Why thursday the weeknd

One reading of the story of Thursday runs roughly as such. A young man encounters an emotionally fragile young woman. He seduces her with the promise of fame and the aid of drugs; she needs him more than he wants her.

The sexual arrangement that ensues is both imbalanced and unconventional. She begins to call him on days other than the fifth day of the week.

The narrator finds himself surprised, and then worried. His past experience of deprivation has instilled in him a numb mentality, yet the eagerness of girl Thursday threatens to thaw out his persona and render him equally enamored, and vulnerable.

It makes for a sloppy, lopsided story if the girl at the center of the narrative exits it completely two-thirds of the way through without the slightest memory or mention afterward. If Thursday were a narrative conducted in written words, a novel or novella, one could swiftly write it off — too operatic, not enough logic or nuance. Though the narrative takes fatal excess as one of its themes, the means by which those themes are elaborated are relatively compact and discreet.

Everything hinges on the girl who saves herself for Thursday, or more precisely her skin color. As mentioned, the young woman on the cover of House of Balloons was racially ambiguous — only the pale balloon obscuring her face suggested anything regarding her skin color, and that only weakly. But the woman on the cover and at the heart of Thursday is explicitly, unequivocally white.

Yet even this fails to exhaust the symbolic potential of the central figure. Already a subscriber? Log in or link your magazine subscription. Account Profile. Sign Out. Tags: the weeknd thursday divinity music interracial couples white girl problems weekndology house of balloons More. Most Viewed Stories. But not many artists, especially in the Internet era, show up with such a well-developed aesthetic a very foggy, of-the-moment variation on mainstream radio's slow jams and something as self-assured as the House of Balloons mixtape.

And those that do probably don't have a Drake co-sign and such a carefully managed cloak of anonymity. Months later, all we really know about the Weeknd is that there's a singer named Abel Tesfaye with an earthy The-Dream-like voice and a lecherous persona that's both repellent and compelling.

Beyond that and a handful of "unofficial" but suspiciously high-budget videos, we have the music on these two mixtapes. Though there's less breathing space on Thursday , and fewer melodic hooks, it still feels of a piece with House of Balloons. There's the same ineffably skeezy vibe and a genuine sense of the album-as-journey, brought upon by smart sequencing and Tesfaye's willingness to complicate his devilish, drug-addled Lothario persona. The production is slightly harsher and streaked with violence, befitting the lyrical content-- "Life of the Party", the best and most disturbing song here, is based around doom-like guitar riffs that suggest something truly terrible about to happen.

The guitars burst forth during Tesfaye's mocking chorus "you're the life of the party" , sung as he casually convinces a girl into a group-sex situation. Other songs are tinged with similarly abrasive sounds: drill'n'bass noises rattle around in the background of opening track "Lonely Star"; "Rolling Stone" begins with a blustery chunk of heavily processed guitar; and the final track, "Heaven or Las Vegas" not a Cocteau Twins cover features a late-song interruption by screeching effects and heavy echo.

For contrast , the only jarring touch to the production on the fairly one-note House of Balloons is the title track 's Siouxsie and the Banshees sample. So the world here, in addition to being more sonically varied, feels just a little darker and a little more dangerous. Oh yeah-- and Drake shows up on this one. He delivers an end-of-song verse on "The Zone", very much in his " I'm on One " mode. The Weeknd and Drake have been linked for a while now, first through a series of blog and Twitter co-signs and now as proper collaborators, so it's interesting to finally hear the superstar step into this far more debauched world.