on the weeknd

Ok, so I should really have written about this ages ago, but I have been pretty busy: The Weeknd. The mixtape ‘House of Balloons’ has been around for about 3 months now, although as eponymous as it is, it feels like a year. Since then, a new track called ‘Rolling Stone’ has been dropped via twitter, and last month, a song called ‘The Birds (Part 1)’.

So, what’s the deal with The Weeknd? Who or what is it, and why the heck is he or she or it so popular? Well the answer to all these questions has been a source of great discussion from almost the first days of ‘House of Balloons’ going online, and a source of great publicity too. We now know that the The Weeknd is Abel Tesfaye. He is from Toronto, and he’s only 20. But that’s about all we know.

This has proved part of the allure in itself. However much we are aware that it is a very clever bit of marketing for an artist to cut himself off just after dropping a great record, (and a record with a musical tone that is itself enigmatic, jaded and disconnected), The Weeknd’s glow continues to mesmerise us like hip little flies. In this media age, that refusal to speak is worth a thousand double-page spreads. To not give anyone an interview when the entrenched presumption is that aural and public exposure rise in tandem, is frankly unheard of. Tesfaye probably knows it, and it is a very, very smart thing to do if you’re planning your career, and its successive releases, gigs and so on, for the long game. Right now in fact, Abel Tesfaye might well be the holy grail of music interviewees. And, others might say that is well above his station.

The British national newspaper The Guardian online published two features in response to the internet attention Tesfaye received. Both were rather cynical….or questioning at least of The Weeknd’s music and cleverly non-existent marketing, particular Alex Macpherson, who acknowledged how many cultural commentators have got carried away. On the Village Voice, he said:

“It probably counts as some sort of triple whammy of music-critic idiocy: a sweeping proclamation about an entire genre, a blundering dismissal of that same genre, and hyping up an unremarkable new act after being taken in by their marketing strategy.”

Macpherson also denounced the music hand-in-hand with the media attention in his article by saying that R&B today has far more to offer than the stripped out, emotionally shallow Weeknd. Now, of course, one’s pronouncements on ‘better’ or ‘worse’ or ‘great’ are subjective. Art is like that, as is music, as are all cultural creations, and I don’t think Macpherson was holding himself up as a beacon of the objectively Correct. However, if The Guardian's great music critic isn't seeing the talent of The Weeknd, then what is it that the rest of the net sees that he doesn't?

The Weeknd are interesting to me personally because they touch on new and old feelings at the same time. On a basic level, their samples are drawn from all over the place chronologically (e.g. Beach House- c. 2008 on 'Loft Music', Siouxsie and the Banshees c. 1980 on 'Glass Table Girls'). However, more importantly, like How to Dress Well, there is a strong theme of old R&B melodies being stripped down to their simple core and built up again around ambiguous, ambient noise, that brings to mind the lo-fi styles of current indie music. Therefore, 'House of Balloons' hits a strange middle ground chronologically, between familiarly rich soul melodies and the newer lo-res production of Tesfaye's contemporaries.

Secondly, the theme of The Weeknd is undoubtedly despondency and indifference. Yet, what is good about R&B for a lot of people is the artist's emotional investment. Whether pining after someone or getting it on, R&B is for the most part optimistic and uplifting. R Kelly either laments something he can’t have or he’s getting down n dirty. The Weeknd have done away with all that. All that remains is a sort of emotional bankruptcy and a void: one that Tesfaye is constantly drawing our attention to. The R Kelly, the TLC, the Aaliyah, Brandy and Bobby Brown that sit somewhere in the backs of our minds form the core of The Weeknd’s music, just as they do with HTDW, and make all the songs initially familiar. However, around it is a bleak description of a drug and sex-fuelled lifestyle that has gone wrong a left the writer empty. There is a malaise. That part, in my view, is what gives ‘House of Balloons’ its exoticism, its confusion and ultimately, its cool.

The Weeknd therefore take on many tenets of mainstream chart R&B and turn them on their head. One artist’s regret of the drugs, sex and material lifestyle may not be new in R&B lyricism, but I think it has never been conveyed through the music like this. 'House of Balloons' actual lyrics are pretty clumsy if you listen to them; however, subverting the positive feelings materialism brings into really cold, hard, lost, negative ones is alone an idea that has artistic traction in my opinion.

I hope that wasn’t too laboured to read reader! What The Weeknd will do next is a really exciting topic, and perhaps an even bigger one, is to whom Tesfaye will give his first interview (including the cynical question: 'why?')