San Francisco – Hardly anything is shocking anymore when it comes to the twisted lyrics and aching melodies that escape from the lips of Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd. The 25-year-old Ontario native has spilled more than the lion’s share of heartache, self-deprecation, and raunchy details of his lust-fueled escapades into the microphone over the past five years, and he’s not slowing down. With Beauty Behind the Madness, the follow-up to 2013’s Kiss Land (his first true LP, after finding success with the “Trilogy” mix tapes House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence), we find the singer at his most vulnerable, yet at the same time, he’s at his most powerful. He’s crouched and ready to strike.
Beauty Behind the Madness is an album built on antitheses: past and future, reality and fantasy, shadows and light, egotism and shame, companionship and solitude. It is upon the tension built between these extreme forces that the album coasts along, and we as listeners see a true portrait of Tesfaye’s turbulent psyche. It is what keeps this album interesting. Having just had the pleasure of witnessing The Weeknd’s dominating stage persona at the HARD Summer Music Festival at the beginning of August, I can say with quite a bit of confidence that he truly feels what he is singing about. It shows in the creases of his furrowed face, the quivers in his voice, the exaggerated punctuating breaths he takes between lines: this is a man that is constantly battling with himself, with his own beauty, and in turn, his own madness.
The album opens with the harsh, almost industrial synth chords and pounding digital percussion of “Real Life,” in which The Weeknd plays his ‘you-sound-like-Michael-Jackson’ card beautifully (a card he played off so well on Echoes of Silence’s “D.D.,” the singer’s cover of MJ’s “Dirty Diana”), singing about life lessons he learned from his mother. He struggles with the need for change in his own life, going from the fantasy he has been living to securing roots in a meaningful loving relationship. Ultimately he seems to decide that the path he has chosen may be the only one that works for him, and though he feels remorse, he is unsure he will ever be able to find his mother’s definition of “reality,” which may in fact be just a pipe dream for him. Already we see a dichotomy is being drawn between reality and fantasy, and Tesfaye is having trouble seeing which is which. On the Kanye West-produced “Tell Your Friends,” we see The Weeknd stepping towards a fantasy that may one day actually become real: stardom. He embraces his self-destructive behavior and cites it as a major source of his artistry. Rather than relying on the overstated personas of fame and fortune that his peers use to inflate their image, he sees himself coming out of the shadows on his own terms, despite his own (admitted) problems with substance use, like a phoenix from the ashes.
BBTM is not like an R&B album in many ways (not that I would label it as such per se), mostly in terms of lyrical honesty and a more progressive approach to musical style. Yet it still holds true to the genre in the many tracks that deal with (often explicit) sexual relationships. Tesfaye has been no stranger to sexually charged lyrics and deliciously vulgar imagery in the past—and he doesn’t intend to slow down here—but his use of such material ionizes these tracks much more than normal. On “Often,” he strokes his ego—and possibly more—with tales of his sexual prowess stemming from torrid one-night-stands and threesomes, shrugging off the fact that he does it all the time. His position of power and celebrity allows him the “use ‘em and lose ‘em” mentality, evident in lines like ‘Baby I can make that pussy rain often,’ and ‘If I had her, you can have her, man it don’t matter,’ yet the song is bookended by a Turkish poem by the poet Sabhattin Ali that loosely translates to “My each and every day takes years, I’m tired of going alone.” There’s heartache in his conquests, despite his insatiable tendencies.
His tone gets more tender in songs like “The Hills,” where he confesses ‘When I’m fucked up, that’s the real me,’ and in the gut-wrenching “In The Night” where he details the story of a woman who was sexually abused as a child, admiring her tenacity but sympathizing—even empathizing—with her evident mental damage. On songs like “Acquainted” and “Can’t Feel My Face,” Tesfaye finds himself in the curious situation of being outside of his comfort zone when being involved with women. In both songs he seems afraid of his position, viewing it as toxic: ‘saying we’re in love is dangerous’ (“Acquainted”). He goes on to say that his friends think he’s nuts because he can’t stop thinking about her. In the dancier, upbeat “Can’t Feel My Face,” the toxicity metaphor is much more evident, comparing his overindulgent cocaine use to the relationship he’s in: ‘I can’t feel my face when I’m with you, but I love it,’ even going on to say that he doesn’t care if it kills him because then he will be ‘forever young’ (a nod to the notorious 27 Club here, though he doesn’t quite qualify yet, being only 25). The most heartfelt songs come with “Earned It” (first recorded for the 50 Shades of Grey soundtrack) and “As You Are” (‘I believe in you’), where we see Tesfaye finally getting close to someone and not feeling totally crazy about being that way. These songs are the ones that let us see Tesfaye as a component of love rather than a menace to his own happiness.
There are three rather powerful duets on the album, the first being the album’s second track “Losers,” which is a duet with UK singer Labrinth. The two go back and forth about the ‘losers’ who go to school (Tesfaye is a high-school dropout), touting how their experiences taught them much more than any classroom could (there’s also a piano riff in the chorus that sounds a lot like the beginning to Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time,” perhaps put there as an homage to her iconic video of high-school girls behaving badly). Another duet is with UK singer Ed Sheeran called “Dark Times,” in which the two bounce horrible stories about waking up with black eyes and bloody pillows or coming down off cocaine, meant to warn future entanglements that they are perhaps not the best choice. The last comes in the form of “Prisoner,” a duet with sultry pop diva Lana Del Rey (the only female on an otherwise male-dominated album), in which the two evaluate their own addictions—his with drugs, hers with fame and ambition. The two sound perfectly at home with one another, as their idiosyncratic timbres echo and buzz off each other brilliantly.
The album closes with “Angel,” a solo song about letting someone go in an effort to present her with the opportunity of inevitable happiness in the future (sound familiar?). It’s a gorgeous slow and thumping piano track with heavenly whispers in the beginning, and when he sings ‘Cause all I see are wings, I can see your wings;
But I know what I am and the life I live,’ his own demonic vision of himself jumps out of the speakers and basically plunges a dagger into your heart. It hurts.
I’m no psychologist, so I’m not going to say that Abel Tesfaye is clinically “mad,” not that the term has been used to signify any real illness since the days of Lewis Carroll and arsenic-tinged haberdashers. We all feel crazy in our own way, and we all think and/or do messed-up things from time to time that make us feel that way. With BBTM, Tesfaye puts it front and center, and in many ways, that’s why it speaks so clearly to listeners: he’s saying what the rest of us are afraid to say. We all feel nuts, but that doesn’t mean that we are ugly. Perhaps what keeps us going is our innate need to feel like good people despite all the fucked up shit that happens, whether by chance or by consequence. What The Weeknd is doing with this album is recognizing his own moments of lunacy, his own periodic insanity…but it’s what makes him human. It’s what makes us all human. It’s maddening, but it’s beautiful.
Beauty Behind The Madness is available worldwide on August 28th through XO/Republic. The Weeknd just recently announced The Madness Tour, which hits North American venues through November and December. For more information visit his Facebook page.
Corey Bell
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