The brutal Cleveland freestyle competitions that shaped Kid Cudi’s career
When Kid Cudi was a teenager, he was obsessed with New York rappers like A Tribe Called Quest and he knew he needed to move to the Big Apple to become a rapper himself. But that’s not to say there wasn’t a thriving hip-hop scene where he was from.
Cudi was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, which had produced acts like Bone Thugs-N-Harmony but was hardly in the same category as hip-hop centres like New York or LA. These were the places that most attracted young hip-hop fans when Cudi was growing up in the ’90s, but Cleveland was by no means devoid of a scene of its own. If you knew where to go, it was actually very vibrant.
During an interview with Music Connection published in 2013, Cudi characterised the Cleveland hip-hop scene he grew up with as “small” but made up of “a dope collection of hip-hop heads.” It was all about knowing the right people and being able to travel to the places where it was playing out.
The young Cudi was eager to break into this scene, which meant engaging in high-intensity rap battles. “You’d give them an original song and they played it with other original songs,” Cudi explained of how the battles worked. “And if you win that you get to come back next week and perform the song in a 15-minute set.”
Cudi did well in some competitions, but by no means all of them. He won some and lost others, but he really felt the pressure of losing. He came to believe that people looked at him like he was “fuckin’ crazy” whenever he lost, which certainly bothered him. But it also served to motivate him.
“I was always pushing the envelope and trying new things,” he recalled. “I went out of my way to find my own voice, and I think that’s how I developed my sound. I was about growth and adventures and living life and seeing what was out there, but I always felt trapped in Cleveland.”
Cudi remembered thinking, as a young person, that he didn’t fit into Cleveland, and that his development as a musician would best be served elsewhere. There was only ever one other place on his mind.
“Something told me that to start a new chapter I needed to be in New York,” he said. “Call it instinct or intuition or God looking out for me, I don’t know.”
Cudi noted that he’d always been interested in the cultural output of New York, be it music or film, and that he knew he needed to be there in order to grow as an artist. He made the move in the mid-2000s, and it proved an inspired decision. His career only took off from that point.