Nov 2, 2016

The Weeknd: A Rising Starboy



In the beginning, the Weeknd wanted to be invisible. The son of Ethiopian immigrants who had fled the country’s famine in the 1980s, he spoke Amharic as a child. He dropped out of high school in Scarborough, Ontario—an ethnically mixed neighborhood on the outskirts of Toronto—at 17.

Soon after, he moved out of the house he shared with his mother and his grandmother and into a one-bedroom apartment with four friends. In 2010, he recorded three songs and posted them on the internet. They started to get some notice—and then Toronto’s own Drake linked to them from his website, and that notice got serious. “Drake will always be like a big brother to me,” says Tesfaye. “He always showed love and kind of showed the world what I could do.”

Also says he wishes he could make political music like Kendrick and Cole, but says it's a difficult art:

“But I don’t know how to make political music—not yet, anyway. People like Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole, that’s a talent, it’s an art that I wish I could do.”

More: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-weeknd-a-rising-starboy-1478102781

 

Nov 3, 2016

cadences and melodies.

the most complete song he took from the weeknd is crew love, but artists take other artist's songs all the time.

the "take a shot for me" hook was originally sung by the weeknd, and then drake took the hook and made it in to a song with 40. same with cameras, the ride and the bonus track.

the narrative that the take care is a weeknd album is absolutely ridiculous, and taking away points from drake for taking a hook from an artist and turning in to a song opens up a pandoras box in terms of investigating the process of other artists as well.