Cudder

This is the day and age where many rappers and MCs are attempting to make an album a year to try to get sales. Its an interesting tactic and one that, if I had the time, I'd go into further, because there's a part of it that not many people see and realize, and just gloss over. Many people just complain that the overall quality of the lyrics and the songs have gone down because of this, but you have to remember that this is a business in the end, and a lot of these artists, despite being "artists" are not in fact, "artists". One person who is not like that, is Kid Cudi. From day one, he's shown passion, hunger, and most importantly, the ability to rap the way that Kanye West wanted to on 808s and Heartbreaks, without making it sound partially retarded. He dropped his debut album in 2009 (Feels awesome to do that, let's get it in 2010), towards the end of the middle of the year. After 3 months of his record being on physical and digital shelves, it has sold roughly 230k copies. Now, I'm not going to talk about how those are horrible numbers for a debuting artist, particularly one like Cudi who had major advantages going for him.

This is a recession and very few people are selling. Rap album wise, only Jay-Z and Eminem went above platinum in 2009, I don't count the Black Eyed Peas. And that's Jay-z and Eminem. I'll leave it at that. Cudi's debut put up strong numbers, maybe not the numbers that he had hoped for, and that his label had hoped for, but strong numbers, nonetheless. Day N Nite, that smash hit of his, went to number 3 on the charts.

So, why the second album so soon? I could give a few reasons, but I'll go with the one that makes the most sense and is the most obvious. It makes "cense". He's looking at it from the perspective that he's getting another chance to make music, music that people may want to hear, and music that for him, he has something of a need to make. His labels are looking at it from the perspective that, despite the fact that he didn't sell a huge number of records (So Far Gone EP, here's looking at you), he's still selling majorly well.

His sophomore album may not sell as many copies as Man on the Moon did. But he and the marketing division at UMG are smart. They're not calling this album the sequel to Man on the Moon, they're calling it Cudder, and its not a Kid Cudi album, per se. Its a collaboration album, which means that they're going for a broader audience, and they're going to try to allow him a chance to make his unique sound even better by mixing it with people from different genres of music.

Thus, when he gets to a proper sequel to Man on the Moon, he'll be ready to go all out and make an album that not only will sound good, but will sell well, at least for the year that it's released in. And you can't ask for much more than that.