the bellwether for a new kind of artist. Pharrell Williams is the first individual to be interviewed in A Man Named Scott, and as he puts it, Cudi was part of an Internet freedom movement populated with “people who do not adhere to boundaries.” As the film reaches back to the artist’s earliest days of writing and performing, testimonials from his friends and peers emphasize the same descriptors again and again: to be weird, to be open, to be unwilling to stick to the script. “We’re creators man,” explains Schoolboy Q. “We just want to create.”
That sentiment is echoed by Willow Smith, her brother Jaden, A$AP Rocky, Timothee Chalamet, and even Shia LaBeouf, who all point to the vulnerability and introspection inherent in Kid Cudi’s swirling, occasionally disorienting, but always melody and beat-inflected songs, qualities they find inspirational to their own careers as creative people of a certain generation. Kid Cudi himself describes his relentless drive to make the music he wanted, stodgy label demands be damned. Being an “Internet rapper” was suddenly a thing for both audience and industry to process. But even as his on-ramp to success appeared, Cudi was quaking internally. “I had a hard time dealing with the adjustments from being this guy, from being Scott, to being Kid Cudi.”
Ultimately, A Man Named Scott becomes a story about the collision between creative passion and the powerful forces of emotional turmoil, chronic depression, and suicidal thoughts. Cudi travels through addiction and darkness before getting clean and returning to performing, and recapturing the verve he once felt for creating. But that comes with a caveat. “I have no desire to make more dark records. That chapter is done. I just hope that fans can see I’m finally — that Scott is finally — in a better place.”
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? In her YouTube series Dancing With the Devil, Demi Lovato combined unused footage from a concert documentary with frank discussions about the interplay between stardom and performing and her own struggles with addiction, relapse, depression, and anxiety. Netflix is host for Travis Scott: Look Mom I Can Fly, a 2019 documentary about the occasional Kid Cudi collaborator, as well as Lady Gaga’s Five Foot Two, in which the superstar faces down the physical and emotional challenges of her work.
Performance Worth Watching: The insights of producers and longtime Cudi collaborators Dot da Genius, Plain Pat, and Emil Haynes into his kinetic creative process inform at a baseline level, which is that of the working artist hammering his output into shape. Before anything else happens, there has to be the toil of writing, of recording, and sparking what’s great into life.
Memorable Dialogue: Former Complex editor-in-chief Noah Callahan-Bever offers that Kid Cudi’s work brought a dynamic inner life to rap’s brash and thriving exterior. “Hip-hop had done an incredible job articulating a lot about the environments that these artists were coming up in and did a lot less about what was going on inside those artists’ heads. Cudi had no reservations about delving into his most private, dark thoughts.”
Sex and Skin: Nope.
Our Take: Without question, Kid Cudi’s distinct sound has been an influencing agent on the amorphous, inward-dwelling or often just weirded-out and discomfiting sound of contemporary hip-hop, everything from his bracing melodies for Kanye West to the work of Future and Lil Yachty. Cudi took a scythe to his soul, and tossed the ribbons onto beats. But while that brought him multi-Platinum success and the mark of influence, it was wreaking havoc on the man inside, and the emotional nadir of A Man Named Scott is the public announcement of his entry into rehab. “I simply am a damaged human being swimming in a pool of emotions every day of my life,” he wrote in an October 2016 Facebook post. “There’s a ragin’ violent storm inside of my heart at all times. IDK what peace feels like. I am not at peace. I haven’t been since you’ve known me.”
While the film’s artful retellings of Cudi grappling with addiction and chronic depression (some of them starring Jaden Smith) aren’t as rewarding as the interviews with the artist himself, A Man Named Scott is careful to depict confusion, lack of place, and anxiety as universal issues, the natural result of being alive on this earth. “Feeling lost is right where you’re supposed to be.” And it’s that language, the kind that rings with the tone of counseling and therapy, that becomes the throughline here, beyond even the music being made. The music is therapy, too — Kid Cudi says his post-rehab album Kids See Ghosts, recorded as a duo with Kanye West, literally saved him — but the message here is clear. It’s OK to be weird. It’s OK to have unsettled thoughts, because damage can lead organically to true art. In the pursuit of happiness, everything that shine ain’t always gonna be gold.
Our Call: STREAM IT. A Man Named Scott is a thoughtful, introspective look at Kid Cudi’s life and career, but it saves its biggest beats for his bout with personal well-being.
Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges
Watch A Man Named Scott on Amazon Prime
This post first appeared on Nypost.com
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