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TRACK: Day N Night

WHO: Cleveland rapper Kid Cudi, or Scott Mescudi, if you know him well enough.

WHAT: Hip-hop for a yet-to-be-made top-of-the-range car ad.

HYPE: “Splitting the difference between big shit bravado and shoulder shrug cool” - The Fader.

WE SAY: Yep, it’s a lively and fertile time for hip-hop from top to bottom at the moment, from Jay Z Godzilla-ing over Glasto down to the grass roots. And it’s guys like Kid Cudi that are helping to keep it fresh. While many of his peers are checking their sneakers and dusting down their old breaks and turning the party out, Cudi is bringing a sense of stylish restraint to the scene.

Over Day N Night’s crisp and understated squelches, moody sweeps and bare-bone beats, Cudi’s sober yet assured flow draws strength from other genres, principally R’n’B, while lyrically he leans more towards reflective, poetic blogging, dealing more with internal issues and personal dilemmas than you’d expect from a genre that tends to swing between vacuous bombast and playful consumerism.

Boasting suaveness in abundance, this is like hip-hop you’d pay a few pence more for if it was labelled up as Finest or Taste The Diffrence in a supermarket.

IF YOU ONLY NEED TO KNOW ONE THING: Cudi has a mixtape A Kid Named Cudi ready to drop. You can download it from his MySpace. You’ll just have to wait 'til the 17th, if that’s cool with you. Oh, and also, the dude cooked up an exclusive track for the UK’s DJ Semtex – ‘ere y’are http://djsemtex.wordpress.com/2008/06/15/kid-cudi/

WHERE CAN I GET MY HANDS ON IT: Day N Nite is released on Fool’s Gold on August 4th.

FIND MORE: www.kidcudi.com

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