"I'm a Facebook prophet/ I told all the girls that I'd be the hot shit." Thus sings Kid Cudi on "Soundtrack To My Life," the uninflected voice of a generation that grew up staring at monitors for hours and spends nights cycling through social networking websites. Embodying the hipster-hop aesthetic, Cudi's soundtrack is essentially a stream of chatroom confessions and lamentations. Sometimes it works -- the sparse, catchy "Day&Nite" captures the drone of restless solitude and somehow makes it danceable -- and most of the time it's mopey. But Cudi really is the hot shit right now: his smooth, intuitive cross-genre musical approach reflects our web-surfing, boundary-crossing, potentially infinite pop culture reality. It's artists like Kid Cudi who are best suited to speak to a generation of kids who conduct their social lives and define their identities online, rather than subscribing to any one scene or genre to find a sense of self.
-- Hollis Wong-Wear
Kid Cudi, with John Legend. Thursday, December 31. Wet at the W Hotel, 2201 Collins Ave., Miami Beach. Age 21 and up with ID; 305-938-3131; wallmiami.com
