Kid Cudi 'Broke Down' Upon Hearing of Fan's Vision Before Death

Ben Breedlove in his video

Sourced via YouTube

Kid Cudi says he "broke down" after watching YouTube videos made by an 18-year-old fan who died on Christmas day. The fan, Ben Breedlove, suffered from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a condition that makes it difficult for the heart to pump blood. Before his death, Breedlove put two videos on YouTube describing his lifelong struggle with the disease through a series of handwritten index cards.

When he collapsed in high school and had to be revived by paramedics, he recalled, he had a vision of being in a white room with his favorite rapper. "Kid Cudi brought me to a glass desk and put his hand on my shoulder," he explained, quoting from Cudi's song "Mr. Rager": "When will the fantasy end?... When will the heaven begin?"

"I am so sad about Ben Breedlove," the rapper, born Scott Mescudi, wrote on his Tumblr blog. "This has really touched my heart in a way I cant describe, this is why I do what I do."

He went on to address Breedlove's family: "To Ben's family, you raised a real hero, he's definitely mine. You have my love."   

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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