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This blog post was contributed by Max Willens, ZIO's Music Channel Assistant.

Welcome to the latest installment of ZIO's latest weekly series, Late to the Party, in which we give our readers a more complete look at an artist by catching you up on what everybody - from staff writers at the top outlets to the bloggers hiding in their mothers' basements - has been saying.

This week's subject: the Brooklyn-via-Ohio rapper Kid Cudi, the man behind "Day 'n' Nite", whose full-length debut came out last week. 

What's so special about Kid Cudi, anyway? Aside from the fact that he hails from the hip hop wasteland known as Cleveland, the artist known to his mother as Scott Mescudi is a pretty typical mainstream rapper. From the gigantic ego to the irreparable tone-deafness to the not-easily-sated appetites for drugs and women, Cudi's not much different from every other dude you're likely to see on 106 and Park.

And yet the ridiculous streak Cudi's been on for the last two years - his debut single, "Day 'n' Nite" was featured in Entourage after being licensed and pressed up in half a dozen European countries, he was personally tapped to co-write Kanye West's 808s and Heartbreak, and his debut album, Man On the Moon: The End of the Day, sold over 100,000 copies in its first week - suggest that there is something very special about him.

It certainly isn't his technical skills as a rapper ("Kid Cudi doesn’t suddenly become precise and gifted as a vocalist or lyric-writer," PopMatters writes of Cudi's debut). Though he's done a handful of freestyles that have been well-received, Cudi's sing-song-y delivery casts him somewhere between singer and rapper, an approach that not everyone cares for ("Can this dude sing? Hell no!"), and also one that doesn't always work well on stage.

Cudi's choice of beats is another possible explanation. On A Kid Named Cudi, the highly-touted mixtape that got Mr. West's attention, producers Plain Pat and Emile (who also doubles as Cudi's manager) backed the Kid with an all-star cast of indie rockers, including samples of Ratatat, Band of Horses, and LCD Soundsystem songs. End of the Day even featured some original contributions by Ratatat and MGMT, a fact that got Pitchfork so excited they found it hard to hide their disappointment with the results.

But similar things have been said about lots of other artists before Kid Cudi. In these days of catastrophically low CD sales, moving 100,000 units in the first week hints at something bigger.

That bigger something could be two things. Reviewers at hip hop hubs HipHopDX and iHipHop, for example, both sweep Cudi's microphone shortcomings aside and instead praise Man on the Moon for its cohesiveness, its "cinematic" qualities. As a move away from the "collections of tracks" that have passed for big releases in years past, Man on the Moon is automatically a success. 

To others, the most important aspect is this album's depressive mood. "Cudi is most comfortable stoned and trapped inside his own head," is the diagnosis of the Onion A.V. Club, and they're not wrong; Man on the Moon is an angsty, nearly emo album.

It's hard to imagine such a mopey figure rising to the top of the hip hop world, but it may simply be that audiences appreciate Cudi's honesty. The empty glitz and materialism of mainstream hip hop reached a peak almost five years ago, and the downward slide that's followed has seen an almost total disappearance of emotion from rap lyrics. Kid Cudi might not be the most winsome emoter, but he's the first rapper since Kanye came along who's shown himself brave enough to do any at all. Maybe that's what people think is so special.