Skip to content
News

Kanye and Kid Cudi’s Kids See How Many Ghosts? An Investigation

Kanye West, Kid Cudi
AUSTIN, TX - MARCH 19: Kanye West and Kid Cudi perform during VEVO Presents: G.O.O.D. Music at VEVO Power Station on March 19, 2011 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Daniel Boczarski/Getty Images for VEVO)

On April 19th, Kanye West took to Twitter to announce that several albums he was working on would be released in June, including his eventual solo album ye. Another was a collaboration with Kid Cudi that he called “Kid See Ghost.” You might not have noticed at first, but there is no “s” at the end of ghost, implying a singular ghost that the kids see. You would be forgiven if you didn’t catch it; we didn’t and neither did other media outlets. But there it is from Kanye himself: Kids See Ghost. And acccording to a Pitchfork report, Kanye even filed a trademark for the name “Kids See Ghost,” so that should settle any confusion on what the album’s name is —unless of course that isn’t actually the name.

Later that month, Kanye showed a few Takashi Murakami-inspired pieces to mark the collaboration with Cudi and you can clearly see from the images the words, “Kids See Ghosts” written out. This would imply that Kanye misspok/wrote earlier, and that the plural version is the actual album title.

 

Earlier this week, Cudi confirmed as much when he shared the official Kids See Ghost(s) album cover by Murakami and called it “Kids See Ghosts.”  This, however, contradicts a tweet made the day before by Cudi’s manager, Dennis Cummings, about the two rappers’ album listening party scheduled to take place in LA, wherein he calls the record “Kids See Ghost.”

Cudi doubled down today though, tweeting a link for fans to use to watch the album listening livestream tonight and continuing to call it “Kids See Ghosts.”

So what exactly is the correct album title? It seems that neither Kanye nor Cudi can decide on how many ghosts are being seen. This is similar to Frank Ocean’s Blonde/Blond confusion, in which the physical album cover read “Blond” while the official listing on iTunes and streaming platforms called the record “Blonde,” seemingly on purpose to highlight both the masculine and feminine connotations of the word.

The Kanye-Cudi issue, however, seems more borne out of indecisiveness or a lack of clarity. If you were to investigate the Murakami and Murakami-inspired images for clues, you may notice that in the early one Kanye shared, there are two kids with one ghost —a point for “Kids See Ghost.” But there are two ghosts on the album’s official cover, countering that theory.

Looks like we won’t have a definitive answer on how many ghosts those kids see until later tonight, when Kids See Ghost(s) officially drops. Spooky…