Kid Cudi isn’t hiding anything about his near-fatal overdose or one of the darkest periods of his life.
In a passage from his soon-to-be memoir, the 41-year-old rapper talked of a night spent by himself in his Tribecat flat in New York, crying for hours while high on more cocaine than he had ever taken.
“I was at peace with dying,” he writes, per GQ, before saying he collapsed to the floor and felt paralyzed. “‘You made great music that people loved,’ I thought. ‘But this is the end.’”
“I couldn’t make sense of what was plaguing me,” he said further into the passage. “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.”
Cudi revealed that before he escalated into daily “lines that were as wide as my pinky,” he used little bumps of cocaine.
He added, “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.”
“My rage came from my reality not aligning with my dream,” he confessed. “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 said that his cocaine use drove Man on the Moon II and that, while recording Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven, he had suicidal thoughts once more.
“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 hits stores on Aug. 12.
