Kid Cudi Reflects on Drake Wanting to 'Kick Me When I'm Down,' Moving on From Beef: 'He Respects Me'

Kid Cudi reflected on Drake wanting to “kick me when I’m down” in a new interview in support of his memoir, Cudi, out now.

As fans have likely not forgotten, Drake’s 2016 track “Two Birds, One Stone” included a Cudi diss. Since Cudi was in rehab at the time, the general reaction to the timing of the diss wasn't positive.

Its release, notably, came after several X (then Twitter) updates from Cudi about artists, including Ye and Drake, who have “30 people write songs for them,” yet are still included in conversations about all-time top 5s.

“I was like, oh okay, you wanna kick me when I’m down. Great,” Cudi told Anthony Mason in a CBS Mornings interview released this week. “But he wanted to play the game with me. He wanted me to put him in my song or whatever and I’m not that type of artist.

I’m not going to the studio angry rapping about some other man and putting him in my art. That’s not what we’re gonna do here. I’m gonna come to your doorstep and I’mma let you know that I’mma see you. I’mma see you and that’s a promise.”

A couple years after the diss, Cudi further recalled, Ye arranged for a meeting between him and Drake. By then, Cudi said, he felt he was “kind of rehabilitated” and thus “in a much better place” personally.

During that meeting, Cudi and Drake were able to reconnect and have a “great conversation,” setting aside any would-be differences. In fact, by 2021, things were good enough between the two for Cudi to make an appearance on a Certified Lover Boy track.

“I went on to do a record for him for his album, but granted, I haven’t heard from him ever since,” Cudi said in the new interview, seen below.

While Cudi had initially been optimistic that his reconnection with Drake might lead to a sustained rekindling, that ultimately failed to happen.

“It just let me know that time is over,” he said. “We’ll never be homies like we were before. I don’t have any beef with him anymore and I’m not mad at him or anything. It’s just time has gone by. [We are in] different places. It’s all good. I know he loves me. I know that. And I know he respects me as an artist. That’s good enough for me.”

Cudi’s journey, which fans would agree grows more inspiring with each passing year, will next bring Free, his latest album. Out Aug. 22, the album is available here in a limited-edition cloud vinyl format.

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