Only Built 4 Skinny Jeans Part 4 (The Search for 3)
September 17th, 2009
Under no circumstances should Skinny Jeans and a Mic be better than Kid Cudi’s Man on the Moon. After all, Cudi has the co-signs (Kanye, Common, the uh, Black Eyed Peas) the would-be indie icons brought in for Aoki-crowd mustache cred (MGMT, Crookers, Ratatat) and the back-story: at age 11 loses father to cancer, makes the Bright Lights, Big City trek to New York, gets a job at the Bape store selling hoodies the color of skinned angel fish, etc. The New Boyz had one classic single, guest spots from a third-tier Young Money yokel and Brandy’s sex-tape making brother, and less than a month to record a quick cash-in album.
Somehow, things got mixed up faster than you can say Billy Ray Valentine. While Cudi decided to sink his putatively huge recording budget into warbling off-key experimental electronic ephemera, The New Boyz had neither time to contemplate nor the self-awareness to even attempt something that ambitious. Sometimes, the tinkering in the lab approach can yield you a Loveless or a Revolver and other times, it finds a young artist running up against the predictable pitfalls: pretentiousness, over-thinking, letting Lady Gaga infect their album. It’s unwise to bet against Cudi–he has the substantial fanbase in place to ensure that he’ll continue to receive label backing, his gestures towards the avant-garde seem sincere (even if he doesn’t really seem sure what the term means), and there are moments on Man On the Moon that justify the outlandish expectations placed upon him.
