Songfacts®:

• Most songs about smoking pot are couched in euphemism and delivered with a wink, but in Kid Cudi's "Marijuana," we get the sense that he really needs it to balance his moods. ON another track from the album, Cudi explains how he can turn into a maniac with just the slightest provocation. Here, he's mellowed out thanks to the bud.
• The second single from Kid Cudi's sophomore album, Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager, "Marijuana" finds him rapping on a single note over piano arpeggios. Cudi produced the chilled-out track with Dot da Genius and Mike Dean.
• The week that Man on the Moon II was released, sufficient downloads of this track were made to enable it to reach #54 on the Hot 100.
• The video was directed, shot and edited by Cudi's actor pal Shia LaBeouf and produced by Lorenzo Eduardo while the rapper was in Amsterdam serving as a judge for the 2010 Cannabis Cup. LaBeouf originally reached out to Cudi as he wanted to shoot a short film centered around "MANIAC." "While we were brainstorming that, I had the gig to perform in Amsterdam. I was thinking about ways to do a video for 'Marijuana' because I knew I wanted to do something and I wanted to do the right thing," Cudi told MTV News." And it just hit me one day, like, 'Yo, I can have Shia come with me and film the whole trip and we could do it like a real vintage documentary style of the entire trip.' What could be iller than that?"
  
  The video shows Cudi and his friend Cage in Amsterdam smoking exotic strains of weed. The clip confused some fans as the hip hop performer had announced a couple of months previously that he had given up smoking grass. Cudi told MTV News nothing has changed. "It's something I did before I decided to quit smoking marijuana," he explained. "However, I didn't want to deprive people of the footage, deprive people of the video because of my personal decisions. It was almost like an R.I.P. video to my whole smoking career."
• The song lasts exactly 4:20, a reference to 420 being a popular number in cannabis culture.