In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
We have flirted with the idea for long enough, and now here it is: a chart-topping pop hit that does not exist. Travis Scott and Kid Cudi’s “The Scotts” is an illusion, an apparition. It’s a cloud that you probably passed through without noticing. It’s two minutes and forty-five seconds of nothing whatsoever. “The Scotts” goes down in history as a #1 hit. It’s the only #1 hit for Kid Cudi, an artist whose career has had an actual impact on some people’s lives. But the song itself leaves no legacy. It leaves less than no legacy. It’s the spritz of carbonation that you hear when you crack open a soda can. It’s the puff of air from a freshly torn potato chip bag. It’s a dream, but not your dream. It’s the dream of the stranger sitting next to you on a long flight, one that you can’t even sense through the electrical impulses in the air. It’s an absolute void.
In order for an absolute void to debut at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, so many factors had to converge. New advancements in technology had to transform music itself into some new thing — not an art or even a commodity but a utility, a monthly ten-dollar subscription fee. A global pandemic had to force billions of people indoors, with nothing to occupy their desperate attentions but the flickering of a screen. A new generation of opportunistic, chart-manipulating megastars had to take over, nurturing fanbases who treat new songs like collectable Pokémon cards and bending the Billboard algorithms to their will. “The Scotts” isn’t just a triumph of marketing over music. It’s the triumph of marketing absolute emptiness to a captive audience. Somewhere, a boardroom full of executives passed a glittery hologram in front of people’s faces and found a way to monetize it.
Travis Scott and Kid Cudi are two relatively consequential artists, and you can’t really write the history of 21st century pop music without at least mentioning their names. Both of them participated in the rap economy at a time when rap utterly dominated pop music, and they intersected and overlapped in all kinds of ways. They collaborated a bunch of times, but they still sold “The Scotts” as if the prospect of their collaboration was itself a self-evidently big deal. It was not. The question of whether “The Scotts” is the best Travis Scott/Kid Cudi collab barely even seems worth considering, though no, it’s not. It’s just the song that came out with enough ballyhoo, at a moment when the world was sufficiently starved of ballyhoo.
In the weeks ahead, we will be forced to discuss a great many songs like “The Scotts,” #1 hits that do not exist. In a way, we’ve been doing that for a minute. Travis Scott’s previous #1 hit, “Highest In The Room,” was a smash only in the theoretical realm. Last week’s column, on Drake’s “Toosie Slide,” marked the beginning of a stretch of meaningless, impactless COVID-era hits. But “Highest In The Room” went platinum nine times, and it remains part of Travis Scott’s live show. “Toosie Slide” remained in the top 10 for ten weeks. “The Scotts,” by contrast, dropped into the shadow realm after its one week on top. As far as I can tell, Travis Scott and Kid Cudi have never performed it live, separately or together. It’s the lead single to an album that never came out, one that never will come out.
Honestly, I should’ve skipped this week’s column. This whole Number Ones enterprise is about the history of popular music, the ways in which mass taste has shifted and evolved over the decades. “The Scotts” does not factor into that larger narrative, except perhaps as a symptom of rot. I’m only bothering to commit thought to this nothing song out of sheer completism. But since we’re here anyway, we might as well get into it.
One good thing about “The Scotts” is that it gives us a chance to discuss Kid Cudi, a character worth discussing. This column has already considered the specter of Travis Scott a couple of times, and he’ll be back a couple more, for songs just as forgettable as “The Scotts.” But Kid Cudi is something new, at least as far as this column is concerned. Cudi was one of the towering figures of rap’s proverbial blog era, an omnivorous and eccentric creature who fed the internet media as the internet media was just coming into itself. He had a huge impact on legions of young fans like Jacques Bermon Webster II. Webster chose “Travis Scott” as his stage name partly as an homage to Kid Cudi. Cudi, whose real name is Scott Mescudi, is only seven years older than Scott, but he was an early favorite and a formative influence. In choosing his name, Travis Scott combined the monikers of a favorite uncle and of Kid Cudi. In a Tonight Show interview years later, he referred to the two of them as “my two superheroes.” So when Travis Scott put Kid Cudi on a #1 hit, it was almost like when George Michael helped push Aretha Franklin back to the top.
About that superhero: Scott Ramon Seguro Mescudi grew up in low income housing in Cleveland’s Shaker Heights neighborhood. (When Kid Cudi was born, the #1 song in America was Yes’ “Owner Of A Lonely Heart” — appropriate, perhaps, for the Lonely Stoner.) Cudi’s father, who was of mixed Mexican and Native American ancestry, was old enough that he served in the Air Force during World War II. He painted houses, worked as a substitute teacher, and died when Cudi was 11 years old. Cudi’s mother, a Black woman, was a middle school choir teacher. Cudi was a sensitive kid who often slept next to his mother and who got expelled from high school for threatening to punch his principal. After getting his GED, Cudi studied film at the University Of Toledo for a year. He dropped out, made a demo tape, and moved to the Bronx to live with his jazz-musician uncle. He wanted to make it in music.
In New York, Kid Cudi found work in a couple of cool-kid clothing stores. Eventually, he moved into a Brooklyn apartment with his friend Oladipo Omishore, the producer known as Dot Da Genius, and with Dot’s family. Together, Cudi and Dot figured out Cudi’s sound, a hazy, emotional, genre-blurred take on rap. Cudi’s early music exists in the shadow of Kanye West, a figure who looms huge in Cudi’s life in all sorts of ways. West made the rap world safe for sensitive hipsters, and blogs like Nah Right helped establish a global audience for rappers who were creative enough to stand out and canny enough to churn out music constantly. On his 2008 mixtape A Kid Named Cudi, Cudi rapped over tracks from Outkast, J Dilla, Ratatat, Paul Simon, Band Of Horses. He met Kanye West a couple of times around then — once in a Virgin Megastore, once when he was working in the Bape boutique. Both times, he tried to offer West his music. West politely declined.
Over time, Kid Cudi made connections. Patrick Reynolds, the DJ and producer known as Plain Pat, became a friend and then started managing Cudi. So did Emile Haynie, a producer who’s done a lot of work in a lot of different genres. (Haynie has been in this column for his part in Bruno Mars’ “Locked Out Of Heaven.”) In 2007, Cudi and Dot Da Genius recorded the song that would become Cudi’s breakout, the spaced-out, hypnotic amble “Day ‘N’ Nite.” The single, originally posted on MySpace, came out on the New York indie label Fool’s Gold, and Cudi included it on A Kid Called Cudi. The blogs loved it, and the song found a new audience when the Italian dance duo Crookers remixed it and that remix became a club smash. Over time, “Day ‘N’ Nite” built into an instant party-starter and a full-on crossover hit. In 2009, two years after its release, “Day ‘N’ Nite” peaked at #3 on the Hot 100. Seventeen years after its release, it went diamond. (It’s a 10.)
Once he heard “Day ‘N’ Nite,” Kanye West was suddenly interested. West signed Cudi to his G.O.O.D. Music label, and he flew Cudi to Hawaii to help out on Jay-Z’s Blueprint 3 sessions. Cudi recorded a bunch of hooks, one of which appeared on Jay-Z’s LP. West used a bunch of Cudi’s other ideas on his 2008 album 808s & Heartbreak. West influenced Cudi enormously, and then Cudi influenced West right back. In 2009, Cudi was part of the first blog-rap class of XXL Freshmen, and he released his major-label debut Man On The Moon: The End Of Day. None of the LP’s tracks hit the Hot 100 to the extent “Day ‘N’ Nite” did, but the record’s slippery, searching qualities made a deep impression on a lot of kids. That album eventually went quadruple platinum. Cudi’s song “Pursuit Of Happiness” — a collaboration with MGMT and Ratatat, two indie-ish duos who I saw at the Bowery Ballroom back in the day — never got past #59, but it’s now platinum 12 times over.
After “Day ‘N’ Nite,” Kid Cudi didn’t make it back into the top 10 for more than a decade, when “The Scotts” debuted at #1. To his credit, he seemed entirely content with cult-hero status, and he never chased hits. He still made some hits; they just weren’t huge ones. In 2010, Cudi’s Kanye West collab “Erase Me” reached #22. “Just What I Am,” with Cleveland underground rapper Chip Tha Ripper, made it to #77 in 2012. Somewhere in there, Cudi also started acting, taking supporting roles in forgettable things like the Entourage-esque HBO show How To Make It In America and the 2012 video game adaptation Need For Speed. Cudi’s artistic decisions got progressively weirder over the years. Cudi and Dot Da Genius started an alt-rock project called WZRD. Cudi served as the first bandleader for Comedy Bang! Bang!, IFC’s talk-show spinoff of the podcast. Stuff like that.
While Cudi was on the G.O.O.D. Music roster, Travis Scott entered the fold, helping to produce a couple of tracks that featured Cudi. From the beginning of Scott’s career, you can feel Cudi’s influence — the fashionable genre-collisions, the gestures at big feelings, and especially the humming low-register textures that are often more memorable than the actual words that Cudi raps. Eventually, Cudi left G.O.O.D. Music and spent some time in rehab. His music-business experiences were weirder, perhaps, than we will ever know. Over the last few years, for instance, the world learned that Diddy, a figure who has appeared in this column too many times, got upset because Cudi was seeing Diddy’s ex-girlfriend Cassie. In response, Diddy had Cudi’s car firebombed while it was sitting in Cudi’s driveway. Cudi has been vocal about his struggles with mental health, and if you’ve already got issues on that front, dealing with that kind of thing is not going to help.
Once Kid Cudi left G.O.O.D. Music, his records became less and less commercial. His 2015 alt-rock double album Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven and his guest-heavy 2016 follow-up Passion, Pain & Demon Slayin’ didn’t send any singles into the Hot 100. In 2018, though, Cudi had a big bounce back when he reunited with his old friend Kanye West and they became a one-off duo called Kids See Ghosts. The self-titled Kids See Ghosts mini-album came out during West’s brief blitz of mini-albums, all recorded in Wyoming, and it brought out the best in Cudi. Kids See Ghosts was an instant cult favorite, and all of its tracks charted. The biggest of them was “Reborn,” which peaked at #39 and which served more as a showcase for Cudi than for West.
Travis Scott presumably figured he and Kid Cudi could do a Kids See Ghosts type of thing together. Scott and Cudi worked together a few times over the years. In 2016, Cudi appeared on Scott’s song “Through The Late Night“; Scott heavily interpolated “Day ‘N’ Nite” on that one. Scott returned the favor on Cudi’s track “Baptized In Fire,” which reused the Mort Garson sample that DJ Shadow flipped on “Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt.” In 2018, Cudi appeared on Travis Scott’s “Stop Trying To Be God,” an Astroworld track that also featured Earth, Wind & Fire’s Philip Bailey, indie-electronic star James Blake, and a Stevie Wonder harmonica solo. It peaked at #27.
“The Scotts” was supposed to be the first single from a new group, also known as the Scotts. Travis Scott and Kid Cudi were going to make a whole album, just as Kanye West and Kid Cudi did with Kids See Ghosts. That was the idea, anyway. But “The Scotts” does not sound like a statement of intent. It’s a statement of nothing. It barely sounds like a song, certainly not one built to function on its own. Kids See Ghosts had a peculiar sort of resonance — two broken people with deep and intertwined histories trying to heal themselves and each other by coming together. The combination of Travis Scott and Kid Cudi didn’t work that way. Travis Scott might be a broken person, too, but he has no interest in depicting himself that way in his music. Instead, Scott works as a brand, a frontman for the oceanic stadium-rap that he and his producer collaborators generate. The dynamics of those two duos, Kids See Ghosts and the Scotts, feel almost opposed. Kanye West always has too much to say, and Travis Scott never wants to say a single thing.
On “The Scotts,” Travis Scott doesn’t really say anything, and neither does Kid Cudi. Both of them simply fill space on the beat. When a new super-duo announces itself with an eponymous single, you expect that song to work as a blueprint for what’s to come. “The Scotts” doesn’t even have a chorus. Scott raps a verse, and then Cudi gets one. In a context like this one, Cudi’s eccentricities cease to exist. He becomes a spaced-out baritone sound effect, much like Travis Scott. Scott’s lyrics might make vague reference to the duo’s existence during the pandemic, but they mostly just fill time: “We see the hype outside/ Right from the house/ Took it straight from outside/ Straight to the couch.” Them and everyone else. Scott’s most memorable lyric is his dumbest: “She drink a lot of the bourbon, like she from the street.” Get it? Like she’s from Bourbon Street? Wordplay, baby!
Kid Cudi ultimately doesn’t make more of an impression than Travis Scott on “The Scotts.” He says that some girl wants a mimosa, so bring on the shots, as if anyone consumes mimosa in shot form. He doesn’t want to talk to any bitches with PhotoShoppin’ bodies. He’s on his hustle, having visions. A line about “the Porsche outside without the top” could work as a reference to the Diddy firebombing, but nobody knew anything about that in 2020. Honestly, I’m doing too much work by even attempting any kind of lyrical analysis of “The Scotts.” It does not exist to be analyzed. Scott and Cudi’s verses are probably best heard as collections of textures, tones, and cadences.
At least in the texture/tone categories, “The Scotts” is just fine. If it was track 14 on a 19-song Travis Scott album, it would drift past me pleasantly, and I would never think about it again. Naturally, a bunch of people have production credits on “The Scotts,” including Kid Cudi’s old friends Dot Da Genius and Plain Pat, as well as the New York duo Take A Daytrip. Take A Daytrip is Denzel Baptiste and David Biral, two guys who met when they were both students at NYU. They got their start producing some 2014 tracks for the briefly hyped-up Georgia sing-rapper Raury, and they went on to work with people like 6LACK and Cordae. Take A Daytrip scored their big breakout in 2017, when they made the tinkling, rumbling beat for “Mo Bamba,” a freak hit from Travis Scott’s protege Sheck Wes. (“Mo Bamba” peaked at #6. It’s a 9.) In 2019, they co-produced “Rodeo,” a #22 hit for past and future Number Ones artists Lil Nas X and Cardi B. We’ll see Take A Daytrip’s work in this column again.
Take A Daytrip, Dot Da Genius, and Plain Pat’s work on “The Scotts” is pretty cool. Acoustic guitars flutter eerily. A lonely breakbeat gives me trip-hop flashbacks. The rappers’ voices have layers of digital reverb, which helps them work as sound effects and distract from the way that they refuse to say anything. At the end of the track, regular Travis Scott collaborator Mike Dean comes in with a very cool progged-out keyboard solo. That Mike Dean synth action is easily my favorite moment on “The Scotts.” I don’t think there’s anything offensive about “The Scotts.” Travis Scott and Kid Cudi don’t even bother to pander, the way that Drake does so gratingly on “Toosie Slide.” Instead, “The Scotts” simply works as slight but proficient atmospheric rap. If I don’t expect anything from it, it doesn’t bother me. But the idea that this is a #1 hit is just fucking laughable. To make a #1 hit, someone should have to try something. On “The Scotts,” nobody tries anything.
The reason that “The Scotts” hit #1 was the way that the song entered the world. In April 2020, when the world was shut down, Travis Scott played a live show in the online video game Fortnite Battle Royale. I knew that this was a thing, but I didn’t know what it meant until I researched this column. I don’t play Fortnite. My kids don’t play Fortnite, either. We issued a blanket ban when we first heard about it, since they were young and it had creepy Hunger Games vibes. By the time the kids were old enough to be mad about that, they didn’t really care about Fortnite anyway, and I don’t feel like I deprived them of some crucial cultural experience. Anyway, I have never experienced a video-game concert as anything other than a really fucking stupid idea. The footage of Travis Scott’s Fortnite show does nothing to dispel that impression.
I don’t think Travis Scott actually had to do anything to play his Fortnite concert. Instead, it’s a nine-minute psychedelic cartoon that stitches together a bunch of his hits, including “Sicko Mode” and “Highest In The Room.” A giant Travis Scott stomps and flies around, sometimes emitting energy-beams, while people’s digital avatars gyrate arrhythmically. Sometimes we’re underwater, or in space. “The Scotts” plays at the end, and we can’t hear it very well because it’s drowned out by the sound-effects of an exploding amusement-park mini-planet. What the fuck is this? I get nothing out of it, and I would like my nine minutes back, please. On the plus side, I guess nobody can get trampled to death at a Travis Scott Fortnite show. (Maybe their digital avatars can get trampled to death? I don’t know how Fortnite works.)
“The Scotts” debuted at #1 thanks to some big streaming numbers and actual singles sales. Travis Scott gamed the system by selling the song in a bunch of different physical formats, and collectors snapped them up like they were Labubus. I have sneaker-head friends who made a bunch of money by reselling Travis Scott’s branded shoes; I wonder if his singles worked the same way. Kid Cudi was clearly just along for the ride, though he was very happy to finally fall backwards into a #1 hit. But the success of “The Scotts” did not last. A week after it debuted on top, “The Scotts” fell to #12. It didn’t stay in the Hot 100 for long. Somehow, the single is now triple platinum. I have never heard it in the wild — not once, not in my entire life.
The Scotts’ promised collaborative album never materialized. In 2023, Kid Cudi appeared on “Looove,” a Travis Scott track that reached #49, so they must still be cool with each other. In 2022, though, a fan on Twitter asked Cudi about the Scotts album, and Cudi responded, “Naw im not doin that. The moment has passed.” Last year, he answered the same question, writing, “That ship came and went my friend. Lets move on. So much more to see and hear.”
Kid Cudi has done a lot more since “The Scotts.” A few months later, he and Eminem, someone who has been in this column, tons of times, released “The Adventures Of Moon Man & Slim Shady,” a one-off single that peaked at #22. At the end of the year, Cudi released his album Man On The Moon III: The Chosen. In 2021, he guested on songs from Kanye West and Drake that charted pretty well. Cudi played versions of himself in the 2020 legasequel Bill & Ted Face The Music and in the 2023 House Party reboot. He was pretty funny in both, and he was almost certainly the best thing about the latter, which is not saying much. I liked him in Ti West’s slasher flick X and in John Woo’s wordless action picture Silent Night, which I saw in the theater for some reason. In 2022, Cudi made a Netflix cartoon called Entergalactic, which doubled as a new album, and people seemed to like that one. I didn’t see it. I did just see Cudi make an extremely brief cameo in Happy Gilmore 2, which is exactly the kind of movie that would have an extremely brief Kid Cudi cameo.
Kid Cudi’s most recent album Insano came out last year. It was nothing special. He got more press for testifying about the firebombing in the Diddy trial earlier this summer than for anything he’s done creatively in a while. I have generally positive feelings toward Kid Cudi, even though the vast majority of his music doesn’t do much for me and even though he’s really spent an entire career coasting on the goodwill generated by his first mixtape and album. I get the sense that he’s a great person to be around. Cudi probably won’t appear in this column again, but I wish him well.
Travis Scott is another story. Scott released a ton of music in 2020, though he was mostly appearing on tracks from other people: Rosalía, Migos, Nav, Kanye West, Justin Bieber, Don Toliver, Jay Electronica, Future, Gunna, Lil Keed, Big Sean. Scott’s song “The Plan” was the end-credits music for Christopher Nolan’s misbegotten blockbuster attempt Tenet; it peaked at #74. Scott continued to release event-singles that evaporated instantly, and some of those songs did extremely well on the Hot 100. We’ll see him in this column again soon.
GRADE: 3/10