Kid Cudi

An old soul with a livewire mind, Kid Cudi is hip-hop’s patron saint of misfits and outsiders. The Cleveland native—born Scott Ramon Seguro Mescudi in 1984—came up fueled by the trials he'd faced early on. After being expelled from high school, he moved to New York with dreams of becoming a successful rapper. His 2008 breakout hit, “Day ‘n’ Nite,” neatly encompassed his contradictions: What sounds like a bouncy party cut captured the kind of melancholy candor that would come to define the next decade in hip-hop. Soon signing to Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music label, Cudi co-wrote several tracks on his label head’s 808s & Heartbreak, further molding the future of hip-hop in his own introspective image. Over the years, Cudi’s vision has become more expansive, yielding multi-part album series, deep dives into the life of the mind (2016’s Passion, Pain & Demon Slayin’, released publicly discussing his anxiety and depression), and boundary-breaking side projects like WZRD, his alt-rock partnership with longtime producer Dot Da Genius. In 2018, Cudi and West teamed up as KIDS SEE GHOSTS. Grappling candidly with the wages of fame, the duo’s track “Reborn,” with a moving chorus sung by Cudi, is a timeless anthem to self-love and self-improvement. For Cudi, creation is ultimately about unlocking access to a higher power, and he found other willing partners for that quest when he enlisted Skrillex and Steve Aoki for 2022's Entergalactic, a wide-ranging set to accompany his first animated movie, and Travis Scott and Lil Yachty for 2024's INSANO, a harder-edged but still energetic effort that saw the rapper turn trap beats into another means for transcendence. As he told Apple Music about his choice of collaborators, “We need to feel the music all around us, we need to swim in it. And the only way to do that is to connect with other like-minded people on the same mission.”