The Weeknd – Earned It
So now he’s having top 10 hits and duetting with Ariana Grande, now we need a new indie verison of The Weeknd, right?
[Video][Website]
[4.89]
Britt Alderfer: This sounds like it was recorded in the Christopher Nolan-era Batcave. And look, though everything to do with the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise needs to be so explicit, The Weeknd still managed to pull off a track called “Earned It” while resisting the urge to add the sound of actual change falling into the till, or the whisper of cash, smack even, if you flip through a stack of bills fast enough. Because he knew they were meant to be together in the end anyway, this capitalist love story and our dead-eyed, drugged-out lothario of the lowlands. But, I know a good power play when I hear one. Picture a hand lovingly massaging a throat, yours, to get a bitter pill down more easily.
[7]
Thomas Inskeep: I tend to run very hot and cold on the Weeknd, and I find him incredibly overrated, but this is a pretty sharp marriage of film-score-feel and pop/soulcraft; it actually brings to mind a slow-tempo Bond theme. I feared that since this is related to that movie, and considering what the Weeknd’s capable of, that this would be inexorably sleazy, but it’s the precise opposite: this oozes class, maybe even too much for its own good, but I’ll take it over the alternatives.
[6]
Luisa Lopez: Not to implicate a beast not even on trial, but this is the whole problem with Fifty Shades of Grey: it never takes the joke as far as it should.
[1]
Micha Cavaseno: I’m still riding for this kid, because if it wasn’t for him, Chris Brown would still be making apology power ballads about his human weaknesses and I’d be still screaming from auditorium seating, “STOP LYING! YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE AND WE ALL KNOW IT!” But if there’s anyone who doesn’t get what makes Abel great, it’s himself. “Often” and “King Of The Fall” both suggested strides to return to form, and he follows it up with retro balladeer suave for Fifty Shades Of Grey. For what it’s worth, he lets the association do all the talking for us, much to our eyerolls and gritted teeth. And not for nothing, it is interesting to hear Abel dwell within “normal” music and not something that feels like a drugged-out haze. The hiccuping bit on the chorus is a bit absurd though, and I’m disappointed that his pen game is still deteriorated from that initial rush of fantasy in the mixtape-era. Regardless, I’m here for the long haul, fed up and disapproving, but still here. For this asshole.
[6]
Alfred Soto: As tenderer and more rhythmically astute acts assimilate his legacy, The Weeknd sounds like a normal asshole these days. The strings — Massive Atttack and “Forget About Dre” after four strong puffs of crippy — are of course the stars. The falsetto’s nice too. Don’t trust this guy’s criteria or empowerment doggerel though.
[5]
Scott Mildenhall: Elegant, stately, slightly undermined by lyrics so banal that it’s a struggle to end this description of them. It’s the immediate assertion of grandeur that carries it, intriguing and quite unusual to hear on the radio. Weirder still is that placing aside the tokenistic deference to themes of earning and deserving, between this and “Love Me Like You Do,” 50 Shades seems positively lovely.
[5]
Brad Shoup: Pretty sneaky how he puts two whole minutes between the hacky “magic/tragic” rhyme. You almost got away with it, The Weeknd! This is four minutes of vamp, a ponderous slow jam begging for Tesfaye to layer several different vocal attacks, instead of stringing them in series.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: Given my blurb the last time we went to this particular well-well-well I am perhaps too far into the snark gallery to talk, but how is it possible that The Weeknd can record a song called “Earned It” for Fifty Shades of Grey with a chorus that goes “girl, you earned it / and you deserve it” without one hint of innuendo that you don’t read in? Obviously a blockbuster budget-deredding romance film can’t soundtrack itself with NIN and Depeche Mode, or for that matter with Echoes of Silence, but given that Twilight and The Hunger Games have both snuck genuinely noteworthy tracks in with their label-placed filler, would it kill Abel to be more perverse than a randomly selected desires_exe meme? Despite the odd incongruous line (“I’m so used to being used,” bullshit) this is over-scrubbed, overly safe, and classed up until it approaches dumpy. The spiritual source of the strings, beyond “expensive-sounding bordello music,” eluded me until the very end: the Weeknd is every dude you’ve ever met who still fucks to Portishead in 2015, can only recognize songs that aren’t “Glory Box” on muscle memory, and yet continually finds people who fall for it. People love to rag on 50 Shades‘ upper-class fantasy, as if they’ve forgotten that the economy is still shit and people have always turned to Little Orphan Annie stories as escapism from their hard-knock lives, but make no mistake: Abel is more of a ruthless capitalist than its entire viewership put together, and his song a far guiltier pleasure.
[6]
Patrick St. Michel: My desires are… conventional and boring.
[2]
*Patrick steps up to bat, looking befuddled*
*The pitch*
*Patrick swats with the bat at an awkward angle, with a v. :/ face*
*goes into the stands*
I fell asleep before blurbing but would have said something like: it’s really exciting to hear something this slow (and in 6/8!) on the radio, though I don’t believe a word he says.