Kid Cudi

“I’m a very emotional creature, very sensitive,” Kid Cudi told Apple Music. “It’s the Aquarian in me. That’s how I make the music I make. I put all my feelings into it. It’s never a joke. It’s never a character. This is very autobiographical. This is all real. And I think the kids know that.” An old soul with a livewire mind, the Cleveland native—born Scott Ramon Seguro Mescudi in 1984— is hip-hop’s patron saint of misfits and outsiders. Mescudi came up fueled by the trials he’d faced early on: After being expelled from high school, he moved to New York with dreams of becoming a successful rapper. His 2008 breakout hit, “Day ’n’ Nite,” neatly encompassed his contradictions: What sounds like a bouncy party cut captured the kind of melancholy candor that would come to define the next decade in hip-hop. Soon signing to Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music label, Cudi co-wrote several tracks on his label head’s 808s & Heartbreak, further molding the future of hip-hop in his own introspective image. Over the years, Cudi’s vision has become more expansive, yielding multipart album series, deep dives into the life of the mind (2016’s Passion, Pain & Demon Slayin’, released publicly discussing his anxiety and depression), and boundary-breaking side projects like WZRD, his alt-rock partnership with longtime producer Dot Da Genius. In 2018, Cudi and West teamed up as KIDS SEE GHOSTS. He continued to expand his sonic palette and perspective on 2025’s Free, his first pop effort that came from an innate need to push himself creatively. He told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe that “people know that I’m a risk-taker” in the context of Free, but the truth is Cudi has taken—and continues to take—risks throughout his career. For Cudi, creation is ultimately about unlocking access to a higher power, and he found other willing partners for that quest when he enlisted Skrillex and Steve Aoki for 2022’s Entergalactic, a wide-ranging set to accompany his first animated movie, and Travis Scott and Lil Yachty for 2024’s INSANO, a harder-edged but still energetic effort that saw the rapper turn trap beats into another means for transcendence. As he told Apple Music about his choice of collaborators, “We need to feel the music all around us, we need to swim in it. And the only way to do that is to connect with other like-minded people on the same mission.”