Music: Working for the Weeknd
Originally published in The Walrus. Read the full text here.
The weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face” may be the closest thing we have this year to a song of the summer. If you listen to top 40 radio, you’re probably tired of the track—and addicted to it as well. It has something I never thought I’d get from the Weeknd: a prominent bass line, similar to the Louis Johnson groove that made “Billie Jean” an instant classic. And it gets at a truth that Michael Jackson grasped instinctively: catchy music needn’t have anodyne lyrics.
The Weeknd’s second major-label record, Beauty Behind the Madness (out tomorrow), is billed as his pop debut. It has him getting away from the brooding R&B of his previous work and incorporating dance-club textures. We typically think of moves like this as a form of selling out, but in this case, the change has made the music more complex, not less. I’m a lapsed Weeknd fan who’s suddenly listening again, which means that I’m contending with the many things that make him such a troubling, compelling performer.
When the Weeknd’s first mixtape, House of Balloons, came out in 2011, I was hooked. Here was an artist taking contemporary R&B and transforming it into something hypnotic, gauzy, and eerie. The songs felt if not decadent like Jay Z then decadent like Huysmans: a study in hedonism and sexual dependency. And when was the last time an R&B artist sampled post-punk acts like Siouxsie and the Banshees?
For those who twigged to the Weeknd early, there were more surprises to come: that the press-shy singer behind the project was Abel Tesfaye, a twenty-one-year-old Ethiopian Canadian from Toronto; that Balloons was the first of three independent mixtapes released for free that year; and that, despite Tesfaye’s down-tempo style, he brought his A-game to his live shows. He may have sounded the crooner on his records, but he was an arena rocker on stage—despite not yet playing actual arenas.
Some early listeners found the trilogy too depressing to bother with, but those who fell for the records fell hard. And loving the Weeknd meant dealing with the lyrics and their ambiguous sexual politics. How much of a creep was this guy?
This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.