Wednesday, October 5, 2016

The 2015/1967 Countdown - 10/05/2016 Update

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.

No comments: