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Darkness, drama and Daft Punk: the Weeknd’s best songs – ranked!
Ahead of Abel Tesfaye’s livestreamed concert in Brazil to launch his new era, we rate his path from cult mixtape star to pop icon
It says something about how smooth and successful the Weeknd’s collaboration with Daft Punk was that Starboy was written in 30 minutes, based on a beat that was on Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo’s phone: the result – mid-tempo, sleek but sad – went on to sell a staggering 11m copies in the US. Another multimillion seller from Starboy, and as close to straightforward R&B as that album got, Reminder faced down critics who claimed the Weeknd was going too pop – “I’m like, goddamn, bitch, I am not a Teen Choice” – and co-opted a succession of huge hip-hop names as cameos in its video to underline the point. The opening track on his debut mixtape, and thus the world’s introduction to the Weeknd, is an immediately striking entrance: the music offers murkily disturbing electronics, the lyrics attempt to talk an apparently unwilling partner into either taking drugs or having sex or both.
Or read this on The Guardian
