I’m going to keep trying to break through and more fully grasp the hip hop supergenre. It’ll happen eventually. Maybe. Picking up this Kid Cudi album was another effort at that. And I don’t regret it, but it also wasn’t a success in any meaningful way. If anything, it’s reinforced the perception that the genre-at-large is functions wildly differently from the rest of the music industry.1
Kid Cudi is a rapper who’s been active for about twenty years now, with his debut album dropping in 2009. I can’t speak to his more typical material, but Mark Chinapen’s review for Medium states that he often leans into psychedelic beats. Insano is still very lo-fi, utilizing thoroughly vibey backdrops while he and his guests drop lines, but insano is ultimately a Trap album.
And it’s beefy, at 21 tracks and just over an hour of playtime. Of course, that means that the tracks are generally pretty short, averaging just over three minutes. And that’s not awful – a bit on the short side for my preferences, normally. Normally. But there are many tracks on the album that ultimately bore me well before they end. As nice as the vibes are, generally, I find myself tuning out on more tracks than I care to count. The sounds are nice, but there’s no variation, no evolution, no depth. And, ultimately, it doesn’t feel like Cudi has anything to say on the album, which feels like a problem ingrained in Trap – when most of your rhymes are about doing drugs, getting high, or having sex, there’s nothing inherently interesting there. At least no more interesting than the literal thousands of other two-bit musicians talking about the same thing.
That said, I have to underscore that that criticism does not apply universally to this album. “Tortured”, for example, delves into addressing the state of existential self-loathing and worthlessness that comes with depression, and the sort of state of resignation that you find yourself in when it really sets in that the battles inside your head truly are life-long. Yes, drugs are mentioned, but they’re not the focal point of the track. “Tortured” is as real as it gets, and it’s seriously good.
Another of my favorites is the album’s penultimate track, “Blue Sky”, which adds in some actual instrumentation and a solid melody as Cudi sings (with autotune) about breaking free to find blue skies above his head. It is the very idea of a good day perfectly embodied in song form.
Insano has its high points, but getting to them is a bit of a slog. I had higher hopes for this one, but it is what it is. There are at least a couple of tracks here that I’ll be glad to hold onto for casual listening later.
Rating: Orange
Tags: 2024 | Orange | Hip-Hop | Trap
With two key points:
It’s refreshing to see a hip-hop album with only half of its tracks showing parenthetical features in the title; and,
Why do the Producer credits have to rival the length of the end-credits for Marvel movies?