Earlier this month, Kid Cudi announced he was leaving the fold of Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music imprint to start his own record label, Wicked Awesome.
On April 3, he told Power 106 that he and Yeezy had a phone conversation about the move, that there was a “creative direction” Cudders needed to explore, despite having found commercial success as a rapper under West’s wings.
“Me and Kanye were talking on the phone the other day. These have been things I wanted to talk to him about, about me wanting to start my own direction.”
The conversation, we imagine, couldn’t have been easy. According to Cudi in an interview with MTV, it most certainly was not: That was the most stressful 48 hours ever.”
“I wanted to make sure that when I spoke to [Kanye] he understood and I didn’t say anything that would upset him,” Cudi said. “It’s a shot in the dark telling someone what I had to tell him, but I was overthinking it. I was way off. When I got on the phone and talked, within the first five minutes I was like, ‘Whew. Holy sh–.'”
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Cudi feels confident that West still wants to know what’s going on with him creatively. This, a week after he dropped his third studio effort, “Indicud,” with all indications that it may be one of his most commercially successful albums yet. A$AP Rocky and, ahem, Michael Bolton guest on the effort. We will see tomorrow (April 24) how it fares on the charts.
“In the last email [West] sent me, he was just like, ‘Yo, come out to Paris and work,’ but I gotta go shoot ‘Need for Speed’ first,” he continued. “I’ma handle that and hopefully he’s still working because I got some time in between so I might jet out and go check him, play him some beats that I been working on. Now that I know he might need my help I might go in the studio and actually try to make some beats with him in mind and see what comes outta that.”
Sounds pretty loose, and Kanye is tight-lipped on his own recording plans, though it sounds like everyone from Jay-Z to Daft Punk have dropped into his Paris studio to help out on whatever follows 2012 G.O.O.D. compilation “Cruel Summer.”