★ The Weeknd ★ What You Need ★

He dropped a mini video for this as well, nothing too exciting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weweLG6Or-g

I'm still really loving this song.

Kiss Land is good, based on first impressions. "Wanderlust" is almost disco and the title track is convincingly bleak superstardom cliches over a sprawling seven-minute suite, and his voice sounds better than it ever has.

Not a fan of how they're burying his voice in this, though. But I like the album much more than I thought I would on first listen.

@goinradiodotcom

The Weeknd makes music for straight men who visit Brazil to date transsexuals

there it is

lock thread

the weeknd what you need. conference room
weekend? sucksome!
_o

{sees r&b transsexual weeknd, not weekend}
n-n-n

This album is a million times better than I expected it to be based on the singles. I'm kind of surprised at the lack of an obvious hit, though maybe Wanderlust could make some waves?

The Drake verse on Live For is very lazy and weird sounding.

I could barely choke down a single listen of this. It's all so loud and oppressive. Angry Michael drums are one of my least favorite sounds, and this album is just saturated with them.

you mean like MJ?

Yeah, but not universally beloved MJ. Late period, HIStory, all-caps, paranoid, "more is more can we crank that up?" MJ.

sure, i love a lot of those songs and teddy riley but some of those snare drums are the worst.

http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/86819/electric-ladies-and-dead-eyed-models-new-albums-from-janelle-monae-and-the-weeknd

etherous

*applauds*

and it's very true, i do really really find myself wanting to like monáe but i kind of don't want to listen to her albums again

After a handful of listens, I think Professional is the best song on here. The album sounds like a natural progression of his earlier work. He didn't play it too safe or too weird. The lyrics, as a whole, are getting a bad warp, but the title track is indeed putrid.

I think I like this, but really I like that he sampled Emika and just keep playing "Professional" over and over

okay I just got to the track that samples "Machine Gun" and um... lost cause here, I don't not actually have the necessary critical distance to dislike things like this

The Grantland article is excellent. I particularly like "Tesfaye revels in degrading women as a hedonistic, publicist-approved pose — he wears his misogyny like Lana Del Rey dons Eisenhower-era evening gowns."

I haven't even gotten to the point where I'm listening to the lyrics, for all I know he could be singing "I just fucked DJP's parents/They're begging me for more/Punched his brother in the dick/And gave his wife a herpes sore"

xp Yeah that's spot on. At some point his music became less a critique of party-culture hedonism and more an exploitative celebration of it. I still don't think he condones all the awful shit he sings about or anything, but he's engaging in some really gross role playing

haven't heard these record but that's great writing.

Someone played this on Spotify in the office today. It was at a fairly low volume and I though, sweet, someone played the Portishead album, I haven't heard this for a while. Turns out it was The Weeknd. Whether it's a sample or not, it sounded exactly like Machine Gun. Barrow's a prick for not allowing the sample and this guy's a prick for doing it anyway and pulling a Vanilla Ice.

ime Monae and the Weeknd's fanbases barely overlap at all.

Time to announce the joint tour!

co-sign m@tt

i dont dislike this but there arent nearly enough hooks

what the shit is the new video

she's not with me any more so she deserves to die?

blogs calling him a "major badass" for it?

what is wrong with people and in particular this creepy beta basquiat-wannabe cunt

what I'm gathering from the general response to this is that I will hate myself for liking this once I start listening to the lyrics

if you just watch the new video it could well cure you of the liking part

true, but OTOH I still think "Kim" is a top 3 (if not the best) Eminem song

Ha that video. It's the candid portrayal of everything that is inherently shitty about The Weeknd we've been waiting for.

Wow, the YouTube comments thread on that video :/

Finally, a video where the dude from the Counting Crows murders a woman

http://ts3.mm.bing.net/th?id=H.4553577035596702&pid=15.1

Why did people take his thematic material so much at face value? We all agree that it's horrifying stuff... but to me it just played like a horror movie where the character he plays is trapped in this torturous hedonistic Hell rather than any sort of glorification of that lifestyle.

I'm also pretty bummed people ragged on his sound palette here - I thought it was great. What's wrong with the gaudy maximalist sound he mined? It's hardly subtle but he's not exactly going for a nuanced look at gender identity. I think I read someone comparing the title track to John Carpenter, which is such a great comparison I think - Carpenter's someone who just owns gaudiness and this album to me does the same. The lurid overproduction was leaps more interesting than the stuff he released on Trilogy. But then again, this is coming from a big fan of HIStory-era MJ.

Hope dude keeps doing what he's doing in spite of the acclaim vacuum.

Why did people take his thematic material so much at face value? We all agree that it's horrifying stuff... but to me it just played like a horror movie where the character he plays is trapped in this torturous hedonistic Hell rather than any sort of glorification of that lifestyle.

that's...pretty much the consensus take on his stuff

im all in on in vein, great song

I guess I see a bit of a double standard in that people have been far more offended by this album than they ever would by a lurid horror movie. I think it also bugs me that people like Kanye continue to succeed by being actually misogynistic, while people like Abel who, IMO, skewer people like Kanye quite viciously, somehow end up with the disapproval of the critical establishment. I really do think people see him as someone who actually lives this life, and that it affects the way critics perceive him.

i mean...if you think he's a moralist who's purely creating a hedonistic strawman character that does things he never does, yeah, that is not generally how people see him.

I wouldn't go so far as moralist, but I definitely think his "IRL" identity probably has very little to do with his stage character. From his Wikipedia "career beginnings":

In Toronto, Tesfaye met producer Jeremy Rose, who had an idea for a dark R&B musical project called "The Weekend".

Seems pretty carefully planned and constructed to me.

And I have no idea whether he's a moralist or not. Based on the story of him ripping the Barrow sample, he seems like he might not be the most pleasant guy to work with. He seems to have upset a lot of people he's worked with. His split with that producer seemed pretty nasty.

All that aside, the work speaks for itself, and to me it's just way, way, way too gaudy to be taken as anything but a pastiche of that lifestyle. The fact that the album is a moral desolation doesn't mean it's *immoral* like a lot of the criticisms seem to hint at. Wolf of Wall Street is a comparable example of ludicrous depravity. Sorry about all the film comps but I can't think of any musical contemporaries who do such similar themes.

Don't really think it matters whether or not he lives up to the image presented (were critics really hung up on this?) when that image isn't all that interesting or engaging to begin with. I mean carefully planned and deliberate? Yes, but well constructed? I'd say the trilogy was well put together as a whole but thematically you'll love it or leave it (or love it for novelty then quickly get bored as it goes nowhere).

If you make 40 odd songs about the same shit + vague, self referential lyrics, people are going to start drawing connections and speaking to depth that isn't really there.

tsroboto, did you listen to Kiss Land?! For all the times that Trilogy left things a little too wispy, Kiss Land compensated by basically beating us over the head with the grotesque. I would also level the "not engaging" criticism at Trilogy, but Kiss Land was a pretty tremendous departure from that formula.

Yeah, a fair number of times. Problem is you're right he doubled down, but on something I don't feel there was much to in the first place. He fleshed out the skeleton but with more bones. He'd mined that theme for all it was worth in the Trilogy. Plus I wouldn't call more vividly grotesque nihilism a tremendous departure from grotesque nihilism.

I don't think his theme is necessarily nihilistic. There's too much sadness on his tracks for it to be nihilistic in the same way as, say, the YG stuff is. I also felt the Trilogy left a lot to be said. Sure, he spent a lot of tracks singing about creepy sex, but in too much of a distant way to be engaging to me.

I think, for what it's worth, the inherent creepiness of fame, sex, and hedonism is a good theme to mine! It's certainly underrepresented in contemporary R&B. And I think it also provides a nice counterpoint to the (delightful) bullshit peddled by the R Kellies of the scene. It's fun to indulge in the whole freaky luxury sex fantasy, but I think it's also nice to view it from the sadder perspective the Weeknd offers.

we already had one Drake and that was more than enough

Yeah solipsistic would have been a better term, but even that sadness is very muted and in that sense I don't feel Kiss Land steps far away. We don't really learn much more about creepy sex now that its up close.

But did he really mine it? Is there enough irony here for it to be considered subversion? You're right in that there is room for exploration here but I don't think he's really done it to any meaningful degree. He's very thoroughly explored one angle of it, but if its supposed to be an obverse caricature of what the R Kellies are peddling its an extremely thin one to have stretched over 3 and a half hours.

satire is only meaningful if it can be distinguished from the real thing

feel like audience interpretation is a big factor in this too and in my experience half of weeknd stans take this very, very seriously and the other half just think of it as sex music

ha that sounds about right

It's certainly underrepresented in contemporary R&B.

really????

maybe 10 years ago, but in recent years (and arguably before that, though perhaps not in the big pop singles) there's not really been a shortage of r&b artists being conflicted about luxury/fame/hedonism etc. a lot of it has been done rather better than the weeknd too