There continues to be no love lost between Kid Cudi and Kayne West, over the collateral damage from Ye dragging the younger rapper into his evidently still somewhat ongoing harassment campaign against his ex-wife Kim Kardashian and her now ex-boyfriend Pete Davidson.
It all started back in February when Ye announced that Cudi wasn’t featured on Donda 2 because he felt backstabbed that Cudi was still friends with Davidson. In turn, Cudi fired back in the comments, writing: “Too bad I don’t wanna be on ur album u f*ckin dinosaur hahaha.” Soon after, West lobbed another cheap shot at Cudi by posting a since-deleted photo of Cudi, Davidson, and Timothée Chalamet together with Davidson’s face X’ed out on Instagram.
Ye even dragged Cudi into his victory lap following the news that Kardashian and Davidson had split up. On a doctored New York Times front page declaring Davidson to be “dead,” West added: “Kid Cudi meant to play funeral but fearful of bottle throwers.” The jab was ostensibly a reference to fans throwing water bottles and other objects at the stage after Cudi replaced West as the headliner for the Rolling Loud Miami festival last month.
Which is all to say that … Kid Cudi has been through a lot, as that sort of ongoing harassment can take a severe toll on an individual’s mental health. And although the pair have feuded publicly in the past, as rappers with dueling egos are sometimes wont to do, the 38-year-old is making it extremely clear that he and Ye are never ever getting back together.
In a new Esquire profile published on Wednesday, Cudi did not mince words when discussing his falling out with West. And although he noted that there had always been a power imbalance in their professional relationship — Cudi has appeared on all of West’s albums while West has only appeared on two of his — that it was unequivocally the Davidson nonsense that was the final straw.
“Do you know how it feels to wake up one day, look at your social media, and you’re trending because somebody’s talking some sh*t about you?” he asks. “And then you got this person’s trolls sending you messages on Instagram and Twitter? All in your comments? That sh*t pissed me off. That he had the power to fuck with me that week. That he used his power to f*ck with me. That pissed me off.” He adds gravely, “You f*cking with my mental health now, bro.”
He addresses West directly: “I’m not one of your kids. I’m not Kim. It don’t matter if I’m friends with Pete or not friends with Pete. None of this shit had anything to do with me,” Cudi says. “If you can’t be a grown man and deal with the fact that you lost your woman? That’s not my f*cking problem. You need to own up to your sh*t like every man in this life has. I’ve lost women, too. And I’ve had to own up to it. I don’t need that in my life. I don’t need it.”
Well, surely, this will be the last we ever hear about this feud … or until literally any day now when West inevitably responds by dragging Cudi on Instagram, or in a track, or by some other creative method. But in the meantime, we can all probably agree that “you f*cking with my mental health now, bro” is a pretty evergreen retort for anyone who has to deal with Kanye West.
