Kid Cudi has been through quite a bit since bursting onto the scene several years ago. Speaking candidly with Headkrack’s Hip-Hop Spot, the Midwestern rapper explained how he quit drugs and alcohol and revealed that his rise to fame was more than he could handle.
“For me, I just got to this point, and especially up until recently, I gave up liquor. I don’t drink anymore; it’s been five and a half months I’ve been sober,” Cudi said. “The booze was a new thing for me, I didn’t realize I was an alcoholic all these years. I had a problem. I think with any addiction you have to be ready to make the choice, whether it’s cigarettes or anything. You have to just commit and you just have to stick with it. I stopped everything cold turkey. When I had my cocaine problem, I stopped cold turkey; I didn’t go to rehab. I don’t believe in these things. Some people need the extra help, not me. I wasn’t a drug addict before this crap. I wasn’t doing cocaine; I wasn’t getting wasted every night because I didn’t want to be alone. I wasn’t this dark person before the madness, I was a whole other dude. I don’t even think I smoked weed as much ’cause we couldn’t afford it and I lived in Ohio; there’s no good bud out there—well there probably is now. You just have to make the choice and decide the person you wanna be and stick with it. You get to a certain age where the people around you are not gonna be on that roller coaster all day long ready for you to go up, ready for you to go down, and stick with you through all the madness. People want you to be one person and stick with it and I chose to be clean and be sober and get my life together for myself, for my health, for my daughter, for my family.”
“I couldn’t deal with fame, short and simple,” he added. “For me, I could not wrap my head around the fact that a week before I blew up I was just a regular dude and a week after it was just on; it was a whole other thing. When I first started getting recognized in the street it was cool, ‘cause it wasn’t extreme; it was just like, ‘Oh man I like your music. Could I take a picture?’ It was chill. But then when it started to be everywhere I went, it was hard for me because I never wanted to make that adjustment. I didn’t want to be like, ‘Oh now I’m famous now, I guess I gotta live a celebrity lifestyle.’ Spent twenty-three, twenty-four years of my life living a normal life, it was hard for me to feel like I needed to make that switch just because of my job.”
