He appeared to be an unimpressed student of R&B: someone who had seen so many singers get close to the line and then back away from it right when the audience was begging for something that felt like risk. This was his edge. He’s a marginal singer, at best, who relies on the same wave of vocal melody to get most of his lyrics out: a low start to a line that ascends briefly before cutting out. He curses more than all of his contemporaries, and is young enough to imagine a world in which he is invincible, so his interest in nihilism doesn’t feel like it’s directly trimming any years off of his life.
But, more than anything, The Weeknd sings about sex. His trilogy of mixtapes landed him a major label record deal, and a debut album in Kiss Land that found itself hotly anticipated. It is a colder, more isolated album than his mixtape efforts. It sounds like what it is: an album made by someone who never thought that their haunted tales of debauchery would make them this famous. It’s a subtle shift in tone, dialed a bit down in content, but with an attempted dial-up in concept, which leads to a more open and personal world that ends up falling flat.
Still, when I realized he was coming to Seattle, where I was briefly spending time with old friends, I paid way too much cash for a ticket on the street because once, about a year ago, a darkhaired girl from Toronto I was hanging out with told me, “If you ever get a chance to see The Weeknd, you have to do it. There’s nothing like it.”
Seattle is sitting in summer’s dying moments, which makes the city’s usual tone of grey seem all the more suffocating. Inside of the Paramount Theater, however, fluorescent colors splash the stage and bleed out into the crowd. Upon entry to the theater, there are Kiss Land condoms being handed out. Someone shoves a handful into my surprised and waiting palm, and while killing time before The Weeknd takes the stage, I flip them over in my hand, looking at the various lyrics etched on the outside of the packaging. On one: “YOU DESERVE YOUR NAME ON A CROWN” from the song “The Town.” On another, from the song “Wanderlust”: “GOOD GIRLS GO TO HEAVEN” on one side, “BAD GIRLS GO EVERYWHERE” on the other. As I shove them back into my pockets, the curtain on stage drops, and a bath of blue light seeps out onto the audience, so intense it forces a few people to shield their eyes as a head rises from below the stage, a mess of dreadlocks atop it.
“Can I get on top tonight, Seattle? Can I make you cum?”
These were the first words spoken to the crowd by The Weeknd, forcing a wave of screams back at him in response. It was not so much a question as it was a direct invitation, or a statement of intent. The fascinating thing about The Weeknd is that, when compared to his direct peers within his genre, he stands out. He may not personally consider himself an R&B singer, aligning himself more with the rappers he spent time around in Toronto, but there is no mistaking that the music he is creating, particularly on Kiss Land, is rooted in R&B tropes, sounds, and imagery. With this in mind, it bears pointing out that The Weeknd is not exactly a physical sex symbol in the way that soul and R&B has manifested physical sex symbols since the 1960s. Even now, with R&B folding aggressively into the umbrella of pop, the male R&B sex symbol is what sells. Months before this, at a Trey Songz concert, I watched Songz abandon his shirt one song in, to the delight of fans. By three songs in, he was grinding against the mic stand. By the end, he was on the ground, simulating sex with the stage floor. The Weeknd, by comparison, layers his clothes and approaches the stage with a calm, almost laziness. Tonight he wears a jacket, a vest, and then another shirt underneath, with baggy pants. He is attractive, but not in the sharply-groomed way that a traditional R&B heartthrob might be attractive. He often looks like he is trying to give off the aesthetic impression that he is only present in between breaks from being in bed, immersed in some unspeakable passion.
It is startling how well one can sell sex without doing much of the work themself. As he powers through the show, sometimes turning to conduct the band behind him, The Weeknd is not doing anything explicitly sexual. He’s letting the atmosphere do the work, and folding into it. During the song “Live For This,” his face is projected on monitors around the theater, overwhelming the audience with his presence. Not his face singing, or doing anything romantic. Just his face, staring, blinking occasionally. There is a tension in this, something that pulls you in and dares you to break first. The sex is sold by that which is implied after The Weeknd opens the show by making his intentions known. The way the pornographic film looping behind him cut out right before the film reached its climax, because it could. Because it didn’t have to show the audience what the audience was already building to in its head. The Weeknd, even with his faulty choirboy vocals, is at his best when planting an idea in the head of those who are watching him. It’s sexual inception: first leave nothing to the imagination, and then leave everything to the imagination. At the end of the song “Kiss Land,” with the echoes of passion still hanging thick in the air, The Weeknd stands entirely still on stage, overly satisfied with the display he just offered the audience. When he finally moves, after the crowd goes silent, he flicks his wrist toward the mic stand. Everyone in the theater screams.
No one during the show is touching, despite the themes being sensual, at the very least. I’m interested in the physical space bodies take up at times like these. The way we fold into each other when a slow jam works its way out of the speakers. But tonight, everyone is at least performing distance. It occurs to me that this could be because there is nothing about The Weeknd that assumes love as a necessary vehicle for physical intimacy. This isn’t new, in all genres of music, but for The Weeknd, there is such a clear dismissal of love as a trope in his lyrics. He isn’t necessarily chasing women as much as he is chasing a feeling, which creates an audience that also sets out looking for that feeling. And, look, I am saying that I have wanted to forget the day and run into whatever allowed me to do so at night. I’m saying that I want to be in love, but sometimes I just don’t want to be alone, and I don’t want to do the work of balancing what that means in what hour of whatever darkness I’m sitting in. And across the theater in Seattle, I lock eyes with someone for what was mere seconds but feels like an entire small lifetime, and I wonder what it must be like to trust a stranger with your undoing in the way that The Weeknd asks us to. What it must be like to feel briefly full without considering if any emptiness might follow.
I’m unimpressed by The Weeknd. I am perhaps unimpressed by The Weeknd because I’m jealous of the way he makes that which I once believed to be complicated sound so simple. Miles away from here, in my Ohio apartment, there is still hair on a pillow from a woman who hasn’t slept in my bed in two weeks, and likely never will again, after a year of doing it. Before I boarded the flight here, I pulled one of her long, black hairs off of a sweater and held it briefly to the light. When I arrived in Seattle, there was a small bottle of nail polish, from a trip we’d taken together months ago. Not enough people face the interior of separation in this way. What it is to find small pieces of a person who you know you’ll never get to wholly experience again. It feels, almost always, like piecing together a road map that places you directly in the middle of nowhere.
The Weeknd closes out the night with “Wicked Games,” a song about entering into a doomed one-night relationship with a woman who was, moments ago, a stranger. It is his most personal song, of the night and perhaps his young career. It’s the song where he’s asking for a thing greater than forgettable sex. In the final chorus, as the curtain begins to descend, he fights through the last lyrics, his already worn-down voice breaking even further on “so tell me you love me / only for tonight, only for tonight / even though you don’t love me / just tell me you love me.”
It is the first thing he’s truly asking. The way the concert has come full circle: first, him asking if he can make an audience cum, and then, asking for someone to tell him that they love him. I suppose the lesson is that the one-night stand takes as many forms as the desires of the people inside of it. Once the curtain falls completely, the sound of women
moaning push back through the speakers hanging in front of the few remaining fluorescent lights. I’m here because a woman I loved told me I had to be, months before she left her hair on my pillow for the last time, and as I scan the crowd quickly for the woman I shared brief eye contact with, I think about how much of myself I’ve left behind for people to gradually find, heartbroken, over the course of several months. The Weeknd tells the same tale: it’s never about love but then again, how can it be about anything but love, even if the love is just the love you have for your own ravenous desires. Stepping out into the night, swallowed by grey even inside of the black, I’m not sure if I came here tonight to forget pain, or to remember thirst.
Oh, how wrong we were to think that immortality meant never dying
Gerard Way
II.
Rehearsals for his All-Star Game performance had been rocky. People feared that he wouldn’t show on time to sing. He arrived late to the arena, disheveled and anxious.
There are times when I like to think that I see America the way that Marvin Gaye saw it in the spring of 1970. After he buried Tammi Terrell, and after his brother came back from a bloody war, when Marvin stared at all of our country’s mess and told Smokey Robinson that he couldn’t sleep because God was using him to write the album that would become What’s Going On.
What’s Going On is, more than anything, an album with few solutions. We are a world obsessed with proof of work, demanding results at every turn, even when we have little hope to tie ourselves to. I always appreciate What’s Going On as an album that asks first and holds no optimism that the answers will be what it’s looking for. Even the album’s most optimistic song, “God Is Love,” feels like it’s banking on a shaky hand at a poker table, trying to convince everyone of something it isn’t certain of itself.
What I imagine to be most difficult is the exact moment when you realize that your wealth and success will still not save you. To be black and understand that you are in a country that values these things, but will still speak of how you earned your death after you are gone far too soon. Blackness and labor have been inextricable in America for hundreds of years, but still, being reminded of that hovering truth can destroy a man who does not think of what he does as labor, a man who perhaps thinks it’s not “work” if I’m bringing people joy. I think of all this reality arriving to Marvin Gaye at once in 1970, and he could not, in good conscious, continue as the same artist.
I Wasn’t Brought Here, I Was Born: Surviving Punk Rock Long Enough To Find Afropunk
I don’t remember the first time I heard a racist joke at a punk rock show. Rather, I don’t remember the first time I was grabbed into a sweaty half-hug by one of the laughing white members of my Midwest punk scene and told don’t worry about it. We don’t think of you that way. I don’t remember the first time I saw a teenage girl shoved out of the way so that a teenage boy her size, or greater, could have a better view of a stage. I don’t remember the first time that I made an excuse for being a silent witness.
I don’t remember the first time I noticed the small group in the back corner of a punk show at the Newport Music Hall (one of the many venues that I fell in and out of love with in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio), all of them, in some way, pushed out of the frenzied circle of bodies below, and the alleged loving violence that comes with it. I do remember the first time I became one of the members of that group in the back corner of shows. At 18, I hung in the back corner of the Newport and watched NOFX with the rest of the kids who didn’t quite fit, or at least became tired of attempting to fit. I looked around and saw every version of other, as I knew it. The black kids, the girls my age and younger, the kids most fighting with the complexities of identity. We sat back and watched while NOFX tore through an exceptionally loud version of “Don’t Call Me White,” and watched below, as a monochromatic sea crashed against itself.
There is nothing simple about this. What we’re sold about punk rock is that anyone can pick up an instrument and go, something that we’ve seen proven time and time again by a wide number of awful bands. But even in a genre that prides itself on simplicity, the complexities of erasure and invisibility in punk rock go deep. It is hard to hear the word “brotherhood” without also thinking of the weight behind what it carries with it in this country, and beyond. When I still hear and read the punk rock scene referred to as a “brotherhood,” I think about what it takes to build a brotherhood in any space. Who sits at the outskirts, or who sits at the bottom while the brotherhood dances oblivious and heavy at the top. In the punk landscape, we are often given imagery that reflects the most real truths of this scene: the exclusion of people of color, of women, of the queer community, and that exclusion being sometimes explicit, sometimes violent, but almost always in direct conflict with the idea of punk rock as a place for rebellion against (among other things) identity.
A friend recently posed a question to me, similar to one that Lester Bangs wrote about being posed to him (in 1979’s “The White Noise Supremacists”):
Well, what makes you think the attitudes of racism and exclusion in the punk scene are any different from that of the rest of the world?
The answer, of course, is that they aren’t. Or at least it is all born out of the same system. In the ’70s, the answer was perhaps easier to digest. That punk rock, born in part out of a need for white escape, just wasn’t prepared to consider a revolution that involved color, or involved women as anything that the scene deemed useful. That, of course, also being a reflection of the time. Today, we sit back and watch seemingly evolved artists talk about tearing down these large political structures and uniting the masses, and making safe spaces for everyone who wants to come out and enjoy music, but the actual efforts to build and create these spaces fall extremely short, as evidenced (in one example) by Jake McElfresh being allowed to play Warped Tour. McElfresh has a now admitted history of preying on underage girls, a demographic that the touring music showcase predominantly caters toward.
It is a luxury to romanticize blood, especially your own. It is a luxury to be able to fetishize violence, especially the violence that you inflict upon others. To use it as a bond, or to call it church, or to build an identity around it while knowing that everyone you can send home bloody will not come back for revenge. To walk home bloody. To walk home at night. At the time of writing this, a video is circulating of a black man being killed by police, on camera. Before this, there was another black man. And a black boy. And black women vanishing in jail. And black trans women vanishing into the night. I do not blame punk rock for this.
I instead ask to consider the impact of continuing to glorify a very specific type of white violence and invisibility of all others in an era where there is a very real and very violent erasure of the bodies most frequently excluded from the language, culture, and visuals of punk rock. I ask myself who it serves when I see countless images showing examples of why “punk rock is a family,” images with only white men. It does no good to point at a neighborhood of burning houses while also standing in a house on fire. It is true, now, the flames in the house of punk may climb up the walls more slowly than, say, the flames in the Fox News building. But the house is still on fire. Too often, the choice in punk rock and D.I.Y. spaces for non-white men is a choice between being tokenized, or being invisible. Having experienced both, I chose the latter, and then chose to stop going to as many shows altogether. Which isn’t mentioned in sadness. To watch the casual packaging of a violence that impacts and affects bodies that look like yours, and to watch that violence knowing that you have no place in it, other than to take it in, feels similar to being black every other place in America.
After reading a few poems about being black at punk rock shows in Boston a few months ago, a black woman came up to me. We talked about our experiences in our respective scenes, how we eventually got less excited about them, and gravitated toward the Afropunk festival. Where the music may not be rooted in the short/fast/loud assault of sound that permeated my Midw
est upbringing, the dreamt-of ethos of punk is there. The idea of finding your own tribe, and keeping the circle open. An idea that I think many traditional punk scenes struggle toward, or have forgotten about, in part because when you create the tribe, the concept of opening a circle to those who seem different never crosses your mind.
When I left the last Afropunk festival I went to, I remembered that I wasn’t alone. Afropunk by itself isn’t going to save us, or dismantle a racist world, but if punk rock was born, in part, out of the need for white escape, Afropunk signals something provided for black escape from what the actions of white escape breeds. The fantasies that it, often violently, provides its young men with, and the people who suffer beneath those fantasies, vanishing. Like all dismantling of supremacy, punk, D.I.Y., and likeminded scenes have to cut to the core, and rewire the whole operation. There has to be an urgency to this; the world demands it. There is no war, but for the one that is claiming actual casualties. It is outside. And the bodies all look the same. There is no option now but to be honest about that.
Last year, I was at a Brand New show. One where, in typical Brand New fashion, they charged through half of their set and dragged through the back half. It was a hot night, and even hotter in the venue, a closed-in brick space with few windows. I stood upstairs, looking down. Halfway through “Sic Transit Gloria… Glory Fades,” I noticed the only black kid in the pit had passed out. Likely due to heat, or the physical nature of the pit. As a few of us above pointed, to try and draw attention, I watched his peers step over him; some kicked him, in the pursuit to keep dancing. To maybe touch the edge of the stage that their heroes graced.
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