This is a disappointed letter to Abel Tesfaye aka The Weeknd, who released a series of R&B mixtapes in 2011 that skyrocketed to popularity and landed a deal with Universal Republic records. The label has rereleased the trio of mixtapes in a remastered set called Trilogy.
Waddup, Abel.
First off, my column doesn’t run on Mondays, so I can’t pop anything for you. You might need to be high for this. Sorry. Secondly, I’d like you to know that your three albums basically accompanied the randomness of my love life perfectly throughout 2011. Although I don’t sip lean recreationally, pop Molly, drink recreationally, do ominous amounts of blow or even sleep with people unprotected (because that’s naaaaaasty), your lush, filthy ballads are simply breathtaking.
Sidenote: I’ve never heard anyone sound so eerily close to M.J. Your “Dirty Diana” cover is too ill.
But back to the filthy part for one moment—that’s pretty much what drew me in to the whole drug-induced sex romps you spew in your music. Even by mainstream R&B standards, it’s quite unwholesome. And for someone who’s pretty tired of the conveyor-belt-mainstream standard that churns out auto-tuned carbon copies by the millisecond, I found your filth appealing in a modern context that doesn’t mesh with the radio redundancy.
Then you got a major deal. And then, this winter, Universal Republic rereleases everything you dropped for free… last year… with only three new songs. Not only that, but the filth of the mastering of last year’s releases? Gone into thin air.
That may not even be your fault. When I get the bread and I stop trappin’ off of Mediafire, I will gladly support you. I don’t just want you for your potential. Horrible mastering is a problem, and with problems come solutions. But pardon me if I feel disconnected because of this awkward-yet-conventional label release phase when applied to you. Is it so wrong of me that I loved your music the way it was before?
Dirty in content, aura, an atmosphere? That’s what set you so far apart. And now, I feel stripped. Like someone you take to meet your boys. You’ve got a lot of boys, too.
Nah, I take that back. If the mastering was horrible, your projects wouldn’t have permeated the blogosphere into the mainstream the way it did. And if Drake ends up on the tail end of “The Zone” and Juicy J mumbles drunkenly at the end of “Same Old Song,” it’s not like you didn’t have the budget or the connections to get someone to make you right. Well, the music anyway.
This leads me to wonder… was this deliberate? Was it a conscious decision to let your music sound this way? Because if so, why abandon the aesthetic that makes you shine?
There’s something about remastered versions of lo-fi music that leaves me with a healthy distrust and a bitter aftertaste: once you compare it to the original, it is not always the best route to take. I have this same sentiment for the SpaceGhostPurrp release of a lot of the songs found on his Blvcklvnd Rvdix 66.6 mixtape on Mysterious Phonk: The Chronicles of SpaceGhostPurrp. It is wonderful that Purrp is getting what he’s worked for and obtaining access to the resources he desires to make more quality music, but there was a mystical maze of vibrancy about the compressed, hissing, seething vibes of the original tape, the way the bassline was hidden beneath the Windows Pinball sound effects and the Mortal Kombat cut-ins. It matched Purrp perfectly… the dopest in 1991 in 2011 (and if you two don’t have songs already, do that).
How does that apply to you? The sonic appeal of your older sound was gorgeous because it was a perfect accompaniment to the content. The Weeknd is about shoving oneself deep into the crevices of pleasure and betrayal when so many stop at the waistline. Thus, the way your filth hits the eardrums made perfect sense and left me stuck in a seedy serenity full of double cups, alleyways and bedrooms with broken hearts. The remaster just seems like a fix to something that was never broken.
But don’t hate on a writer like me. You’re perfectly entitled to all of that hard work that satisfied me and a lot of others. But the next time you invite us in, lock the door and get inside your zone, remember that we’ve already felt the ground before. We aren’t scared of the fall and we’ve felt the ground before. Pull us back down in every way possible. We know everything. So stop hiding.
Signed, A Fan Who’s Sober All The Time.
(P.S. How much does Juicy J get in royalties for the end of “Same Old Song”? Honestly? He got a credit for that? I can’t with this industry anymore.)
