![pursuit of happiness kid cudi pursuit of happiness kid cudi](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-aROsNwzrRsM/UK1iCiCX_1I/AAAAAAAAA5c/n4274YQ8diM/s1600/kid+cudi+the+pursuit+of+happines+chorus+excerpt+arranged+by+bono+uploaded+to+pianopad+share.jpg)
Hip-hop is no different from many other forms of art and celebrity in that it rewards the performance of realness, though it doesn’t always know what to do when it is confronted with an actual life committed to living that level of realness. I might, like the Geto Boys, have a moment where I make the story more real, but still add enough distance to it for everyone to feel “moved,” but not confronted with anything. But I’ll press it underneath a joke, or inside of a story with something relatable hanging to it, like an awkward trip to the supermarket with a silly ending. I may, for example, talk loose and easy about how I’ve battled anxiety for years, how I rarely have moments where I’m not anxious. I often find myself thinking about performative realness. What I think about most, there, is how so many listeners of hip-hop value the song as a stand-alone statement, but not the album cover not the messaging of the album, or the fact that “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” was the only single the Geto Boys pushed out from it. Bill realizes that it isn’t even Halloween night as his knuckles bleed from punching the concrete where he believed all of his demons to be. He and his crew wrestle the man to the ground and Bill begins punching his face, blood flying back up at him. But at the end, Bushwick Bill delivers a brief and haunting verse about imagining a man who he’d seen in a dream, following him on Halloween night. Almost without a doubt, Scarface’s first verse in the song is the one that has held up as his most memorable over the years. Each member is at the brink of sanity, with a muddy Isaac Hayes sample rubbing up against a dark guitar. “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” is one of the most fascinating Top 30 rap hits of all time. He lived, of course, his destiny instead determined by doctors, loved ones, the music itself. Before the album’s release, he insisted that his girlfriend kill him, and as they wrestled over a gun, it went off and shot him in the eye. It is a striking and startling album cover – the group’s management took Bushwick Bill directly out of his hospital room to take the photo, Bill’s eyepatch and IV drip removed. The song is on the Geto Boys album We Can’t Be Stopped, an album that, on the cover, shows members Scarface and Willie D on each side of a hospital bed holding Bushwick Bill, a graphic wound on his face as he recovered from a gunshot he took to his eye. Kid Cudi, in a 2012 interview, said that the 1991 Geto Boys’ “ Mind Playing Tricks on Me” was his favorite song in the world. There is an entire history of songs outlining the complexities of mental health, and the impact mental health has on the creator. The hip-hop song that details and unravels the inner demons of the artist is seen as brave, sometimes a cause for celebration. This, after all, is what so many of us say that we want. If I, as a consumer of art, create a structure where I choose not to separate an artist’s flaws from the art they create, I am saying that I also must value an artist who leans into a raw and open vulnerability through their art, even if I think it to be occasionally messy. Even his failures, like last year’s sprawling and confusing Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven, feel triumphant, in that through the work, we learn about what he has had to survive in order to create it.
![pursuit of happiness kid cudi pursuit of happiness kid cudi](https://i.etsystatic.com/16596238/r/il/2ee821/1493035799/il_794xN.1493035799_4arg.jpg)
Beyond the fact that we share the same home state, he embodies so many parts of it. I have, in many ways, always found myself rooting for Kid Cudi. Abandoned factories still blow clouds of white smoke from their rooftops. For the past two winters, I’ve driven into Ohio from the north, cutting through Kid Cudi’s old stomping grounds. But it is also hard to shake the isolation, the feeling of loneliness that can creep into the architecture of living. There’s a silence in these types of winters that allows for grand, creative moments that come to life later, during warmer months, adding to the vibrancy and brilliance of a city like Cleveland. During bad Ohio winters, the ones where pipes burst and thick snow pushes its weight down on power lines, people stay inside unless they have no other choice. I think of how, in winter, a heavy chill drifts in from Lake Erie and sits over the city, sometimes for months, making the outside world a burden. With this in mind, when I think of Kid Cudi, I also think of Cleveland, Ohio, in all of its beauty and its moods. It is nearly impossible to imagine an artist and their work without also framing those ideas around where they come from.