Kid Cudi’s “Day ‘N’ Nite” Introduces Sensitivity to Emo Rap

The late 2000s saw emo rap transition from the underground grime of hip-hop duo Atmosphere into something more syrupy and tender, marked most clearly by the commercial debut single and subsequent mixtape from Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi. The Ohio native’s global smash “Day ‘N’ Nite,” produced by Cudi’s longtime friend Dot Da Genius, was first uploaded to MySpace in 2007. By early 2008, after receiving a wider push and a bevy of remixes on award-winning DJ A-Trak’s label Fool’s Gold, the Grammy-nominated single changed the course of emo rap.

“My first experience with that song was very primal and simple,” A-Trak recalls. “I knew Plain Pat from my work with Kanye, and Pat hit me one day and wanted to play me two or three records from some new rapper. He sent me ‘Day ‘N’ Nite.’ Pat was working at Def Jam, but there was this implied statement of, ‘Major labels aren’t going to understand this yet. Should we try something on Fool’s Gold?’ I went on a trip to Australia. A few days after Pat had sent me the songs, I ended up listening to ‘Day ‘N’ Nite’ for hours and hours and hours on that flight. I remember thinking, We have to do something with this song. I can’t stop listening to it. It was hypnotic. I remember Pat and I having a conversation about the beat itself sounding a little unpolished. I was just vaguely aware that Cudi and his friend made the track themselves. We decided to leave it as-is.”

“Day ‘N’ Nite” was the byproduct of Cudi moving to New York in hopes of launching a rap career and immediately facing emotional and financial hardships. Cudi lived with his uncle for a time, but their relationship ended on poor terms, and his uncle passed away in 2006 before they could reconcile. As Cudi told Complex in 2009, the final state of their relationship ate him up inside.1 “Day ‘N’ Nite” was written in response to a swell of lingering regret and drew inspiration from the seminal Geto Boys track, “Mind Playing Tricks on Me.” Completed in a matter of days, the song peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was a mighty turning point in pop culture.

Cudi introduced the idea of an emo rapper that could be your best friend from up the block. The accessibility of Kid Cudi’s suffering allowed hordes of people trapped in their bedrooms to see themselves one-to-one with the artist. Grafting yourself onto a Cudi narrative was easier than the hyper-specific screeds Atmosphere delivered. On wax, Cudi sounded alienated from his struggles, as though he’d already drowned and washed ashore. The trauma had moved through his body, and now he could report from the gallows of his soft despair. Such a measure of distance helped open up emo rap to a wider audience.

Cudi’s writing was only gently tortured. Though it dealt with complex feelings of loss and isolation, it was extremely approachable. Cudi was friendly in his delivery—there was a late-night-at-the-kitchen-table-with-friends energy to the single. And as it so happens, “Day ‘N’ Nite” would go on to soundtrack rambling, existentially anxious evenings for listeners the world over. The song scanned as trustworthy, having the essential quality of providing much needed companionship to its audience.

“In the 2000s in general there was a shift of the typical rapper persona,” A-Trak says. “The Pharrells, Kanyes, and Lupes made it cool to be a nerd and punctured the myth of the macho rapper. But Cudi, even with his style of dressing, he took all that further to where it wasn’t just a question of the rapper being a tough guy. They could be very, very vulnerable, and bring in themes of depression.” Tinges of psychological pain were already a mainstay in rap music, but the way Cudi was able to popify the content—without making it childish, or worse, insincere—gave the growing mental health conversation in hip-hop and popular culture an even stronger foundation.

By the late 2000s, the shape of angst had changed. The world was slowly falling into a new era as social networking amplified desires for community but also bolstered the sense of the individual. Young people were encouraged to perform their identities online, and with the internet promising an audience, there was a sense of lonely showmanship to the whole prospect of MySpace and the blogs. It was all about you, the poster, but who was the “you” of the internet, anyway?

Kid Cudi harnessed that curious energy. He took the curves of the question of individuality and wound them up tightly. He made it cool to sulk in the increasing tension of having access to everyone, and still feeling misunderstood and trapped in your own head. “There’s something to be said about the rise of the internet and social networks like MySpace,” A-Trak affirms. “These new types of interactions—everyone is more connected but feels more lonely. Cudi tapped into something that was a really popular feeling around those years.”

The modus operandi for Cudi in his early days saw him tapping the swelling vein of loneliness. Where God Loves Ugly hinged on self-deprecation, Cudi was busy unknowingly constructing a new pillar to prop up the genre. Where Atmosphere made music for the degenerate with a potential heart of gold, Cudi’s music spoke to the somber everykid who was just searching for their place in the world and hoping to muster some semblance of cool as they journeyed through life. His incantations on “Day ‘N’ Nite” summoned the spirits of insecurity into battle with him. His persona was hewed closely to his interior, and that overlap allowed Cudi to develop emo rap into a position where emotions could still be read as pathetic, but their presentation was at least aspiring to some measure of swagger.

Kid Cudi was able to lift the hustle of “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” and the overall power of the Geto Boys to polish off the purely pathetic emo persona Atmosphere had developed. Cudi’s version of the genre allowed for some playfulness. It was immediately palatable. Additionally, his visual rhetoric broke off from the dusty mire of God Loves Ugly and instead featured Cudi looping through a colorful, tripped-out universe. “Day ‘N’ Nite” would go on to telegraph the widespread appeal emo rap could have, if paired with a likable emcee and an infectious production.

“Cudi didn’t originate the swaggering sad-sack archetype, but he distilled its ethos to the purest form and then rapidly saturated its influence,” wrote Pranav Trewn for Stereogum’s ten-year retrospective on Kid Cudi’s debut mixtape.2 Trewn goes on to describe Cudi as “as much spectacle as star.” With the knowledge of all Cudi has sown, there is the sense Cudi’s presence is more valuable than the majority of his music, in much the same way Lil Wayne’s presence on his rock album, Rebirth, is greater than the music.

“Day ‘N’ Nite” was not engineered to be a hit, and it’s true that its edges show. Cudi’s flow is imperfect. His raps sound, at times, noncommittal while his singing struggles to be more than charming. “Day ‘N’ Nite” sounds like a transitional space for rap. Still, it resonated with tastemakers and fans. Here was the beginning of Cudi’s massive following. The writing was on the wall for emo rap when this song came out—more melody, more purplish timbre, and more plainstated writing that obscured nothing and everything at once.

When Cudi raps “the pain is deep,” he is simultaneously giving himself over to the listener and saying nothing at all. The line could inspire a series of questions about trauma and how it atrophies the brain, but Cudi deadpanning the line renders those critical curiosities moot. It remains more satisfying to say, “Damn, I feel that,” than it is to poke holes in the song’s narrative tension. Kid Cudi establishes a literary tradition within emo rap, spotlighting this anxious dance of openness and opaque description. Where the forefathers of the genre applied a tremendous specificity to their writing, Kid Cudi’s work shows the natural bends emo rap would come to adopt. As in, he creates space for the listener to become a part of the song’s narrative. It is personally emergent, and it works.

“Kid Cudi made his struggle with his demons the focal point of his image,” Trewn tells me. “We talk about Drake all the time, but no one points to him as defined by his emotions. Going back to Geto Boys, they have songs I’d put in my personal emo rap canon, but Kid Cudi is the first to say, ‘This is my defining feature.’”

“‘Day ‘N’ Nite’ was the Godparticle of modern-day hip-hop,” Trewn continues. “It was a lot of people’s first exposure to this sound, and it gave rappers license—because it was very popular—to get weirder, to show more of those alternative touchpoints in their music. That song led so many artists down different paths where they wouldn’t have been without it.”

The slow creep of “Day ‘N’ Nite” was fed by a handful of successful remixes, with the Crookers‘s remix—which originated from a MySpace message between the Italian production then-duo and Fool’s Gold—and the rap version progressively ballooning into something bigger than Fool’s Gold could handle. Once Jim Jones got on a rap remix of “Day ‘N’ Nite,” the radio potential of the song took off. “In the meantime, we had a Fool’s Gold tour where Cudi was on the opening slot, performing in front of thirty people,” A-Trak remembers. “Through those months, his song just got bigger and bigger.”

“Somewhere along the way, Cudi’s team decided to sign him to Universal/Motown,” A-Trak says. “I remember, once he was signed to a major label, going to a Cudi show at South Street Seaport in New York. There was a mob of people screaming for him on a Beatlemania level, which is not what we were seeing just a few months ago at our homegrown event. This is a whole other story! It must’ve been late ‘08 or early ‘09.”

As “Day ‘N’ Nite” grew in popularity, Cudi’s touchable image endured. His humanity in those years was not washed away by the flow of capital. Instead, he doubled down on being a person-first artist. Appearances came second to the project of honesty. “People started to form a relationship with Kid Cudi,” Trewn agrees. “He’s sharing and documenting his journey in real time. So much of rap focuses on what you’ve overcome, which is so powerful. Cudi’s work was set apart because he was talking about his current struggles. It was music for people who were fighting.”

This relationship building, foundationally, makes Kid Cudi one of the icons of emo rap. His music naturally feeds into the emo sensibility of, “This music is made for me. I know this artist, and they know me.” The truism “Kid Cudi saved my life” would go on to be mocked by critics and weaponized in online discourse, sure, but within that very sincere statement is a strain of music history: this stuff means the world to listeners.

As Cudi was able to soundtrack amorphous feelings, “Day ‘N’ Nite” embodied the adage, “The only way out is through.” In the best way, the song and Cudi’s image were shameless. There was no posturing or braggadocio that wasn’t immediately met with a humbling admission of pain. The gendered subversion of “Day ‘N’ Nite” includes the pivot of emo rap to a more fluid form of expression. Where Slug used pain as a marker of masculinity—“I wear my scars like the rings on a pimp” is a classic Atmosphere line—Cudi embraced a more coded-feminine tone in his delivery and writing. “Day ‘N’ Nite” is downright gentle, from the production to the visual language.

As emo is a feminization of hardcore, Kid Cudi’s landmark contribution to rap is the welcoming of such a soft bleeding out. His sensitivity opened doors for even more hysterics. Though he himself wasn’t unraveling on the mic in the way artists in his wake would, Cudi was still able to establish a safe space for projecting intense emotions without having to defend masculinity. As such, Cudi allowed for the mental health conversation in hip-hop to begin taking center stage.

In 2016, Kid Cudi checked himself into rehab for depression and suicidal thoughts.3 As reported by The Atlantic, once Cudi publicized his “suicidal urges,” the outpouring of love on social media demonstrated the great reciprocity and humanity of emo rap, “giving rise to the hashtag #yougoodman for people to discuss race, masculinity, and depression.” Here is the crux point of emo’s benefit: the feeling of this music belonging to a listener allows for those listeners to rally and support their favorite artists, and each other, through difficult times and conversations.

With a demographic skewing younger, there is an awareness of artists like Kid Cudi as role models. And so his honesty in 2016 carries with it the potential to help countless listeners. The stigma surrounding mental healthcare for Black men persists in America, but as generations turn over and artists are open about their struggles as Cudi was, there is a changing tide in our perception of seeking out care.

“As I got to know and befriend the generation of rappers who came after him and saw the way they spoke about him, I could tell he was a voice for a generation,” A-Trak concludes. “He made a whole bunch of teenagers feel like they were heard. I remember catching up with Cudi and telling him, ‘I’m at the studio with Travis Scott.’ He said he would pull up. Travis freaked out. Cudi had just bought some new sports car, and he pulled the ol’, ‘Get in the car, let’s go for a little drive.’ The three of us went and drove around, and Cudi was playing us some beats he’d just made. Travis had the excitement of a kid. When Cudi left, Travis got up on the couch and started jumping because he had just met his idol.”