Projected behind the Weeknd on stage in Seattle, two women wearing smeared makeup and little else are rolling around on a bed, frantically kissing each other. It is a mess of hands and naked skin, with some soft groans sprinkled in. Being that this is an all-ages show, the parents, undoubtedly dragged here by their eager children without knowing what to expect, are either shuttling their children toward the exits or staring in shock with the rest of us, mouths open. The Weeknd, unbothered by the commotion, begins to launch into the song “Kiss Land,” the title track from the album he is touring on the back of tonight. As the song goes on, the pornography projected behind him becomes increasingly graphic. He sings the lyrics to the song out over the film’s sounds of passion: “This ain’t nothing to relate to / even if you tried / you tried / you tried.” It occurs to me, in the moment, that a lot of kids are going to have a story about how they went to a concert and ended up sitting through a pornographic film with their parents. It is both funny for me, here alone as an adult, and not funny at all, thinking back to my younger years. As the song reaches its climax, so does the film, cutting out right as one woman prepares to go down on the other. When the screen goes dark, the echoes of intimate moaning remain, shaking off of every wall in the theater. It seems exorbitant when it all ends. A pointless, uncomfortable exercise from an artist who believes vanity means no stone of excess can be left unturned.
The Weeknd, real name Abel Tesfaye, sings about sex. The kind of sex you have if you aren’t interested in love, but perhaps interested in warmth. The kind of sex you have when you’re lonely, or rich, or both. When the desire for a body outweighs the desire for a name. He’s made a career off of this, songs about drug-fueled conquests laced with intervals of paranoid boasting and small cautionary tales. Two years before the Seattle concert, in 2011, the Toronto native released three mixtapes: House of Balloons in the spring, Thursday in the summer, and Echoes of Silence in the winter. It was a chilling musical onslaught. The songs were dark and claustrophobic. In the world of The Weeknd, there was rarely a woman worth trusting, unless they were high, or naked, or both. Even here, he would skirt the line between sexual exuberance and chilling inappropriateness. “The only girls that we fuck with seem to have 20 different pills in ’em,” he sings on “Loft Music.” In “High For This,” the first song on House of Balloons, and the song that introduced The Weeknd to the world outside of Canada, he sings about convincing a woman to take a pill before intercourse. “It’s all consensual,” he said in an interview. “The tone is dark, but it’s consensual. Everyone is just trying to have a good time.”
He appeared to be an unimpressed student of R&B: someone who had seen so many singers get close to the line and then back away from it right when the audience was begging for something that felt like risk. This was his edge. He’s a marginal singer, at best, who relies on the same wave of vocal melody to get most of his lyrics out: a low start to a line that ascends briefly before cutting out. He curses more than all of his contemporaries, and is young enough to imagine a world in which he is invincible, so his interest in nihilism doesn’t feel like it’s directly trimming any years off of his life.
But, more than anything, The Weeknd sings about sex. His trilogy of mixtapes landed him a major label record deal, and a debut album in Kiss Land that found itself hotly anticipated. It is a colder, more isolated album than his mixtape efforts. It sounds like what it is: an album made by someone who never thought that their haunted tales of debauchery would make them this famous. It’s a subtle shift in tone, dialed a bit down in content, but with an attempted dial-up in concept, which leads to a more open and personal world that ends up falling flat.
Still, when I realized he was coming to Seattle, where I was briefly spending time with old friends, I paid way too much cash for a ticket on the street because once, about a year ago, a darkhaired girl from Toronto I was hanging out with told me, “If you ever get a chance to see The Weeknd, you have to do it. There’s nothing like it.”
Seattle is sitting in summer’s dying moments, which makes the city’s usual tone of grey seem all the more suffocating. Inside of the Paramount Theater, however, fluorescent colors splash the stage and bleed out into the crowd. Upon entry to the theater, there are Kiss Land condoms being handed out. Someone shoves a handful into my surprised and waiting palm, and while killing time before The Weeknd takes the stage, I flip them over in my hand, looking at the various lyrics etched on the outside of the packaging. On one: “YOU DESERVE YOUR NAME ON A CROWN” from the song “The Town.” On another, from the song “Wanderlust”: “GOOD GIRLS GO TO HEAVEN” on one side, “BAD GIRLS GO EVERYWHERE” on the other. As I shove them back into my pockets, the curtain on stage drops, and a bath of blue light seeps out onto the audience, so intense it forces a few people to shield their eyes as a head rises from below the stage, a mess of dreadlocks atop it.
“Can I get on top tonight, Seattle? Can I make you cum?”
These were the first words spoken to the crowd by The Weeknd, forcing a wave of screams back at him in response. It was not so much a question as it was a direct invitation, or a statement of intent. The fascinating thing about The Weeknd is that, when compared to his direct peers within his genre, he stands out. He may not personally consider himself an R&B singer, aligning himself more with the rappers he spent time around in Toronto, but there is no mistaking that the music he is creating, particularly on Kiss Land, is rooted in R&B tropes, sounds, and imagery. With this in mind, it bears pointing out that The Weeknd is not exactly a physical sex symbol in the way that soul and R&B has manifested physical sex symbols since the 1960s. Even now, with R&B folding aggressively into the umbrella of pop, the male R&B sex symbol is what sells. Months before this, at a Trey Songz concert, I watched Songz abandon his shirt one song in, to the delight of fans. By three songs in, he was grinding against the mic stand. By the end, he was on the ground, simulating sex with the stage floor. The Weeknd, by comparison, layers his clothes and approaches the stage with a calm, almost laziness. Tonight he wears a jacket, a vest, and then another shirt underneath, with baggy pants. He is attractive, but not in the sharply-groomed way that a traditional R&B heartthrob might be attractive. He often looks like he is trying to give off the aesthetic impression that he is only present in between breaks from being in bed, immersed in some unspeakable passion.
It is startling how well one can sell sex without doing much of the work themself. As he powers through the show, sometimes turning to conduct the band behind him, The Weeknd is not doing anything explicitly sexual. He’s letting the atmosphere do the work, and folding into it. During the song “Live For This,” his face is projected on monitors around the theater, overwhelming the audience with his presence. Not his face singing, or doing anything romantic. Just his face, staring, blinking occasionally. There is a tension in this, something that pulls you in and dares you to break first. The sex is sold by that which is implied after The Weeknd opens the show by making his intentions known. The way the pornographic film looping behind him cut out right before the film reached its climax, because it could. Because it didn’t have to show the audience what the audience was already building to in its head. The Weeknd, even with his faulty choirboy vocals, is at his best when planting an idea in the head of those who are watching him. It’s sexual inception: first leave nothing to the imagination, and then leave everything to the imagination. At the end of the song “Kiss Land,” with the echoes of passion still hanging thick in the air, The Weeknd stands entirely still on stage, overly satisfied with the display he just offered the audience. When he finally moves, after the crowd goes silent, he flicks his wrist toward the mic stand. Everyone in the theater screams.
No one during the show is touching, despite the themes being sensual, at the very least. I’m interested in the physical space bodies take up at times like these. The way we fold into each other when a slow jam works its way out of the speakers. But tonight, everyone is at least performing distance. It occurs to me that this could be because there is nothing about The Weeknd that assumes love as a necessary vehicle for physical intimacy. This isn’t new, in all genres of music, but for The Weeknd, there is such a clear dismissal of love as a trope in his lyrics. He isn’t necessarily chasing women as much as he is chasing a feeling, which creates an audience that also sets out looking for that feeling. And, look, I am saying that I have wanted to forget the day and run into whatever allowed me to do so at night. I’m saying that I want to be in love, but sometimes I just don’t want to be alone, and I don’t want to do the work of balancing what that means in what hour of whatever darkness I’m sitting in. And across the theater in Seattle, I lock eyes with someone for what was mere seconds but feels like an entire small lifetime, and I wonder what it must be like to trust a stranger with your undoing in the way that The Weeknd asks us to. What it must be like to feel briefly full without considering if any emptiness might follow.
I’m unimpressed by The Weeknd. I am perhaps unimpressed by The Weeknd because I’m jealous of the way he makes that which I once believed to be complicated sound so simple. Miles away from here, in my Ohio apartment, there is still hair on a pillow from a woman who hasn’t slept in my bed in two weeks, and likely never will again, after a year of doing it. Before I boarded the flight here, I pulled one of her long, black hairs off of a sweater and held it briefly to the light. When I arrived in Seattle, there was a small bottle of nail polish, from a trip we’d taken together months ago. Not enough people face the interior of separation in this way. What it is to find small pieces of a person who you know you’ll never get to wholly experience again. It feels, almost always, like piecing together a road map that places you directly in the middle of nowhere.
The Weeknd closes out the night with “Wicked Games,” a song about entering into a doomed one-night relationship with a woman who was, moments ago, a stranger. It is his most personal song, of the night and perhaps his young career. It’s the song where he’s asking for a thing greater than forgettable sex. In the final chorus, as the curtain begins to descend, he fights through the last lyrics, his already worn-down voice breaking even further on “so tell me you love me / only for tonight, only for tonight / even though you don’t love me / just tell me you love me.”
It is the first thing he’s truly asking. The way the concert has come full circle: first, him asking if he can make an audience cum, and then, asking for someone to tell him that they love him. I suppose the lesson is that the one-night stand takes as many forms as the desires of the people inside of it. Once the curtain falls completely, the sound of women moaning push back through the speakers hanging in front of the few remaining fluorescent lights. I’m here because a woman I loved told me I had to be, months before she left her hair on my pillow for the last time, and as I scan the crowd quickly for the woman I shared brief eye contact with, I think about how much of myself I’ve left behind for people to gradually find, heartbroken, over the course of several months. The Weeknd tells the same tale: it’s never about love but then again, how can it be about anything but love, even if the love is just the love you have for your own ravenous desires. Stepping out into the night, swallowed by grey even inside of the black, I’m not sure if I came here tonight to forget pain, or to remember thirst.