Kid Cudi released “Pursuit of Happiness” as the third single from his seminal 2009 debut album Man on the Moon: The End of Day. The MGMT-assisted track remains one of his biggest songs to date, peaking at No. 59 on the Billboard Hot 100 and earning a 4x Platinum certification. Ratatat’s keyboard and guitar-driven production is a major reason for its success, setting the tone for Cudi and MGMT’s vocals.
“This was my first time really playing beats for a real rapper that was going to have a record out, so I was like, ‘I gotta do something quick,’” Ratatat’s Evan Mast, a.k.a. E.VAX, tells Genius. “He’s literally in a car on his way over and I’m feeling around the keyboard and just like, I had a sound that I had created on that keyboard and I was like, ‘Maybe I can do something with this.’ And just basically as fast as possible… Just laid that down and then, the doorbell rings.”
Mast says he started with a particular keyboard sound before adding in the drums. “That’s a Nord Wave keyboard which is one of the worst keyboards I’ve ever bought, but it did have that one sound. It’s basically an organ tone that’s being run through a format filter,” he explains. “There’s three kick drums here. There’s a filtered version of the kick that happens during the verses, I guess. There’s a couple snares, two or three snares.”
He continues by describing some of the more unorthodox sounds in the beat. “Then there’s some weird stuff in here,” he says. “That’s from a recording of an Indian hand drum. And then there’s this other really weird thing. Basically sounds like white noise, but it’s a recording of a radiator steaming. If you take the kick and snare out, the beat is actually really pretty weird.”
Check out the full Deconstructed episode above to learn more about how the song was made, and read all the lyrics to Kid Cudi’s “Pursuit of Happiness” featuring Ratatat & MGMT on Genius now.
