Kid Cudi reflects on a near-fatal experience he had while doing cocaine alone at his New York apartment in his upcoming book, Cudi: The Memoir. On Tuesday, GQ published an exclusive except from the memoir, in which the Man on the Moon rapper admits that he was "at peace with dying."
He begins by explaining that at one point in the night, he collapsed to the floor and felt paralyzed. "After doing more coke than I ever had in my life I was losing all sense of what was real. I’d been alone in my New York apartment, crying for hours, listening to the Lykke Li song 'Time Flies' on repeat. It was a love song, but the melodies and her voice filled me with despair. I tried to get up off the bed, but my legs wouldn’t work, so I collapsed to the floor and started to crawl. Eventually, I gave in and just laid on the ground. My heart was racing. It felt like it was going to burst any minute."
“‘You made great music that people loved,’" he recalled thinking. "‘But this is the end.’”
As caught by Complex, further into the passage, Cudi adds: “I couldn’t make sense of what was plaguing me. It was all happening so fast. The first Man on the Moon had been out for about a year and I was on a rocket ship. Grappling with fame pushed me toward cocaine, which I only ever did alone. I was drawn to it in isolation, and my time by myself was increasing.”
Kid Cudi Memoir Release Date
Eventually, Cudi admits that he started doing “lines that were as wide as my pinky.” He continues: “I was feeling shut-in and I could barely even leave my house. The coke felt like a necessary countermeasure for my celebrity, but it was wreaking havoc on my life, creatively and personally. I had become super volatile emotionally. My relationships were in shambles, and I couldn’t get songs out like I wanted. The anger was boiling in me. My rage came from my reality not aligning with my dream.”
“I thought being set financially was going to save me and make everything all right. I thought being Kid Cudi would transform my life in all the best ways. It didn’t," he explained.
Before ending the excerpt, Cudi admits that he was suicidal by the end of the making of his 2015 album, Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven. “After we’d finished a session, I’d be alone Googling exit bags,” he wrote. “I was thinking about a way I could actually do it. I was plotting it. There’s a song at the end of Speedin’ Bullet where I say good-bye, and that was meant to be my final album. I was going to kill myself at the end of that album, or before it came out, or during that cycle. I was not planning to live that year. Not many people around me expected me to either.”
Cudi: The Memoir will be releasing on Tuesday, August 12. The 320-page autobiography is available for preorder now.
