Tryna Get You Out The Friendzone: Making Sense of The Weeknd’s Relationship to Feminism
This post contains NSFW images and discussion of themes related to sex and sexual violence.
Did you really just read the words “feminism” and “The Weeknd” in the same sentence? You sure did! Having established himself as a purveyor of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll (or kind of, like, pop-infused contemporary R&B?), the artist known as The Weeknd recently shot to the top of the Billboard 200 with his album Beauty Behind the Madness. The Weeknd, also known as Abel Tesfaye, has been talked about with considerable controversy and reverence over the last few years, particularly with reference to the lyrical content of his songs (which are largely about sex and drugs and having sex while being on drugs, see aforementioned). I’m not here to determine whether or not a thing is “feminist,” but I am interested in how themes related to The Weeknd have circulated in terms of their gender politics and what that says about the cultural moment in which The Weeknd exists.
Beauty Behind the Madness is The Weeknd’s second full-length album, after 2013’s Kiss Land and a much-loved trilogy of mix tapes remastered and compiled as the amply-titled Trilogy (2011). His soft, occasionally Michael Jackson-esque vocals have been positioned in opposition to the more sordid content of his songs.
For instance, Steph Kretowicz, reviewing Kiss Land for Dummy, suggests that The Weeknd “is summed up in his misleadingly emotive, often overwrought vocals that reveal a sexual appetite of sociopathic proportion.” That his vocals are considered “misleading” is noteworthy in a culture which so heavily equates masculinity with toughness and violence, especially when it comes to black masculinity. Would Kretowicz have found the music less jarring if the vocals had been sung in a style she thought was congruent with the lyrical content? Immediately, then, we can position The Weeknd as somewhat oppositional in his packaging, or at least see him as offering a point of discussion when thinking about the interrelations between pop culture, feminism and racial discourses.
The Weeknd’s lyrics are entrenched in sexual imagery considered “too much” for many, and he’s managed to construct full album-length narratives around these NSFW themes. His lyrics have been called “misogynistic”, and “Sexy, filthy, and down right offensive.” His song “Initiation” has been described as “an anthem for date rape.”
The sexual themes are also in peripheral texts such as his music videos. One such video was “Pretty,” which garnered some bad press. Is an interesting parallel to Rihanna’s “BBHMM,” (which I looked at in a previous post) in terms of its content and the ways in which its misogyny was constructed in the popular media. The gender dynamics are different here, though, because it’s a man doing the killing. In “Pretty,” Abel is shown enacting revenge on a former female lover while she sleeps with another man by shooting both of them. They’re in Japan for some reason.
As credible as a lot of the reactions to the video were, there usually is more to the picture. For instance, nobody drew attention to the role of tropes associated with Japan in “Pretty.” According to the director, the video played with Yakuza themes in which violence is considered commonplace (basically it’s no big deal because it’s Japan, innit?).
The racial element complexifies the issue of misogyny in terms of who is doing the representing, who wields the power and who is the oppressor. Abel, a black man, is shown shooting an Asian woman who is having sex with another black man within a narrative which is bookended by themes which, it’s safe to say, are Orientalist, particularly the video’s indulgence in its female star’s naked body. I’m not really comfortable with making concrete statements about the video because it’s complicated. Is it misogynist? Probably, but we need to consider the nuances.
Bringing the discussion back to now, Pitchfork recently did an interview with The Weeknd, at one point asking him about the perception that his music is misogynist. His answer was:
Yeah. But I don’t feel like I’ve ever pushed it to the point where they can’t understand or respect the art, because it is art. Music is like film to me. When Tarantino makes a movie he gets people shitting on him 24/7, but it’s his art, and he stands by it. And at the end of the day, my listeners love it, I love it, I hope you love it.
Funny how Tarantino is invoked any time any reference is made to “shocking” or “controversial” content produced by black artists (going back to “BBHMM” again), a filmmaker who in many ways capitalizes on racism and slavery narratives in his films. Either way, Abel seems convinced that his “persona” shields him from criticism when it comes to the possibility that his lyrics are offensive. We know that art isn’t beyond criticism, so that’s a lousy excuse if there’s any credence to the claim.
“BUT!” you might be thinking, “isn’t rap/music associated with black people just inherently misogynistic?” Not so much considering the grand scheme of things. A lot of music in general is rife with sexism, racism and homophobia. Thinking about the visibility of women/people of color/queer people in metal, for instance, is pretty painful considering the abundance of hairy white dudes singing about “girls, girls, girls.” In its heyday, a whole bunch of emo music was about women who were, in the eyes of the male singers, terrible.
I think a lot of the discomfort Abel’s songs foster might actually stem from Western culture’s relationship to female genitatia. The Weeknd’s obsession with vaginas is relentless in a way which is disconcerting because we don’t talk about female body parts in particularly flattering ways, if ever. What we consider to be inappropriate, gross and abject is entirely gendered. Think about the abundance of “feminine hygiene” products (reaching back to the historical practice of douching) marketed to women who are told that their reproductive organs are unclean (when vaginas are pretty much self-maintaining).
A lot of The Weeknd’s songs make reference to providing a woman sexual pleasure (through that which he oh-so-lovingly refers to as “pussy”). In “Often,” for example he talks about making “that pussy rain.” He also refers to a woman who “rode the wave,” which could be a reference to sex, drugs, or even, dare I say, menstruation (since she was “down to do it either way, often”)?
That said, the content of these songs quite often tips into the zone where women are valued only for their body parts, which is arguably dehumanizing. When Tom Jewitt reviewed “Often” for Fortitude, he argued that “The Weeknd portrays a version of the modern male as a predatory and sexually dominating being, whilst underlining the modern female as and the passive vessel for male pleasure.” Again, this is a valid point, but by considering a broader picture of how both men’s and women’s (hetero)sexuality is constructed in Western culture, we can complexify these issues.
Thinking about The Weekend in relation to feminism raises a number of interesting points. The Weeknd’s lyrics are considered misogynistic because of the way in which he apparently views women in terms of body parts or submissiveness, and because he talks about having sex with them a lot. For all intents and purposes Abel is being criticized for being a slut. Is being a slut then inherently bad? If so, what are the implications of such an attitude? Or is it just worse when it’s a man because of the power dynamic? What would we make of these songs if it were a woman singing about men? Or a woman singing about women? Does it make a difference when the singer is black? What would happen if the songs’ references to vaginas weren’t also accompanied by “she” and “her” pronouns?
I know there are lots sex songs out there, but I’m singling out The Weeknd because of his huge success recently. A lot of the detail he gets into when describing these acts makes people feel uncomfortable. Drug-addled sex is weirdly framed as culturally inappropriate and highly indicative of virile masculine behaviour considered admirable for men. Meanwhile, Western culture also privileges a wholesome nuclear family unit enabled by heterosexual monogamy. Discussions of misogyny in culture tend to end there though. A more useful approach would therefore be to ask why it is we think this is bad or wrong or misogynistic or feminist or this or that. How do we get to that point to begin with?
We spend a lot of time thinking about what we should and shouldn’t like and this tends to derail the focus from what’s actually being talked about. No doubt I “shouldn’t” like The Weeknd: he presents himself as a macho “villain” and appears to glorify drug use while fragmenting women’s body parts. He wrote a song for “Fifty Shades”! He unquestioningly uses the term “friendzone!” I could think about whether or not I should like his music but I prefer to invest my time and energy in thinking about how these cultural texts engage with bigger issues and what that says about the culture they’re situated in.
So I also think it’s a bit more complicated than needing to reconcile our feminist selves with our misogynistic pleasures, as Katherine Burks argued in a piece for The Lala earlier this year, since this depends on the idea that something can be concretely one thing or the other. We live in convoluted times defined by feminisms which are multifaceted and shifting, which by extension suggests that things that are considered not feminist follow similar patterns.
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