Kids See Ghosts is the Psychedelic Rap Album We’ve Always Wanted

Nobody expected Kid Cudi and Kanye West’s much anticipated joint album to take us on a flawless Psychedelic Rap odyssey. Kids See Ghosts, by the eponymous group is an organic mesh of Hip-Hop with Psychedelia; in other words the best Rap Rock album since Licensed to Ill.

The Kid Cudi – Kanye West partnership has been genre-altering since the late 2000s, they closely collaborated on an excellent pair of albums: Man on the Moon and 808s and Heartbreak. These albums codified today’s dominant ‘sad boy’ rap persona. The legacy of these transcendent projects reverberates across today’s Auto-Tune crooning era of Rap.

2008 was vastly different in Hip-Hop. While Auto-Tune was creeping into the landscape, the biggest selling artists of the day embodied today’s archaic toxic masculinity values, with Lil Wayne, pre-woke T.I. and 50Cent all selling well. This wasn’t quite the hyper-masculine peak of the late1990s, but Rap was still braggadocious, materialistic and didn’t like to embrace real emotions. The recession of this image is the lasting impact of Cudi and Kanye.

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