Kid Cudi’s surprising job after moving from Cleveland to New York City
Kid Cudi is a superstar of the rap world, but, before he made it big, he worked some normal jobs like the rest of us.
Cudi grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, but he knew he needed to leave if he was going to make it in music. He moved to New York in the mid-2000s, moving in with his uncle in the Bronx. His mind was set on forging a rap career, but the realities of life still needed to be dealt with. He had to find work.
At one point, Cudi took a job working at a store for the Japanese fashion brand A Bathing Ape, otherwise known as BAPE. It was founded by the famous Japanese fashion designer Nigo, who set it up in Tokyo in 1993.
As Kid Cudi tried to get to grips with life in New York, he had a fateful meeting with someone at a Virgin Megastore in 2006. He noticed “the gleam of a Jesus piece,” as he recounted to Spin in 2009, and, when he looked at where it was coming from, he saw before him Kanye West.
Cudi said hello to his future mentor and eventual enemy Ye, and he gave him some of his demos. Nothing came of that, but, luckily for Cudi, the pair actually ran into each other again another time. Kanye showed up at the BAPE store where Cudi was working, although, once again, things didn’t exactly run smoothly for Cudi.
Cudi, as he recounted to Hypebeast in 2010, was helping Kanye to pick out some clothes, but he ended up forgetting to remove a sensor on one of the jackets Ye had selected. “I had to run out the store to catch him before he left,” he recalled. “Pretty funny me chasing after him in SoHo.”
Kanye still wasn’t too interested in Kid Cudi’s music, but he kept at it. He continued to make songs and release them himself online, which, eventually, caught Ye’s attention. He signed Cudi to his GOOD Music label in 2007, with Cudi becoming a star in the years that followed.
Cudi’s music career had finally taken off, and his time as a worker at BAPE was over. But his association with the brand endured, albeit in a different capacity as before. In 2009, BAPE released a series of T-shirts with Cudi’s likeness printed on them.
Not only that, Cudi collaborated with the brand in 2021. They together released a series of prints for a project, the culmination of a connection between the musician and the brand that began long before he was a star.