The Weeknd courts our shadow sides on his new album, Starboy.
Courtesy of the artist
America loves a hot mess. Added by Oxford Dictionaries in August
2014, that phrase connotes "a person or thing that is spectacularly
unsuccessful or disordered, especially one that is a source of peculiar
fascination." The roots of hot mess attraction in popular music go as
far back as the blues. We love transmissions from and about our shadow
sides — secret pains, forbidden longings, destructive urges kept barely
in check. Consider classic rock cyclones like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin
and Jim Morrison, who combined exceptional talent and all-too-human
emotion. Excess, both offstage and on, fed their legends.
"When I'm f***ed up, that's the real me," admits Toronto's Abel
Tesfaye aka The Weeknd. "I gotta stay high all the time to keep you off
my mind," says Stockholm's Ebba Nilsson, whose stage name is Tove Lo.
These aren't incidental lyrics; they're the key lines in the choruses of
The Weeknd's "The Hills," which topped both the pop and R&B charts
last year, and in Nilsson's "Habits (Stay High)," a major international
sleeper hit of 2014. And they're not flukes. The primary lyrical
concerns of both acts are sex, drugs, sex on drugs, and — crucially —
sex as drugs. Unlike yesteryear's rockers, who practically subsisted on
cocaine in an era when it wasn't considered habit-forming, long before
sex addiction became a commonly understood concept, Tesfaye and Nilsson
write from a knowing perspective in which danger is courted like
pleasure.
"I just won a new award for a kids' show / Talking
'bout a face numbing off a bag of blow," Tesfaye sings in "Reminder" on
his latest album Starboy, which recently entered the charts at
No. 1. "I'm like, 'Goddam, bitch, I am not a teen choice.'" He's
referring to the absurdity of Nickelodeon nominating him for their Kids'
Choice Awards in recognition of another 2015 chart-topper, "Can't Feel
My Face," in which he personifies coke as if it were his girlfriend. The
far more affluent daughter of a businessman and, notably, a
psychologist, Nilsson celebrates her appetite for self-destruction as if
it were truly empowering. "Keep playing my heartstrings faster and
faster / You can be just what I want, my true disaster," Nilsson sings
in "True Disaster," the latest fatalistic single from her recent second
album Lady Wood, a euphemism for female sexual arousal.
Tesfaye, 26, and Nilsson, 29, grew up in the dark
shadows of gangsta rap, trip-hop, Nirvana and Amy Winehouse. Tesfaye
considers "Dirty Diana" — Michael Jackson's 1987 soul-rock tribute to a
vindictive groupie who'll do anything for her idol's fame — his
"favorite song of all time." He covered it on Echoes of Silence,
the culmination of his 2011 mixtape trilogy, and superimposes its
titular character onto the pole dancers, prostitutes, models and
drug-addled hangers-on that pepper his catalog to the exclusion of most
everyone else. His pointedly nocturnal music — a woozy hybrid of '80s
synthpop, swaggering hip-hop, post-punk alienation and experimental
R&B — frames these femme fatales with the audio equivalent of
contemporary film noir.
Ebba Nilsson, whose stage name is Tove Lo, has co-authored material for Icona Pop, Girls Aloud and Lea Michele.
Nilsson takes a kindred approach. After graduating from music
school, this Kurt Cobain/Courtney Love fan co-authored hits and album
tracks for Icona Pop, Girls Aloud, Lea Michele and others. These
bankrolled her own material, which still brings the bounce of her
multiplatinum mentors Shellback and Max Martin, but lyrically recalls
her childhood heroes. "I eat my dinner in my bathtub / Then I go to sex
clubs," opens "Habits (Stay High)," which moves onto Twinkie-fueled
bulimia and picking up "daddies at the playground" to dull the pain of
love lost. Undeniably catchy yet far more specific and psychologically
raw than most chart pop, "Habits" is grunge played on synths and drum
machines, right down to its pensive verse/anthemic chorus structure.
Tesfaye
and Nilsson aren't the kinds of self-contained acts who until recently
had the lockdown on gothic pop. Tesfaye's songs and sound have always
been crafted with other musicians, like Doc McKinney, formerly of
trip-hop duo Esthero. With each release, Tesfaye's added more co-writers
and producers: Starboy features several dozen, including
Martin, Daft Punk, Lana Del Rey, Benny Blanco, Diplo and former
Cardigans guitarist Peter Svensson. Nilsson, having crafted hits for
Ellie Goulding ("Love Me Like You Do" from the same Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack
that launched The Weeknd's first smash, "Earned It") Hilary Duff
("Sparks," a #1), Nick Jonas ("Close," their duet), and other acts in
tandem with many overlapping teams, generally creates her solo material
with Ludvig Söderberg and Jakob Jerlström, who work as The Struts.
This committee approach to creating pop seemingly so introverted
it's uncomfortable isn't unprecedented, but in the wake of Winehouse,
Del Rey, and Rihanna, it's reached a critical mass that reflects
shifting standards regarding intimacy and authenticity. It used to be
that folky singer-songwriters created interior art, and manufactured
acts represented the opposite. Nowadays, Drake and Beyoncé make personal
and political statements enabled by a small army of songwriters,
producers, stylists, choreographers and video directors, and they're
still considered auteurs because their brands — sorry, there's no other
word for it — are so strong. Even if their messiness isn't contrived,
it's nevertheless a collaborative act.
Decades
of Auto-Tune and American Idol have fed the perfectionism and
interchangeability of contemporary music, and so today's pop superstars
forge distinction by boasting on about things not worth bragging about.
Their imperfections assert their authenticity while paradoxically
confirming them as unreliable narrators. Lady Wood begins with
the bubbling of a bong that segues into "Influence," Nilsson's duet with
cannabis-celebrating rapper Wiz Khalifa. "You know I'm under the
influence / So don't trust every word I say," she says. "I've been
poppin', just took three in a row," Tesfaye brags of his pill intake in
"Party Monster," one of several Starboy tracks seemingly
designed to assure longtime fans that the now-mainstream singer hasn't
changed his bacchanalian ways. "She said I'm the realest," he attests in
the same song. He and Nilsson win respect for telling it like it is,
despite ample evidence to the contrary.
Neither commanding like a diva nor submissive like the
dream-poppers, Nilsson sings straightforwardly to serve her tunes, which
tug in the most unnerving places. Lady Wood's "Cool Girl"
bumps along on an icy-smooth synth riff so riveting it takes repeated
plays to notice anything else, like the way her ghostly background
vocals float and flutter through the mix. Everything else is minimal and
instant, flowing effortlessly in the direction of the most crucial
line, where the beat drops out and she dips to the bottom of her
register, conceding, "I wanna be free like you." With that, the
melody undergoes a sudden melancholy twist, one calling into question
her assertion that this new relationship is entirely casual. As she
later reveals in the bridge, Nilsson isn't cool at all: She burns with
desire and craves similar heat from her potential beau, and so she's
here caught in a lie underlined by dissonant chords rubbing up against
it.
That synchronicity is the mark of superior craftsmanship, and there's plenty of that on Starboy
as well. The frisson that flares throughout Tesfaye's entire
discography is the disjunct between his sweet, wounded falsetto and his
bitter, steely attitude. If he sang the way he wrote, he'd be
insufferable. Instead, there's a tension between the two, as if we're
hearing the cries of a battered inner child trapped inside the mind and
lifestyle of a misanthrope.
Yet Tesfaye delivers his purest Starboy
performances furthest from his stoner loner comfort zone. He begins
"Secrets" almost unrecognizably as a baritone crooning conventional, but
for him atypical, romantic phrases. The tune takes him progressively
higher, right into his falsetto for the chorus, a rewritten hook from
the Romantics' "Talking in Your Sleep." Suddenly that falls away, and
the only thing left is a filtered but fully intact chunk of Tears for
Fears' "Pale Shelter" right when Curt Smith sings, "completely in
command."
As his fixation on status, drugs and S&M suggests, Tesfaye has
major control issues. However, the New Wave double-shot here proves
that despite his commitment-fearing persona, Tesfaye excels at conveying
passions simmering below the superficial surfaces he celebrates. On the
album's conclusion, "I Feel It Coming," he finally sets them free. As
optimistic as most everything else he does is despairing, the album's
second Daft Punk collaboration grooves sweetly on a midtempo house beat
and scratching rhythm guitar syncopation. Whereas Quincy Jones led a
still-young Michael Jackson into an adventurous adult world, the
Parisian robots bring Tesfaye back to a comforting, childlike place. But
the effect is the same — warm, sunny, bright and with everything in
precisely balanced proportion. No hot messiness here.
Nilsson
serves that in steaming piles with "Fairy Dust," a half-hour film that
strings together her album's first half in a loose narrative in which
she's paired with Free the Nipple's Lina Esco, who plays her
childhood pal and alter ego. After making out on a motel bed, the pair
do drugs, dance and drive until Esco's character steers them head-on
into a station wagon. The two somehow emerge unscathed, but Esco douses
their car with gasoline and sets it on fire while Nilsson runs through
the street executing the kind of post-collision choreography that only
happens in music videos. The storyline veers to accommodate "Cool Girl"
and another unrelated song; Nilsson sets their motel room ablaze, yet
returns to it with a guy. As the credits roll, she's on its bed, this
time alone, underwear-clad with her hand beneath her panties. As her
eyes stare blankly into space in pre-orgasmic anticipation, there's the
suggestion that every preceding scene was a masturbatory fantasy, and
that this — her lady wood — is her only reality.
At an age when
celebrities routinely overshare on social media, Nilsson's sudden
verisimilitude is nevertheless oddly shocking. As a publicity stunt, it
backfired: Lady Wood topped the chart upon release in Sweden,
but fell off the U.S. charts soon after release. Directed by Tim Erem,
whose Major Lazer and DJ Snake "Lean On" video scored well over 1.7
billion YouTube views, "Fairy Dust" comes across as largely lesbian
soft-core porn for straight dudes. Even counting the final money shot,
it's nowhere near as erotic as her earlier "Talking Body" video, which
depicted women freely navigating discos, fetish clubs and bordellos
without this film's punishing conclusions. There, she came across truly
liberated; here, she's mostly desperate.
When they're at their
most dysfunctional, Tesfaye and Nilsson adhere to the norms their
progressive pop otherwise rebels against. His singing may transcend
gender, but Tesfaye doesn't know how to treat a woman: His relationship
with supermodel Bella Hadid ended shortly after "Starboy" bragged that
his baby cleaned cocaine from his ebony tables with her face. Nilsson's
"Habits" video suggests she's so messed up she'll even go bi, and "Fairy
Dust" also equates same-sex relations with mental illness: Contrast its
girl-on-girl car crash with the sole hetero segment, which ends with
the singer and her hippie feller walking literally into the sunset. That
banality may feed their relatability, but not their creativity. In art,
as in life, a little messiness goes a long way.
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