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Photo: Theo Wargo/Getty Images

If you look at the recent headlines, you might get the impression that it’s been a rough year for Kid Cudi, the Cleveland-born fashion and music impresario whose feud with Ye seemed to lead to the public being pelted with bottles he received. during his Rolling Loud performance in July, and whose growing disinterest in his own album-making process threatened to stifle his future musical endeavors. If Cudi seemed eager to end the drama, it’s because he’s worked hard this decade Entergalactichis eighth album and Netflix’s new animated rom-com of the same name, a project that challenged him to use all his gifts in fashion, music and film.

Cudi’s work has always had a cinematic character: percussive, kinetic and spontaneous, an expression of both movement and pure sound. You get it in the streams — Cudi and Wale attack funk singer Trevor Dandy’s sample in the 2008 mixtape staple “Is There Any Love?” like two martial artists throwing a flurry of punches — and in videos like French director So Me’s clip for Cudi’s 2009 breakout single, “Day ‘N’ Nite.” Obsessed with space, Cudi creates compositions with a cosmic weight, such as Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. interdental brushThe thrilling ture through dark corridors of drug use and self-loathing, or the way Man on the Moon: The End of the Day combines personal reflection and narrative interludes into a dreamy concept album about facing your demons and finding happiness, or Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven‘s framing of a depressive period as a lurid 90s nostalgia retreat, with a melange of rap and alt-rock jams of varying quality, punctuated by performances by the real Beavis and Butt-Head. Cudi invoices Entergalactic – named after the End of the day cut about eating magic mushrooms and contemplating the infinite with a woman you like – like his first musical, but it feels like a realization of ideas he’s been touching on since year one.

Entergalactic tells the story of a couple pushed together by fate and learn to put aside their reservations about loving and trusting each other. The album glides through songs about letting go of fear and enjoying the moment, as the film plans Cudi in the role of doe-eyed Jabari, an artist hired to revive a legendary comic book company with a series based on on his character Mr. Interdental brush . Moving into a lavish Tribeca building, Bari meets Meadow (Jessica Williams), a photographer who lives in the apartment next door, whose taste for art, music, weed and vegan food makes a fine impersonation for his ex Carmen, a NYU graduate. whose bedroom walls and Instagram page are covered in motivational sayings. The film marks the long directorial debut of Fletcher Moules, whose work on shorter clash of clans and Star Wars tie-ins gives the sporadic action scenes in Entergalactic the sense of a legitimate superhero intellectual property; the dense, vibrant approach of color gestures to anime and to Disney, Marvel or Pixar movies like cocoa or Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The utility player is likely co-creator and executive producer Kenya Barris, whose network TV successes (blackish, Grown-ish, Girlfriends) focus on black professionals trying to balance busy work and private life while maintaining a carefully cultivated social awareness. When music, image and story come together, Entergalactic is wonderfully loose and lively. A trippy nightmare sequence in which Mr. Rager attacks Bari after a more successful artist at the company suggests a less overtly ethnic art style, as do the scenes when the artist partying with his friends Jimmy (Timothée Chalamet) and Ky (Ty Dolla $ign, who appears twice on the album), leans on a generous, psychedelic feel that lives up to the film’s title. Elsewhere, however, Entergalactic is happy to just be your textbook Netflix rom-com.

There’s a war going on here between innovation and convention, between this fluid, beautiful watercolor depiction of wild New York City nights and the more concrete points of a commercial love story, and between the space-conscious sonics in the soundtrack and the sometimes-obvious lyrics. dance over your head. The music finds Cudi in a quieter headroom than Man on the Moon III: The Chosenthe album written after Entergalactic released only two years earlier in 2020. Entergalactic takes advantage of Cudi’s nearly 15-year career of combining serious lyrics and soothing hooks with soft synth melodies. He sounds revived on “New Mode” and “Do What I Want”, humming about new beginnings and self-actualization. Keeping things in check to tell a single story about overcoming your hang-ups around you and surrendering to someone else who has your best interests at heart, Entergalactic dodges the high-stakes drama of the quintessential Kid Cudi project, a place where death and depression haunt the talented dreamer across a mountain range of highs and lows. It’s less rocky this time thanks to the more cohesive overarching concept, but sticking to the love story opens the singer-songwriter to a world of rotten, misty lyrics that are eventually saved by his gifts for tacky melodies and lyrically intriguing productions (longtime collaborators Dot Da Genius, Plain Pat and E.Vax from Ratatat all produce together with Cudi, with mouthwatering results). The syrupy “In Love” (“You look at me, hope you can’t see, no / As my heart beats, I’m the lonely man / The lonely man, baby”) passes by on a soaring vocal and a tasty synth tone, just like “Ignite the Love” (“Hmm, ooh, I need your body / Ooh, let me have you, please”), where light-hearted guitars and warm vocal phrasing convey emotions that the lyric sheet only vaguely outlines. The old saying about Kid Cudi holds true: he can win hearts with just that sweet buzz. So the animated film fills in blanks in the loose story the album tries to tell, teasing the themes the lyrics don’t explain.

The story takes place immediately after the main character secures his dream job, the moment he moves into his dream apartment and meets his dream girl, makes Entergalactic a story about holding on to your weapons and playing a clean game. Bari wants to be good to Meadow, but doesn’t know that given her ex-streetwear saleswoman is finally making the most of his talents, Carmen wants him back, and this puts us on a predictable path of missed signals and misread texts. Entergalactic hits a snag when one love interest sees a suggestive text, another sent to Bari, and he gives the expected explanation – which – makes – things worse, leaving us in a long trust issue in which Bari has to find a way to explain what we already know: that he is a solid, monogamous man who doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Everything works out for everyone in the end as Bari and Meadow manage to overcome their personal issues and resolve the work-life dilemmas that usually happen off-camera, and we soar into space to the booming notes of the rising’ She’s Lookin’ at Me. It’s neat – too neat. A smooth ride that doesn’t ask you to think too deeply, a water slide where the sense of danger is only fabricated, a scare that makes the feel-good payoff feel even better.

When Entergalactic was first announced, it was advertised as a series. The quick fix for the subplot about workplace assimilation — as well as the random relative showing up ten minutes before the credits start to give Bari the sober advice his mushy friends couldn’t — make this thing the truncated version of what could be a larger, more in-depth project. Therefore, as the team behind it celebrates its innovation in this approach to music release, keep in mind that while you’ll hear bits of most of the album’s songs, they land in the same way as music cues in a regular movie. The songs are not the core of the film, as is the tendency for Beyoncé’s visual album; the plot is informed by the direction of the numbers. That’s different from being the star of a movie for which you also write the music, making Entergalactic an animal other than the polymathic expressions of a Lin-Manuel Miranda. (Another feature that sets this thing apart from most kids movie analogs is all the sex, drugs, and real streetwear. The nudity destroys any Into the Spider-Verse comparisons, and the actual Adidas, Yeezy, and Off-White gear Bari sports might make you long for a time when Virgil Abloh, who Entergalactic before he passed and greeted the whole movie was still around and Cudi and Ye and Kasper Rorsted still got along.) The execution is so smooth, the lyrics are so vague and the story is so mechanically efficient the weird thing is that this story is named after a song about a psilocybin trip. But like some kind of psychedelic outgrowth of a studio album, Entergalactic hits its tracks. It’s poignant and beautiful throughout its 90-minute running time, a feast of ear and eye candies. You know where it’s going before it gets there, and you’re having a lot of fun anyway. That’s worth something.