After a week in hiatus and following the weird JPOP weeks, I am back to talk about hip-hop. Today will be a discussion of Kid Cudi’s first major album, Man on the Moon. For those of us who have listened to a lot of Kid Cudi, you’ll know he has three Man on the Moon albums and a handful of others, but none have been as influential to me as his first album.

To start off, I worked as a housekeeper at a local motel for part of my high school experience. I would come in on the weekends and work 9-7 cleaning rooms and making beds. Sometimes I would have to clean up blood or vomit, occasionally dirty needles, and once a baggie of sex toys. It was not a fun job but it paid well. I was undertrained and overburdened. They would give me 20-30 rooms and tell me to clean at a rate of 2 per hour: that was barely enough time to do a barebones job. I would do this every weekend and spend my entire weekend doing just that. The only reason I didn’t go crazy is that I was allowed to have earplugs in (airpods were too expensive) and listen to music. I alternated between Eminem albums and Kid Cudi everyday. Occasionally I would listen to full musical cast recordings inbetween if I was getting bored of the same album over and over again. I probably would listen to the full Man on the Moon album 4 times per shift.

The album consists of 18 songs with multiple breaks built into songs, telling the story of Scott Mescudi as he matures as a person and deals with life, death, drugs, and night terrors. Listening to the whole album, you can tell the headspace that Scott was in when he wrote the lyrics for the songs. Each song is unique and has its own vibe, but they all paint the picture of an artist who is trying to live a full life and put his personal experiences into his music to help others who are going through the same things.

Overall, the album holds a very important place in my heart, as it helped me through a rough job that I needed to keep. Listening to the album right now as I write this, I can still sing every lyric of every song even though I haven’t listened to any of these songs since I quit in December of 2021. The significance of albums like this can’t be conferred to another person through listening to the artist together. It has to be a personal experience with the songs that create such a strong connection. That is why I love this album so much and why I will always enjoy hearing Kid Cudi playing, no matter where I am.