Bring the drugs, baby, I can bring my pain

The Weeknd, House Of Balloons, 2011

Keep an open mind on this one. I’m becoming more and more fascinated with the Internet’s increasingly heavy, and rapid, influence on the mixing, matching, and re-imagining of the term “genre.” We, as aspiring connoisseurs, have a duty placed on us by the very fact of being alive in 2011 to pay attention to these processes, unless you feel like rendering yourself a dinosaur. Without a doubt, the biggest shift happened in hip-hop, where that oh-so-played-out tough guy bullshit fell by the wayside, replaced with sleeker, more playful, and much gentler sensibilities. Drake became one of the biggest signifiers of the contemporary scene not by showing up hungry and angry, but by stripping away a few of those layers of gangster-forged armor to reveal a sultry set of pipes and an affinity for smiling (WTF, a rapper smiling?!?!) in music videos.

Thank GOD, the next recipient of a Web-driven makeover is R&B. As the lines continue to blur, and we see underground darlings like How To Dress Well and oOoOO taking blatant hints from mainstream R&B, finally a project has emerged that truly refreshes the soundscape. The Weeknd’s House of Balloons, a free mixtape released via the collective’s web site, takes R&B’s nonstop obsession with getting laid, and drenches it in narcotic indulgence. The production sounds like Beach House on ketamine, and singer Abel Tesfaye’s croons swirl around in the murk and mist rather than shine through it. Don’t get me wrong, his voice is gorgeous, but the emphasis here is all atmosphere; dark, druggy, and dangerous. The title track rides the current of a filthy synth line while simultaneously employing a Siouxsie & the Banshees sample that screams ingenuity, while part two of the track, “Glass Table Girls,” seems to be all about doing copious amounts of cocaine.

Clearly, these guys don’t give a fuck about sexual taboos. I'm hesitant with a good deal of contemporary R&B because its notions of lovemaking feel forced, packaged, and homogenized. Here, it’s “XO ‘til we overdose.” The lyrical content walks that rather precarious line between love and obsession, desire and dependency, and the mixtape's attention locates itself in the moments where that boundary gets shattered. Album opener “High For This” is downright terrifying (“Don’t be scared/ I’m right here/ Even though/ you don’t know/ Trust me girl/ You wanna be high for this”), but the intensity and the uncertainty only make me more curious as to what exactly this girl has agreed (?) to do. The sex on this album (and hopefully, the sex that happens because of this album), fueled by chemicals, fully embraces the darker nuances of passion in a way that celebrates our more instinctual inclinations and says to hell with what society says sex should be, let it be ALL that it is. You know what? I’ll co-sign the hell out of it, purely for the sake of keeping hedonism alive and well in my life.

-Henry

Download here

The Weeknd - High For This by TomJenkins