Kid Cudi is an artist I have an interesting but ultimately positive relationship with. He was one of the first rappers I truly loved, and remains one of my favorites to this day. I relate to him on multiple levels and love what he does musically as well as what he has done for hip hop as a whole. He has had various highs and lows throughout his career but has been on a bit of a hot streak since 2016’s Passion, Pain and Demon Slayin’. With that, one could imagine the shock I had at how genuinely unpleasant I found his latest project, Insano, and how far removed it was from what I have grown to love about Cudi, even in his worst moments. On Insano, Cudi replaces his usual spacey idealism and raw emotion with borderline obnoxious flexing and generally uninteresting ramblings, with flat production and mediocre features to boot.
I cannot discuss Insano without mentioning the fact that he employs DJ Drama throughout this album. I personally loved Drama’s presence on the recent Tyler, The Creator album, Call Me If You Get Lost. Said presence even motivated me to check out some of the mixtapes he was on before that album, including some of Lil Wayne’s Dedication series. I enjoyed his contributions there as well. This is why it was so confusing to me how his lines on Insano always seem to go in one ear and out the other. He opens the album on Often, I Have These Dreamz. I forgot this between my first listen of the album and my second one for this review. This makes sense, however, because he sounds completely uninterested compared to other projects I have heard him on. It just feels like Drama on autopilot spouting the same sort of things he always does, and the less interested vocals take out most of the appeal of having Drama here in the first place. He sounds tired on the track. Following this, Cudi delivers some of the most unpleasant humming he’s delivered across his whole career. The lack of interest on the humming leads into the verses, and this continues across the album. On this track, Cudi’s delivery sounds slurred and tired, and again, this is a trend. The unfortunate part is that nothing about the delivery does any favors for the also uninteresting writing. It is essentially just Cudi flexing and rambling. I would mention a common theme but there basically is none besides ‘my life is good and I’m great’. There is a line in the second verse that sums up the entire song (and the album to a degree) where Cudi proclaims “Confident bossin’, wavy, I’m drivin’ the ladies crazy”. He flexes the entire song without ever showing why he has earned the ability to do so. It is frustrating because there are more than a few moments on his 2020 album Man On The Moon III: The Chosen where he flexes and it is far more confident and less comatose. That album also has that Cudi spaciness in the production that helps him stand out musically, whereas the production here is hardly worth mentioning. It’s a light soul sample, some trap drums and a bass drum that occasionally hits and adds a tiny bit of life to an otherwise lifeless track.
It would be rather unnecessary of me to go through each track and say what I dislike about each since Dreamz represents so many of the tracks on this album that have the same issues. Keep Bouncin’ for example has that heavy bass drum trying to inject life into another lifeless trap beat, but this time the drum is overused to the point of just being annoying. Other than that it’s the same boring flexing from the previous track. He pulls up in the “White Benz” in the very first line of the first verse. He talks more about how he smokes trees and gets girls. It is redundant and discussing it in more detail would be as well. It would be more fruitful to mention another aspect of this album that falls flat.
The features on this album are weak and lackluster at the best of times. At The Party should have been a slam dunk since it features Pharrell and Travis Scott. Of course, on this album, it does not pan out as well as it should. Pharrell’s hook sounds so limp that it is out of place over the mildly interesting, futuristic synth driven beat. He sounds winded, like he just got punched in the stomach. Of course, Cudi’s verse does not add anything to the song. He just limply brags about going to “Paris with bae” and how he’s the GOAT. Eventually Travis gets a verse as well, and it’s fine. He delivers more life than either Cudi or Pharrell but still pales in comparison to most of what I heard on Utopia less than a year prior, especially considering the production on that album was leagues above this track. I will still take an average verse on an album full of terrible ones. Speaking of which, this album also recycled an XXXTentacion song as a “feature” on X & Cud. The song Orlando is heavily sampled here and it’s unfortunate. Instead of grave robbing for unreleased material from X, now they are recycling his already released material. The X part in question barely fits the song due to this. Cudi sounds slightly more interested than he does on most of the album, but given the rest of the circumstances surrounding the track it is too little too late. I would not be surprised if Cudi did not pay for the Lil Wayne feature on Seven. The track has Cudi talking about how confident he is and how fun his life is, even shouting “I LOVE MY LIFE” on the first verse. Lil Wayne’s verse uses one flow for all twenty seconds of it. Said flow is mildly grating with how slightly off beat it is and how breathy the cadence at the end of each line is. He gets a small bit at the end as well but it just breezes by with no impact.
I could say the same about almost the entire album aside from Blue Sky, which feels like the best version of this sound and then some. It opens with beautiful metallic drums that Cudi hums over with even a bit of synthesized woodwind action to beat. It creates this atmosphere that feels like floating through the blue sky he depicts. Cudi uses his gorgeous voice to paint a picture of the position he is in, instead of just bragging about it near mindlessly. He ponders his good position instead of just haphazardly throwing it around. He talks about how he has moments on the beach where he considers it. He says in the chorus how he has been “dreamin of this for a while”. The line has such a sugary sweet and lovely delivery that it is far easier to root for him and believe his success. It is a moment of beauty on an otherwise fairly painful album. This is reflected in the closer, Hit The Streetz In My Nikes, with it being a generic, slightly atmospheric dancey number. DJ Drama is here, and that is about all I have to say about that. He screams the album title at the end. No speech like on Call Me If You Get Lost. Just letting the album end on a wet fart like it was meant to.
Insano is a baffling album to me. Cudi has been worse than this on an album basis but has never quite been this generic, this lifeless, this uninteresting, and this unlike himself. Cudi sounds completely indistinct for most of the album, with the flexes on the album being so generic and nameless. Cudi himself has so many qualities that separate him from the rest, but no one would be able to tell here unless they listened to Blue Sky. The production is not fun or remotely psychedelic, it’s rarely even atmospheric, and overall just feels like everything else on the album: limp. Insano feels like it’s suffering an identity crisis. It is a nameless album from one of the most unique names in hip hop, and for that, it is an extremely disappointing start to the year, and an extremely disappointing album from Kid Cudi
3/10
