“Pursuit of Happiness” by Kid Cudi is a popular rap song in which the artist, Kid Cudi, raps about his own personal journey to find happiness in his life. The song deals with Kid Cudi’s lifestyle of abusing drugs and alcohol, which is a lifestyle he has adapted to help give himself happiness. This theme of his lifestyle is visualized in the music video through the recurring shot of him falling onto a couch as he tries to get up and do something with his life. This shot shows how his current lifestyle is getting him nowhere on his pursuit of happiness. Also, the smoke that is seen over and over in the music video symbolizes the fog that Kid Cudi is in when it comes to how he will find happiness, and also represents his constant drug use. This song depicts the cycle of Kid Cudi using drugs and alcohol to get out into the real world.

The main focus of the video is Kid Cudi constantly falling back onto the couch that he first rises from at the beginning of the video. Him getting up off the couch at the start of the video symbolizes that he is trying to get up and go out in the real world and do something with his life. However, every time he starts to get somewhere, like out his door or even out his window, he always ends up back on the couch. The couch symbolizes his lifestyle of drinking and drug use, and it keeps dragging him back in as he tries to get up and do something in his life that will make him happy. No matter what he does to try to put himself in a better situation, which is a situation away from alcohol and drug use, he ends up back on the couch just like always, because of his constant substance abuse which he hopes will make him happy. Kid Cudi’s pursuit of happiness is halted and interrupted by his dependence on substances that hold him back despite his best efforts, and the recurring image of him falling on the couch is his way of visually depicting the struggles he has with alcohol and drug abuse and how they hold him back on getting off the couch. 

Kid Cudi is an artist known for his marijuana usage. In most of his songs, he describes his marijuana use in a positive way. However, in this song and music video, his marijuana use is depicted as a demon he has that holds him back in his life and his journey to find true happiness. About halfway through the music video, Kid Cudi is lifted up off the couch in a cloud of smoke. The image of Kid Cudi being lifted up by smoke off the couch represents how he finds sometimes finds happiness through excessive drug use. The smoke carries Kid Cudi high into the air and brings him into house party where all the party goers are dressed in costume. The smoke symbolizes the high Kid Cudi gets from using drugs, and the party he ends up as represents how he thinks of himself while he is under the influence. The smoke becomes thicker and thicker as the video goes on after that point, especially as he begins to wander aimlessly through the party full of people in costume, symbolizing an increase in his already heavy drug use. At the mysterious party, Kid Cudi is the only person there wearing “normal” clothing, but everybody looks at him like he is the weird one because everybody else is dressed in costume. This symbolizes why Kid Cudi finds it so hard to get off the couch and go outside and do something other than use drugs and alcohol. However, it could also be interpreted that these people are wearing costumes because they are hiding their “true self”, and that Kid Cudi is the only real person there because he is dressed as himself and not something else. This party could also be interpreted as Kid Cudi finally entering into the real world after beating his anxiety and finally getting out of his house, but that would not have been possible if the smoke had not carried him there. In order for him to go out in the real world, it is depicted as that he needs to use drugs heavily to get off the couch. This scene shows how he does not feel like he fits in with society, which is evident through the masked people at the party. This fact can be why he struggles so much to find true happiness and turns to drugs instead. The smoke carries Kid Cudi up off the couch and into the real world, however it is then shown that he does not really feel comfortable in the real world, which explains why he turns to drugs to make himself happy. 

Kid Cudi’s music has always had an underlying theme of his personal struggles with fitting in and with his lifestyle choices. In “The Pursuit of Happiness” this theme is no different, and Kid Cudi uses the music video’s visual motifs to help the audience better understand the struggles he is trying to convey to them. The most obvious and repetitive visual motifs of Kid Cudi falling repeatedly on the couch and the haze of smoke that he finds himself in are the most telling of the theme and really clear up what the song truly is about. Visual motifs help clearly explain an artist’s message, especially when they are paired with lyrics that have a deeper meaning that could be left to the audience’s interpretation. 
