The Weeknd, R&B and the eternal rechurn
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Has the indie scene shifted from hip-hop to R&B as a primary source for appropriation? The talk picked up recently with James Blake, and with the release of The Weeknd’s free House of Balloons mixtape. Initially described as an anonymous collective, The Weeknd has been identified as the work (in part) of Toronto singer Abel Tesfaye. The project takes pains to code as indie: songs that sample Siouxsie and Beach House, a Twitter that gives equal shout-outs to Diddy and Cocteau Twins, a coordinated campaign running across Facebook, Tumblr, and Youtube. The album itself is a diary of moods, each tracking a consequence—the fallout from desire, lust, decadence, resignation to oblivion. Most of these hurts are self-inflicted.
A lot of the conversation focuses on listenership—how the notion of indie credibility suddenly makes a genre okay to check out for kids and critics who would otherwise dismiss pop and R&B. To the popists, the mainstream is always more exciting, an arena best dominated by professional musicians who deliver the genre’s pulse: impassioned vocals, operatic range, sensuality expressed with barely contained desire. I’m mildly sympathetic to this argument, and I have in mind Chris Weingarten’s dig on How to Dress Well: “Avant-softy loves everything about R&B but the hooks and energy and passion and performance ability.” In other words, why flood these pretenders with attention at the expense of masters like R. Kelly or even outliers like Sharon Jones, Maxwell, or Janelle Monae.
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What surprises me is that people seem to not have noticed that R&B’s time has simply come. Like the early 2000s garage-rock revival, which picked up the sounds from the late ’70s punk and post-punk period, the cycle is revisiting the first era since Motown when black soul music became the de facto pop music of the era. It’s been exactly two decades since “Motownphilly” appeared in 1991, a kind of white paper (rather than blueprint?) for a new sound. Things got more sophisticated when they dropped the corny promo taglines (“not too hard…not too soft“) and went for harmony, but real sophistication came when the production palette broadened or slowed down to cruising speed. Most of us grew up on this stuff, and the youngest kids these days are just discovering it. In the years leading up to the present, DJs like Girl Talk have peppered their mixes with forgotten hits from the era of prosperity and the kids are eating it up.
And they should be. R&B first crossed its DNA with hip-hop in the nineties. I’m not sure either genre always benefited from the exchange (was it worthwhile for R&B to welcome a hip-hop that, by the late ’90s, had grown comfortable with rhyming the same word in multiple lines?). But when the two mixed right they were so damn sweet. What’s sour about the reaction to the Weeknd album in some critical corners—like the I Love Music board, a place originally started by Tom Ewing to give pop music fans and critics a safe place to discuss and share their tastes—is reverse snobbery, the sense that the cultivators are looking down their nose at newbies for listening to the wrong stuff. “Why waste time on these indie-friendly acts when the mainstays are putting out good stuff,” the thought goes. But it’s better to just encourage, getting people on to something new: “Oh, you’ve been digging this? Well, check out this and this and this as well.”
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Admittedly, I’m in the camp that needs this nudge. I’ve spent the past few years tracking soul influence more in other forms of electronic pop music, from laptop songwriters to the dubstep and post-dubstep world. I’ve had some touch with the mainstream R&B world, whether it’s mini-obsessions with Erykah Badu and Alicia Keys or lamenting when Tori Alamaze’s naked come-ons in “Don’t Cha” were overlooked for a less soulful remake. But I’ve largely been looking at the sound from a concave lens, collecting strands that reminded me of hazy neo-noir impressionism. I was looking for tracks like Super_Collider’s “Gravity Rearrangin,” an ode to insomnia and dissolution that got me through the post-breakup blues. Matthew Herbert worked some magic on bass keyboards.
(Super_Collider was the project of Chilean techno fabricator Cristian Vogel and former IDM nut Jamie Lidell. Lidell has a fascinating career in relation to all of this. A white dude who tired of the knob twiddling that became a dead end by the late ’90s, he decided to flex his vocal chords and turn himself into a crooner, and he did a pretty damn good job of it. With Super_Collider, he put out a decent debut in which he fumbled for his voice on the best tracks, and then closed out the project(?) in 2002 with Raw Digits, one of the best albums of the 2000s. The phrase “ahead of its time” gets it wrong—you advance time when you come up with something as brilliant as this, a busy soul sound that sacrifices none of its swing when it folds and fractures its bass and keyboards in a million permutations. Chuffed with himself and the aura he managed to project—a balance between serenader and aw-shucks bespectacled nerd that made many a girl drool—he then put out a few albums of throwback soul that didn’t play to his strengths, only to give in to his synthier side and record one of 2010′s best albums, Compass.)
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Thing is, strain all they can, most white guys can’t get serious cred as soul singers. And Lidell started a good decade before the current revisitation en vogue, so he’s kind of an outlier. That’s where The Weeknd make gold. It’s clear that Abel Tesfaye has chops from the moment that “High for This” drops its lurch, a grinding chorus pillowed by faraway percussion in the verses. He’s got an up-and-comer’s need to prove himself, but his moves are by the book: the arcing wail, the self-assured talk-whisper, a warbling inflection now and then to hint at how need leads to vulnerability.
It’s where he’s at conceptually that The Weeknd starts to hit home. And I’m not talking about dropping a few indie-rock signifiers to come across as well-rounded. The two Beach House tracks that House of Balloons samples on separate occasions don’t do any justice when sped up to match the beat. What I’m talking about is turning the louche and the carnal into a commodity to be desired as an end rather than a means, at an even greater tilt than the mainstream pop scene of the last 15 years. At its darkest corners, where the tail end of tracks stretch out and languish, the House wraps up not so much seduction itself but resignation to it in an almost Poe-like fetishism, all orifices and the fear/anticipation of breach. Abel plies you (“Open your head…“), the drugs a proxy for himself as a proxy for surrender, doing things you never thought you’d do.
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All of that works, but it’s not hard to burst a bubble and watch the steam just fade away. My first reaction after a listen to House of Balloons was that Tesfaye & Co. need to add some color, to not take indifference so seriously. I mean, to be truly blasé-blasé is preferable to, say, Jay-Z whining about not getting enough love (really?), but The Weeknd aren’t quite there yet. Compare any song from House of Balloons to “Nature Feels” from Frank Ocean’s debut, Nostalia, Ultra. Hard to beat an opening like “I’ve been meaning to fuck you in the garden,” but our nature boy free associates, first love as Eden, “we keep going baby/we keep getting it baby/we’ll get pebbles maybe/a couple bam-bams,” onomatopoeic Hanna Barbarism also about opening up, no protection and no eye to the consequences, “playing in the dirt/wrestling myself inside you” a hundred times deeper and more confident in its lush palette than the rape jibes of the main OFWGKTA crew (despite copping MGMT’s tune).
But force is beside the point for The Weeknd; seduction’s much smoother. House of Balloons might just lead the way to trip-hop 2.0: R&B stretched into fits of longueur, like the drifting coda of “Loft Music,” or twisted into coked-out egotism like the “Glass Table Girls” segment of the title track, or epic testaments to stoned paranoia a la closing track “The Knowing.” For this long-running Bristol backer, that’s a good thing. Most of the dismissals of trip-hop boiled down to calling it sex music for people who felt they needed a soundtrack for sex, but that doesn’t quite get it right. What I heard in trip-hop was something I got earlier from Depeche Mode—aural sex for the sexless, Morse coded in bass and grime, a phonic approximation of the grind for those who weren’t getting any.
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House of Balloons goes through a similar sublimation process. Abel isn’t singing for most of the women listening (“with your Louis V. bag, tats on your arms, high-heeled shoes make you 6 feet tall“). And if hipsters pick up on this, it won’t be because they directly identify with this lifestyle—though they may want to feel like they do. For those at a single remove, The Weeknd’s coke and poppers are just weed and booze, and the almost unspeakable acts that Abel Tesfaye guides you toward become, say, trying it in the other hole for the first time. For college kids in the U.S. looking at a graduation that will send them back home , for the jobless twentysomethings with nothing to do but dive headfirst into hedonism, this is bizarrely macabre lifestyle music. It’s not PBR&B, as Eric Harvey called it; there are no trappings here of the low: -class, -fi, (arguably) -brow. It’s identifying upward, hierarchically, upwardly mobile wish fulfillment as comedown music—but with a subliminal goading that makes me surprised my man at Vigilant Citizen hasn’t picked up on it yet.
At this point you’re tempted to get lofty, summon up Icarus, call it Achilles soul. But these guys built emptiness into their name (pronounce it the weakened). It’s like the wave of garage rock revivalists with Thee in the name (Thee Midniters, Headcoats, Flying Dutchmen), but now we’re missing letters instead: The Weeknd, Sbtrkt, Clipd Beaks. I’m reminded of the end of Brad Anderson’s Session 9, in which we learn where weakness lives (no spoiler video). Maybe dark is where The Weeknd need to take it to tell their story; a generation ever more amused to death, but it’s all we think we’ve got. Not a bad coup for the powers that be, to have us oversaturated with pleasure and cheering for the death of a guy who we helped create, while others are in the streets overturning cars and demanding revolution.
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