★ The Weeknd ★ What You Need ★

half this album is really good including ones done by him and his old collaborators

I think this is an obviously flawed record from a flawed artist I just want to push back against the idea that it's just an easily dismissed record that is boring or uninspired, I think in all its fame-thirsty glory it's quite listenable much more often than I'd ever expected

It's so fucking weird to me reading writing about this album where everyone is like "gross misogyny tasteless creepy exploitative" etc like really where have you guys all been? It might get a passing reference in the HoB reviews. Is it just post-social media writing ? I'm not saying it's the same people per se but he's not any more creepy than he was four years ago! Folks are doing the same thing with Drake too, it's just wild to me--like everyone has suddenly developed a conscience after years of trying to convince me some of their most cringeworthy shit was actually high art. Now they're both good for a couple actual hits and everyone has discovered their moral compasses

Well in drake's case it's not actual hits but actually decent personal writing & good pop songs vs the tepid stuff of his early career, but you get the idea

There's been IMO a huge shift in the way he's talked about and it is really odd

two things about that

A) it's not the same people, but a lot of people have been saying this from the start, and

B) as a writer, it is a lot harder to place a piece criticizing an artist for being gross/tasteless/creepy/exploitative when most of the world thinks it's high art.

No ones having trouble with it right now! Look at pitchfork at this very moment

And a lot of people may have been saying it from the start but they damn sure weren't posting on ilx

I mean to get more to the point, imo there's a disingenuousness to how stuff is covered when it's perceived as new & cool vs when Mainstreamers are getting on board where there's a tipping point and suddenly a moral argument is a lot more fashionable

But maybe I'm being cynical and everyone is just that much more righteous since the advent of Twitter

I'm not complaining about ppl realizing he's skeezy---I said as much in the original weeknd thread ages ago--I just think it's odd and suspicious how that was something folks would so readily block out for years and now it's the main argument on everything written about him

it's hilarious and appropriate that The Weeknd is the first person i've ever heard sing the word "friendzone" on the radio

Friendzöne.

CFMF is funny and bad

really where have you guys all been

tbh was hoping his career was dead after kiss land, prior to this i would've focused on other artists instead of writing a tract about his emptiness

CFMF is funny and bad

― soyrev, Wednesday, 2 September 2015 10:47 (2 hours ago) Permalink

Funny and the best no 1 hit in ages

ergo, http://www.allkpop.com

xxp tbf the trajectory to pop star was much more likely; kiss land is not that far from this, or HoB, like w/ some editing there were the same ideas there it was just a bit aimless

i think it is reasonable that people could tolerate shitty aspects of the weeknd's (or anyone's) persona for a couple albums but then start to wear on it/call it out when we're a few more albums deep, doesn't seem that mysterious to me

it was transgressive to like the weeknd 3 years ago now it's not

i think it is reasonable that people could tolerate shitty aspects of the weeknd's (or anyone's) persona for a couple albums but then start to wear on it/call it out when we're a few more albums deep, doesn't seem that mysterious to me

― marcos, Wednesday, September 2, 2015 8:19 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'd buy this if the music now wasn't substantially superior

It's all ppl with cloth ears susceptible to marketing imo

It also just strikes me as the kind of "we could like him more of his politics were more like ours" myopia that keeps people from understanding how music works in the real world that like...by the logic of us deciding it's purely his problematic persona that grates, we end up turning criticism into a series of litmus tests

politics bullshit. I don't like dealing with players (to put it mildly) in the real world, why the hell do I need to subject myself to it in music as well?

or in other words, it's a matter of "who is this 'we' and what sort and/or gender of person is it made up of?"

that's a bit too simplistic, perhaps a better way of putting it is "I don't like being around people who concoct elaborate mythos with Tolkienesque levels of continuity about how good they think they are at playing women." (that "lana del rey is the girl in my songs and I'm the guy in her songs" quote is amazing -- in one fell swoop it renders both of their entire canons of music hilarious and impossible to take seriously)

sometimes there's no real explanation why mass opinion seems to shift. counter-currents in a conversation come to the fore after a while, who knows? feel like there was a big sigh of relief/"THANK YOU FINALLY" kind of reaction to meaghan garvey's piece on drake, for instance. (drake stans going mini-gamergate on her in response didn't help)

in one fell swoop it renders both of their entire canons of music hilarious and impossible to take seriously

Without ever making it necessary to answer the question "Why were you taking this seriously in the first place?"

I wasn't but a fuck of a lot of people were

politics bullshit. I don't like dealing with players (to put it mildly) in the real world, why the hell do I need to subject myself to it in music as well?

or in other words, it's a matter of "who is this 'we' and what sort and/or gender of person is it made up of?"

― for sale: baby shoes, never worn your ass (katherine), Wednesday, September 2, 2015 11:01 AM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have no problem with someone finding his whole worldview off putting and saying so, it's more that this reminds me of when people would say shit like "if only Tyler the creator didn't rap about rape, I would love his music!" When rape was like 40% of his lyrical content! Reviews concocting fantasy versions of artists where the artists are different people entirely read to me like people more enamored of the marketing than the music

It also just strikes me as the kind of "we could like him more of his politics were more like ours" myopia that keeps people from understanding how music works in the real world that like...by the logic of us deciding it's purely his problematic persona that grates, we end up turning criticism into a series of litmus tests

it's not just his "politics" (lol what a way to characterize the weeknd's schtick) it's that he also has no presence in his own music, so it's just this collapse of hideous signifiers that fail to even take a shape ("i do drugs!" "i don't respect women!"). imo this is cynical and alienates me from his music even when i like it

sometimes there's no real explanation why mass opinion seems to shift. counter-currents in a conversation come to the fore after a while, who knows? feel like there was a big sigh of relief/"THANK YOU FINALLY" kind of reaction to meaghan garvey's piece on drake, for instance. (drake stans going mini-gamergate on her in response didn't help)

― goole, Wednesday, September 2, 2015 11:05 AM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The thing is, people were saying it all along! Like myself and Katherine.

To me seeing it happen with both drake and the weeknd feels like evidence that it has little to do with the quality of the music and a lot more to do with far more arbitrary cycles of cool

i'm not sure who you're really talking about deej

@brad I know there's a lot more to what is wrong w/ his music--IMO, even an extremely critical review could be very interesting (maybe that should say "especially") I think this record could make for some very good music writing ! It's dense in the sense that what makes it good and bad is woven pretty intricately, I suspect part of why I like it is bc it provokes lots of ideas, gives me a lot to respond to, even tho I think dude is corn and his worldview is sadlol

I'm more concerned w the depth of criticism being kind of basic

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51RNN9S5X4L.jpg

i'm seeing mostly positive (?) reviews floating out there but tbh i'm not very interested in reading about the weeknd beyond this discussion so that's prob why my understanding is impoverished

I pitched the weeknd record but none of my pitches landed so I'm not sure what I'm expected to do here

haha this thread is such a weird ritual of circling around a would-be clusterfuck nobody feels strongly enough to actually start

it is also pretty wild how all the folks who were the biggest weeknd enthusiasts the first time around—Lamp? Grady? Jaxon? have vanished over the years lol

no idea what this clusterfuck is, except I get the vague feeling that it is at my expense

I doubt it, if anything sd is referring to my 14 posts or whatever

Bought this on Sunday, finally listened to it this morning. I think I find the overt Michael Jackson-isms most ridiculous of all ('cause I never liked Jackson that much anyway - was over him by the time I turned 14 - and there's no way this guy is gonna have a career like Jackson's; he would have had to start at age 5, right?), but the Ed Sheeran song is pretty bad, and I still hate "Often." I wish the Lana del Rey song was better. I can't honestly call this "more pop" than his previous work, if only because I don't listen to enough pop music to accurately judge that. There are more uptempo songs than I remember from previous albums, I'll say that. I need to listen to it again, and I will. I like it better than Kiss Land, at any rate.

tell your friends is a p deec terius fix but i always think how he would 100% say phantom in this couplet

Used to roam on Queen, now I sing Queen street anthems
Used to hate attention, now I pull up in that wagon

"tell your friends" sounds like a r. kelly shit talking song to me but eh everytime i think something's reminiscent of kells ilx tells me it's the-dream

as if that wasn't a huge vector of influence on terry!

what i'm saying

just heard the hills on local hiphop/r&b radio now and I thought it was right tbh

lol and then CFMF on the other urban station like a minute later. Not right imo, that song kinda sucks

it def sucks. it has some superficial appeal but only insofar as you can ignore how underwritten and underperformed it is.

also that lame-ass descending counterpoint vocal on the chorus that comes in after the first eight bars is weak even as something to spice up a final go-around, but the fact that it happens from the second chorus on (and a total of four times) is where CFMF becomes actively comical. and using the exact same pre-chorus three fucking times in a song is such overkill, esp when you throw a low-pass filter sweep behind one of 'em and make it work overtime as a bridge (so that your song, by the way, literally ends with: pre-chorus, chorus, pre-chorus, chorus). it's the type of try-hard anthem i imagined i would like the first time i heard the opening, but it's total boredom before it even gets to the first verse

Cfmf is amazing knock it off

maybe if the craterous landfill of western chart pop in 2015 is the only contemporary chart pop you follow

(disclaimer: talking about pop specifically made for the charts, not the crossover stuff that sometimes winds up there – western rap radio is a very fertile crescent rn)

the point however is cfmf is a good as hell

insufficiently familiar w/ grammar too tho

oh lol sorry don't drink and message board

gawd, what a lousy review of (the indeed sophomorically titled) album in the New Yorker. Is carrie battan a Pitchfork person? Her paternalistic, banal shit therein suggests as such around…what year did they decide to talk about Ne-Yo and trey Songz again? was the year of PR&B 2011?