The Sorrows of The Weeknd

Abel Tesfaye, alias The Weeknd, is one of history's most successful musicians. Blinding Lights remains Spotify's most streamed song, and the longest charting song in Billboard's Hot 100. He holds the title of the world's most popular artist as of the Guinness Book of World Records 2023. He also remains unwed, and without heirs; he has admitted to using drugs as ‘a crutch’ and cycles through tempestuous relationships with supermodels. Amid nostalgic synth tones and smooth falsetto, Tesfaye uses his music to express the tortured themes of nihilism and Gnosticism at the heart of hedonistic modernity, which prevent even the most celebrated from sustaining relationships.

Beginning with Trilogy—a re-release of his X.O-era mixtapes—Abel played the role of tempter. His career has been marred by liberal charges of misogyny, stemming from his early use of degrading terms and lyrics boasting of promiscuous escapades. In Wicked Games, he sings of plying women with drugs and alcohol to “Take [them] down another level[,] And get [them] dancing with the Devil.” On Kiss Land's title track, he embraced fame and hedonism with exhilaration and murdered an ex-lover in Pretty. His subsequent single, King of the Fall, celebrated him cuckolding less affluent men and taking stimulants at breakfast. With the title's allusion to Satan, it seems The Weeknd was adamant about his enjoyment of bacchic pandemonium. 

The boasting began to wane with 2015's Beauty Behind the Madness. In the first of his collaborations with Lana Del Rey, he lamented being “a prisoner to my addiction.” Tesfaye expressed the terror of depending on a “life that's so empty and so cold,” which renders him unable to accept the liberation love can bring. This futility led him to later sing that falling in love is “pointless.” In Often, he admitted to conducting his sexual exploits while intoxicated, calling cocaine “My God white, he in my pocket” which gets him “redder than the devil.” He rationalised this in Can’t Feel My Face with the reflection that his love affair with the substance will “be the death of me [but] At least we'll both be numb.” When the pain of existence without self-ownership is so great, Abel takes oblivion as a tolerable consolation prize: cocaine is an expedient formaldehyde, letting him “be beautiful And stay forever young.” His Faustian bargain grants him youth at the expense of length and quality of life. 

With Starboy, cracks start to show. He shaved off his trademark dreadlocks—revealed in a video where he suffocates a past version of himself and destroys the records and awards in his home with a hypnotic red cross. Starboy instigated a break, both in style and tone, from his past work. Tesfaye admitted the album came out of the emergence from “a dark hole, at an earlier point in [his] life.” He later spoke about how his stage name became a persona distinct from himself: 

I guess The Weeknd is Hyde. Abel is Dr Jekyll … I think Abel would love to depart and divide himself from The Weeknd. It’s like the Venom thing, man ... He just doesn’t know how to yet. You know? And that is the journey I feel for me. And he doesn’t know how to yet.

Starboy was the start of Abel's existential struggle to escape the world of the Weeknd—the malaise of materialism and hedonism he once celebrated. Only with the death and desecration of the old can he emerge anew.

This arc continued in After Hours and Dawn FM. Both albums expressed the aching pain of pursuing love in a culture of carnal pleasure. This is a common theme of troubadour ‘courtly love’ literature. Death is romanticised as a means of transcending the limits of material existence towards eternal love. It has a Gnostic strain in its aversion to the physical world—inherited from the abstinent, ascetic Cathar sect rumoured to have preceded them.

This convention is common in fiction—the apocryphal claim that Sorrows of Young Werther caused a spate of suicides comes to mind. The Netflix series Thirteen Reasons Why was accused of inspiring the same trend. So frequent is it in young-adult fiction that writers are accused of perpetuating a 'Bury Your Gays' trope in which same-sex-attracted protagonists are inevitably separated by one of their tragic deaths.

The same sad fate befalls Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers in Romeo and Juliet, as well as Rose and Jack in DiCaprio's less plausible tragedy, Titanic. In fact, in Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, DiCaprio's titular figure is rewritten as a romantic hero, killed before consummating his dream—as opposed to the delusional bootlegger from the novel. Lines indicting Daisy's wealth and privilege were removed and replaced by Del Rey's haunting lovesong, foreshadowing an old age she and Gatsby would never reach. While Fitzgerald's novel criticised the corrupting influence of American capitalism, Lurhman's film spawned copycat theme parties; a clear example of how the materialist paradigm obscures our understanding.

Another critic of capitalism, Karl Marx, provided potent examples of neo-Gnostic martyrdom with his poems Nocturnal Love and The Pale Maiden. The lovers drink poison, “And [their] eyes are closed forever.” The maiden leaps from a cliff, “To dash her skeleton[,] On a rocky place,” seeking reunion with a knight who perished in battle to attain “The joys of True Love!” in the afterlife. Both poems read like eerie prophecies: two of Marx's daughters died by poisoning themselves in suicide pacts with their lovers. Marx also expressed a demonic desire for self-destruction, frequently quoting Goethe's Mephistopheles to friends and in writing.

Similar themes recur in music. Blue Oyster Cult's (Don't) Fear The Reaper depicted a woman flirting with Death, who whisks her away in the night with the suave and decorum of Christopher Lee's Dracula. Likewise, in Save Your Tears, The Weeknd's protagonist ends his life when reminded of a love he sacrificed for fame.

The video is Abel's indictment of the music industry. Its members attend a Gatsby-esque awards ceremony, dressed for a sordid masquerade a la Eyes Wide Shut, and are delighted at being sprayed by a faux golden shower of champagne. Yes, Tesfaye is expressing his bitterness at being snubbed by the Grammys, despite After Hours' record-breaking success. But he also directs contempt at himself, for how fame has malformed him too. He wears a prosthetic surgically-augmented Madonna-esque mask of his own face.

The opening line, and dress worn by his maskless lover, alludes to Selena Gomez—from whom Tesfaye separated before After Hours. (He wrote the short album My Dear Melancholy in the aftermath of their breakup.) The video ends in the bowels of Hell, where Dawn FM begins; Tesfaye deserves to be there, for ending his life and forgoing a love more meaningful than the awards he never received.

This Fall is preceded by other music videos for After Hours. Depressed by the shallowness of success and weakened by addiction, he is manipulated by an unseen force in After Hours. Catholic teaching explains demons, like their angelic brethren, as non-corporeal beings. A person without virtue is an eligible vessel for their embodiment. As exorcist Gabrielle Amorth explained, while a victim of demonic possession is not morally culpable for the crimes committed when demons pilot their flesh, they are guilty of indulging in the vices which made them vulnerable to being possessed. This is why Abrahamic religions place prohibitions on drug and alcohol misuse. Exorcisms have seen a resurgence in popularity in recent years—a sign perhaps that we feel more at the whim of external forces than the Enlightenment myth of the liberal self-authoring subject has us believe.

Tesfaye himself has been ‘California sober’ since 2021, meaning he no longer using Class As, but still smokes cannabis and drinks occasionally. Ironic, then, that Blinding Lights gets top billing: the video depicts Tesfaye, hungover from a Fear and Loathing-like hallucinogenic haze in Heartless, wrecking a sports car while speeding to a liaison with an ex-lover.  Perhaps Tesfaye is hinting at the same conclusion Carl Schmitt drew in Roman Catholicism and the Political Form: that the banality of hedonistic, materially abundant modernity is the way in which the Antichrist will mask his arrival into the world.

Tesfaye becomes such a monster that in In Your Eyes he stalks, and is decapitated by, a horror film Final Girl. She dances with his severed head, mimicking Leatherface's impotent rage from the end of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This head is recovered in Too Late by two residents of Beverly Hills—the same site of loveless sin he sang of in The Hills. The women, faces bandaged after surgical procedures, entrap a stripper, stitch Tesfaye’s head to his body, and writhe in pleasure atop his Frankenstinian corpse. Pleasure has so displaced love, that even death doesn't grant Abel a reprieve from being an erotic object for superficial women.

Dawn FM continued Abel's Dante-esque descent. The music video of its first single, Take My Breath, features lots of black leather—evocative of the fetish gear from the now-mainstreamed BDSM subculture of the song's namesake. The erotic act described in the song has also become more common as sex becomes less common, less embodied, and yet more culturally ubiquitous. More young people have engaged in digital sexting than had sex. Among those who have, strangulation is a common (even requested) occurrence. Louise Perry compared this in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution to domestic violence victims interpreting abuse as signs that their partner still loved them enough to enact their passion in violent outbursts. The lines between death and aching devotion are blurred, as in troubadour fiction. 

Tesfaye's own outfit homages The Matrix. In Trans, Helen Joyce explained the director’s original intent to make the story a trans allegory. Neo liberates himself from the false reality of the Matrix by taking the red pill (oestrogen) and rejecting his dead name (Mr Anderson). Since the film, both directors have transitioned, with Lily Wachowski claiming pornography was the catalyst to his gender gnosis. 

Tesfaye, both intentionally and mimetically, weaves various themes into this video. There is the rejection of unreality in The Matrix; and thereby the neo-Gnosticism and sexual perversion of transgenderism. The song also flirts with the idea that love is located on the brink of death, as in troubadour fiction. But, as Abel ends the song on his back, enslaved by a dominatrix, Tesfaye seems to reject pleasure, devoid of love, as closer to pain than transcendence.

Sacrifice opens where Take My Breath ends: with a weakened Abel abducted by a cult which drains his life essence in exchange for adoration. The lyrics express how his callous nature—“the ice inside my veins [which] will never bleed”—inevitably consign him to a life of non-committal sex for financial success. While the video shows him experiencing kaleidoscopic euphoria when the beauty of the cultists fades, we see they are decrepit, demonic, and giving him ecstasy in exchange for cannibalising his youth. 

Gasoline then depicted Tesfaye in another circle of Hell, mercilessly beating his future self to death. He is encircled by disfigured demons, disguised as androgynous club attendants, writhing in masochistic ecstasy. This older self stumbles onto the scene from a car wreck, echoing his earlier reckless driving in Blinding Lights. All of this suggests Tesfaye is locked in an inescapable loop of error and regret. The three videos come with epilepsy warnings for their strobe lighting—an allusion to demonic possession again rearing its horned head.

Out of Time at first appears unrelated, but its innocent karaoke date dissolves like a Brazil-esque dream. Jim Carey comes into view, grafting a death mask to Tesfaye’s face on an operating table. Abel appears to suggest that the facade from Save Your Tears must remain for his career to continue. Awaking in How Do I Make You Love Me?, Tesfaye pursues his lover, losing limbs and bleeding moths in the process. He is metamorphosing in pursuit of rediscovering love, pursued by a grotesque growing version of his After Hours character. Arriving at her door, he pounds fruitlessly to the rhythm of Take My Breath, implying again that escaping licentious celebrity life for real intimacy is a Sisyphean feat.

This is affirmed by the latest video, Is There Someone Else? Abel's identity is split between a faceless being and the versions of himself that being is damned to watch receive a striptease from his lover. Once he arrives at the apartment he is spying on, another telescope is already set up. His hedonistic loveless lifestyle provides only an eternal recurrence of paranoid voyeurism. Punished for ambition, The Weeknd is waiting for a Heraclesean true love to return, and to shoot the eagle pecking at his alcohol-poisoned liver.

What ties this theme in Abel’s work together is his growing disdain for California. In The Morning, he aspired to “Order plane tickets[,] Cali is the mission[,] Visit every month like I'm split life living.” Tesfaye’s ambition was to get rich, famous, and live in Los Angeles. Years later, he sang in Snowchild, “Cali was the mission but now a nigga leaving.” This disillusionment was explained in Escape From LA: he despises the perverse incentives provided to trade sex for career advancement in the Golden State. Having lived in the Hills, Abel has been disenchanted of the gains which motivated his early career. Now, he must rebuild his self-conception in a spiritual crucible of abstinence and isolation, to have the family he has since admitted to wanting.

The Weeknd's music presents addiction as a prison and intimacy as our means of rehabilitation. This modernity dangles just out of reach. The world is under the influence of a Demiurgic force, foisting sex, drugs, and rock and roll on us as distractions from true love. If the critically-panned cringe-worthiness of The Idol doesn't kill Abel's career, I fear the temptation to return to this entropic lifestyle just might.