Kid Cudi - Man on the Moon: The End of Day (2009) [G.O.O.D.] // Grade: B

How much you enjoy Man on the Moon: The End of Day may just depend on how you felt about 808s & Heartbreaks. If you hated it, then I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do to make you enjoy another attempt at fusing Hip Hop with an early 80′s Synth/Adult Contemporary pop sensibility. Some people aren’t ready to ever let go of the Boom-Bap and coke raps, and Cudi is as far from that as you can get for a mainstream MC.

Man on the Moon isn’t so much a Hip Hop album as  an attempt to broaden what Hip Hop could be, sonically and emotionally. On repeated listens, I was actually struck by the inherent kinship the album had with the likes of Anticon and Atmosphere. The difference, though, is that Cudi can execute those sort of lofty, creative ambitions in a cohesive and accessible manner. OB4CL II may have satisfied my craving for a return to classic MCing… but Man on The Moon is exactly the sort of fresh approach I needed to rekindle my faith and interest in Hip Hop going forward.

Broken into 5 parts, with narration by Common, the album is a loose attempt at a concept album, whose plot boils down to an autobiographical account of Cudi’s life that reads: young man loses his father/always feels like an outsider/starts growing into himself/gains the confidence to pursue his dreams.  The Wall it is not, but Cudi’s Revenge of the Nerd type story is charming in its ability to be both boastful and earnest.

The production on Man on the Moon is impeccable. Despite the use of multiple producers, the album feels uniformly fluid… like some stoner space marriage of Phil Collins and El-P. From Kanye and Emile to Cudi’s astute choice of having Ratatat hold their coming out party as Hip Hop producers, all of the producers’ work together weaves a tight and trippy backdrop that’s as ethereal as it is catchy. But the album’s real magic lies in Cudi’s ability to succeed as both a Crooner and an MC, wrenching out hook after hook from those spacey synths.

In a time when genre interplay has become more and more common, this album is a sort of challenging and auspicious debut that’s not only compelling but a preview of what may come for music just around the bend.

- My Pal the Crook