The Weeknd Satire

The year is 2011, the month is September.

“Moves Like Jagger” can be heard every twenty-five steps you take. Knee-high, pastel-donuts socks determine who you are. Young Money rapper Drake just took to his website to apologize for the fact that “Take Care”, his beloved sophomore LP, just got postponed an extra two weeks due to sample clearances and a bunch of legal stuff that I’d be lying if I said concerns me.

When everyone’s favorite Canadian revealed the delay on octobersveryown.blogspot.com, I stumbled upon a song unlike one I’ve never heard.

“The Zone” did not automatically instill my obsession with The Weeknd and his XO movement, but I could already tell it was going to be a start of a new era for me. Let alone the fact that Drake’s
The Weeknd’s rise to super-duper-stardom must’ve been no surprise to this user and for that I send him a virtual high five and congratulations.

Dating merely a year following my discovery of Toronto’s Abel Tesfaye and each of his three lurid, nebulous mixtapes, his image finally began to be slightly more widespread, due to the commercial release of the projects, “Trilogy”.

The next year, 2013, he released “Kiss Land”. Tesfaye’s LP didn’t receive the love and critical acclaim as I’d originally expected it to; though, its cinematic influence and eerie mystique caught my ear on first listen, which was the usual rate it took for me to appreciate the sounds and textures he put into his previous work.

What I didn’t understand at the time was that this was the type of music that wasn’t a favorite amongst many for could’ve been a variety of reasons; either some considered his subject matter to be far too hedonistic or it was the usual, “I can’t tell what he’s even saying, what the fuck are you showing me?” quandary, which I was constantly pitted against throughout my freshman year of high school.

Merely four months after “Kiss Land”, that’s when I’d first sensed the
Considering that 2016 was the year that your favorite artist went overboard and released overhyped, Gildan-printed shirts, it was no surprise that one of the radio’s latest poster boys chose to make his presence felt in the field as well.

Moreover, it’s difficult to grasp the root of where this ideology stems from; that ideology being the concept that it gets only gets harder to enjoy the artist’s music once he’s completely sold his soul for record-breaking sales, anthemic, pop tracks and some very, very unappealing clothing collaborations. It’s almost as if it places you on a standstill in which you find yourself asking, “Do I hate this artist?”

What a personal favorite going mainstream does to someone is rather hard to describe. The way I look at it is as if it’s basically been yet another era in life that I’ve been through that slowly, but surely, comes to an end. The nostalgic nirvana that runs through my body after listening to a song like “Loft Music” or “Montreal”, the first thought that comes to mind are those late summer-of-2012 nights I’d once spent illegally torrenting classics like “Ready to Die” and