The Weeknd - "Often"

Dudes (well-meaning dudes! good dudes! almost always dudes!) will want to talk to you about The Weeknd, the same way they always want to talk to you about Drake. You will be trying to articulate the strange topography of goosebumps these songs bring out along the back of your neck and they will be all how do you like this or what's the appeal or I cannot stand this guy's Whole Thing or I think the faux-sensitive self-destructive swagger is toxic and shitty and so don't you why don't you why why why why?

These are not necessarily bad questions, but this is one of those spots where the patriarchy has wrecked everything for all of us, brutal- and thoroughly. Here's the trick: when you're forced to meet the world as a woman or a man first instead of just as a person, you've always got to be explaining stuff or fighting back against it, to be forming consistently definite opinions that line up perfectly with the thing you ostensibly are - a woman, a man, a feminist, a good one. The more you're forced to meet the world this way, the better you get at overcoming. You learn to turn away from being overcome.

People (well-meaning people! great people!) sometimes forget how lucky it is to be able to enjoy and dwell and fuck around in the tension between opposing forces - that allowing yourself to get carried away by art that doesn't necessarily jibe with your ideas about how the world should be is a private kind of privilege. It's hard to be open to the pleasures and possibilities of dissonance when you are constantly finding yourself painted into a corner by the thing you're supposed to be, when you are constantly being forced by the culture at large to shout your way out of the boxes it's shoved you into. Someone will ask you what you like about these songs and by the time you've finished - no of course I don't think it's necessarily good, no of course I don't like the way some people treat these dudes' personas like a road map or an excuse, of course not of course not of course not - you come back and they've lost a little of their lustre. The darkness dulls; the undertow feels weaker, watered down. You're forced to compromise even in the act of explaining yourself. It's uncanny. It's a bummer. It's a trap.

The Weeknd - "The Hills"

So anyway: There's a steady chaos in these songs that can and will undo you if you let it - the chemical reaction between what The Weeknd's saying and what you can actually hear, the sloping voice and stuttered beat, thick bass and panicked siren, how he doesn't care about you, how he does. When you touch me, not feel me. When I'm fucked up, that's the real me. That pull apart: together and alone. These songs are if pure tension was an element; they want to meet you in the darkest part, the space between what's good for you and maybe what you want. No explaining. Go to.

[buy Beauty Behind the Madness]