Boy, what a difference a few years and a little taste of monetary success can make.
Five years ago everyone, including this blog, was raving about this mysterious Canadian contemporary R&B artist carefully cultivating a decadent, reclusive, anti-record-industry persona with a series of free downloads dominated by bleak, drugs-and-elicit-sex-obsessed, sonically fascinating slow jams.
Today, thanks to mega-hits like The Hills and our selection for our 2015 Crowd Pleasers mix, the Off The Wall-ish disco banger Can't Feel My Face from his so-so second major label release Beauty Behind The Madness, The Weeknd is now one of the biggest and most commercially transparent mainstream artists out there, sub-headlining major festivals, collaborating with the likes of Drake and Ariana Grande, and performing as the season-opening musical guest on Saturday Night Live - even though his desolate lyrical obsession with the empty highs of a drug-fueled existence remains.
But whatever one may feel about the increasingly profit-oriented arc of The Weeknd's career, one can't totally fault him for his shift in direction when some of the results are as compulsively listenable as this.
Five years ago everyone, including this blog, was raving about this mysterious Canadian contemporary R&B artist carefully cultivating a decadent, reclusive, anti-record-industry persona with a series of free downloads dominated by bleak, drugs-and-elicit-sex-obsessed, sonically fascinating slow jams.
Today, thanks to mega-hits like The Hills and our selection for our 2015 Crowd Pleasers mix, the Off The Wall-ish disco banger Can't Feel My Face from his so-so second major label release Beauty Behind The Madness, The Weeknd is now one of the biggest and most commercially transparent mainstream artists out there, sub-headlining major festivals, collaborating with the likes of Drake and Ariana Grande, and performing as the season-opening musical guest on Saturday Night Live - even though his desolate lyrical obsession with the empty highs of a drug-fueled existence remains.
But whatever one may feel about the increasingly profit-oriented arc of The Weeknd's career, one can't totally fault him for his shift in direction when some of the results are as compulsively listenable as this.
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