Switched on Pop - The Weeknd drives through purgatory (with a little help from Jim Carrey)

Episode Date: January 11, 2022

Dawn FM is The Weeknd’s most narratively compelling album yet. More than just a collection of eighties-nostalgia single bait, Dawn FM is a concept album that picks up on a multi-year meta narrative. Abel Tesfaye, seemingly killed off his character at the end of his last album, After Hours. Getting caught up in the “Blinding Lights” of fame and excess, the narrator ends up overdosing in the back of an ambulance. On the final song “Until I Bleed Out” he sings “I can’t move, I’m so paralyzed.” Dawn FM picks up where After Hours left off. The album opens with pastoral winds and bird sounds, with The Weeknd driving down the road searching for a light at the end of a tunnel. His radio is turned to a fictional radio station: 103.5 Dawn FM hosted by The Weeknd’s real life neighbor, the actor Jim Carrey. Channeled through the Vaporwave inspired production of Oneohtrixpoint Never, Dawn FM is the sound of purgatory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switch on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Nate, do you trust me? Whoa. The fact that I'm taking so long to answer this should be a cause for good. No, no, I trust you implicitly.

I trust you more than most people I know. Yes is the answer. I trust you. Let's test this. Okay. I want you to close your eyes. Okay. Why don't you just summon your earliest musical memory, something that you go back to frequently?

Okay, yeah. What is it? It's a folk music workshop in the cat skills with my mom and singing the song, The Cat Came Back the very next day. I think I'm like six or seven. I'm running around a farm with a bunch of hippies and making music and listening to stories. and it's heaven. Okay, great. What I want you to do is look closer at the background of that memory.

It's a little blurry. There's a house. There's some mountains. It might be fall. Yeah, I don't know. So is this a memory? Or is this a memory of the story that you have told yourself throughout your entire life? I mean, I'm not a psychologist, Charlie, but I would say it's a memory.

colored by everything that's happened to me since, and I've probably gone and rewritten it to some degree, I would think, yeah. This is the wild thing, right? The unreliability of memory. We need it so much because it's comforting. But when we zoom into the details, they become blurry. Right. And that's exactly the feeling you get when you listen to this new album by the weekend called

Dawn FM. Take my breath. I think this is the weekend's most ambitious and creative album yet with some of the best musical payoffs. We've got collaborators like Max Martin, Calvin Harris, Swedish House Mafia, the Beach Boys Bruce Johnson, Tyler the creator, Lil Wayne, his neighbor Jim Carrey, the actor Jim Carrey. And importantly, the avant-garde electronic producer, One Oh No Tricks Pointe. Never. And it's way more than a 80s nostalgia album that a lot of critics are calling it. This is an album that works on a lot of levels.

It's a pop record. It's got singles about love and heartbreak, but it's also part of this multi-year series of concept albums that require some deeper investigation. Don FM has this ghastly aura. And we're going to peer into its nooks and crannies. And once you think you know it, the meaning, just like your memory, Nate, is. is going to slip away and you're going to be haunted by this record. Okay, I'm deeply intrigued. That was a strong pitch.

I like what we just listened to. And this is cool timing because I remember right about a year ago, we were listening to the weekend's last album after hours. And you were breaking down something I didn't realize, which was that this wasn't just a record with a bunch of hits. This was a narrative. And it was even bigger than a record. It was like his live performances, his music videos.

This was this like multimedia, multi-sensory kind of creative act. And so I feel like we're getting another one of those with this new album. So maybe to help fill people in and refresh our memory, we can do a little segment called previously on The Weekend. Like previously on Lost, but with The Weekend, I'm into it. Okay. So as a refresher, The Weekend is Abel Tesfay, singer from Toronto. who has this very melancholic R&B, who has been producing music for over a decade, but probably first gained mainstream attention for his contribution to the 50 Shades of Grey soundtrack.

His single earned it. Came out in 2014. Weekend partners up with mega producer Max Martin to put out one of the biggest hits of 2015. I Can't Feel My Face, a dance floor anthem about the substances used on the dance floor. Then in 2018, he puts out the record Starboy. It is a send-up of celebrity identity. He collaborates with folks like daft punk with lyrical fixations about drugs, sex, and fame. He's really one of the strangest pop stars because his music is fundamentally dark and pretty twisted

and yet breaks through and consistently makes these mega hits. But in his personal life, things are a mess. Sure, he's dating famous celebrities and models, but he's got substance issues. As much as he's ascending in celebrity culture, he's sort of crumbling on the inside. And that story turns into the hit record After Hours, which we spoke about a year ago. And it becomes a stand-in as sort of the perfect pandemic record. It's a concept album about empty. and feeling alone and loss.

His voice sounds ghostly and hollow. He's totally alone. It's cavernous. And that album produces the retro 80s, massive smash, blinding lights. Let us not forget. Nay. This is the weekend's thing, right?

He can have an album with some, dark and challenging messages on it, but there's going to be a hit song, which in itself is probably revealing something that we aren't paying close enough attention to. And he shows us because over a year, he creates this meta-narrative where he visually transforms from this pop star into a sort of washed-up lounge singer in different music videos. He becomes progressively sort of older, and he has botched plastic surgery as a, as a, as this character of the weekend. And it culminates in a enormous performance at the Super Bowl,

which to me is wild because I think this idea of his sort of Gothic R&B has sort of tricked us into accepting music, which is fundamentally, really emotionally difficult. And we're just instead digging 80s retro nostalgic feelings and dancing to the intro of, blinding lights on TikTok, which helped propel it to number one on the billboard. But underneath it, blinding lights is not about our desire to be in the big city, our

sort of nostalgia for sounds from the 80s. It's not even about the emptiness of lockdown when it really sort of broke through cultural consciousness. The song is actually about a fictitious overdose, and the blinding lights are the lights of an ambulance.

By the end of the album after hours, we're left thinking that the character, the weekend, has passed on. It's almost like Abel Tesfay has chosen to kill off the character the weekend. And that brings us to Don FM, this latest record, because it's a continuation of where we left off. I hear the album is split into sort of two parts. a kind of rebirth moment and this weird

psychedelic escape into a nostalgic FM radio land. Ah, okay. We begin in this sort of pastoral place with weird electronic bird sounds and melaton winds. The metallicy landscape quality of it feels like a nod to Michael Jackson, his song, Dirty Diana.

And lyrically, we're kind of in this in-between. Sort of a paradoxical lyric. Because after the light, is it dark? Is it dark all alone? Is this a rebirth moment? Is it happy and pastoral? Or is it darkening? Is this after the after hours?

Well, I feel like the lyrics have some ambiguity, but the music seems pretty clear. That is a powerful and rare. major key cadence resolution. Yes, which I thought would be a nice little moment for a classical master segment. Are we going to talk about the Pickardy Third? We are going to talk about the Pickertie Third. What is the Pickertie Third? Ah, the Pickety Third.

Let's just take someone like Bach, say his prelude and fugue in C minor. Ah, Johann Sebastian. Exactly. Okay. So this is a nice example. because we start in a minor key. You can hear it very clearly. It's kind of dark and melancholy.

And you would expect this piece to end in the same C minor key that it started on, but instead as we slowly wind down to the final resolution of the C minor prelude, we actually end on a C major chord. And I would say like 99% of compositions from the Baroque, period ended with this pickerty third.

And I think it was mainly just because composers didn't want to end on like a dark minor note. They're like, you know, even though this entire piece has been in a minor key, let's end it with a major chord. And we can all leave on this note of like positivity and brightness. Totally. And it's exactly what the weekend does, right? Because his song, Don FM is in the key here of A minor. But then it walks through some chords.

C, F, G. You think he go back to A minor, but no, he goes to A major. The Pickertie third. Mm. And what you're saying is that that is giving us some information. That Pickertie third is saying something to you. Yeah. Johann Sebastian Tesfei is telling us that even though he's alone, there's some hope.

So it makes me think with the lyric saying one thing, maybe the music saying another thing, I want to know where are we? And luckily, the weekend has given us a clue. Here's what he said about Dawn FM. Picture the album being like the listener is dead. And they're stuck in this purgatory state, which I always imagine would be like being stuck in traffic waiting to reach the light at the end of the tunnel.

And while you're stuck in traffic, they got a radio station playing in the car with a radio host guiding you to the light and helping you transition to the other side. So it could feel celebratory, it could feel bleak, however you want it to feel. But that's what the Dawn is for me. Cool. And that radio host is Ace Ventura Pet Detective.

Jim Carrey. Jim Carrey. You are now listening to 103.5 Dawn FM. Just relax and enjoy another hour of commercial free music on 103.5 Don FM. What? Amazing. Incredible. Incredible. It's so cinematic. I'm totally immersed. Right. I feel like I am in a car listening to an FM radio station that Jim Carrey happens to be the DJ of. It's got its own jingle.

Yeah. And I think what we need to do here is move past this bizarre, purgatory introduction. Let's step on the gas, go to the next track called gasoline. It starts with the voice we've never heard before. It's why they are my time again. I've so. A very different kind of weekend. It's not his falsetto we expect. We maybe have an 80s nod to like The Cure.

Yeah. It reminds me of a song like Just Like Heaven, which is maybe fitting given the purgatory theme. And the lyrics of gasoline have a sort of waking up feel similar to Just Like Heaven. Like they're in between speaking. and singing. Yeah.

It's 5 a.m. I'm high again and you can see that I'm in pain. I've fallen into a reptilus. I want you because we're both. But it's like dissociated, man. The production has these chip monkey voices and weird textures. It's very unsettling. Which is maybe appropriate because I think it's picking up the narrative from after hours. about the story of the overdose,

and he's coming out of a dissociative space being helped by a lover. We have the voice of the weekend that we know. The character of the weekend is with some sort of lover who's there to help him. He knows he's going to be okay. He's going to get through that bad night. And yet, we're just at the very beginning here,

and the album becomes even more psychedelic and dissociative. On the song, On the mushroom tea, And cross the restless sea, release your hope to escape reality. On the song, How Do I Make You Love Me? He's literally going into an altered state,

and the music takes a turn for the worse into this 80s-inspired bad trip. That is not what I would want to hear if I had drank that mushroom tea. We're moving back and forth between the darkness and the light trying to figure out, where are we?

Maybe he gives us a little bit of an answer on the next song, Sacrifice. That's a jam. I really like that. Isn't that his trick, right? It's like maybe there's some larger meta-narrative about how life is still worth living, but you can't help but enjoy that sort of like Van Halen-style riff

against a disco beat and his Michael Jackson-style vocal that is, yeah, it just makes you want to groove. He has such a distinctive way of pronouncing the vowel I, It's like, I sacrifice. I love it. Anyway, I love it. It's a curious observation, but I think appropriate because he really is playing with character here. We've gone into the psychedelic realm, the associative space.

We're meeting lovers. We've definitely moved beyond the characters from the last record. And yet things are about to get a whole lot stranger because we have not. made it to the end of that tunnel. We have not made it to the light. We're going to have to get there in the second half of this episode. Okay, so we're back. Do you remember where we are, Nate? Yeah, we're in purgatory. Jim Carrey is narrating our voyage into the next realm, whether it be light or dark. And I think we're kind of at this moment we're about to find out where we're headed.

Are you sure that's where we are? Can you be sure? Oh, I don't know. We're back to my unreliable memory. I suppose the answer lies within us, Charlie. Or within the music? The weekend breaks up the Alamos. here with a little interlude by one of his great heroes, Quincy Jones, the producer of everything from Duke Ellington to, of course, Michael Jackson. Quincy tells this story of the challenges that he had growing up. And at the very end of his narration, he has this meaningful insight

about the role of memory. But it was all so totally subconscious. Looking back as a bitch, isn't it? He ends with this very sort of evil maniacal laugh. And we're sent into this new musical realm, which for me is part to the world of FM radio. This is the Dawn FM. We enter into the song Out of Time. This easy listening vibe. Kind of like a Quincy Jones produced track.

Like it makes me think of the song, Human Nature. It's got similar guitar plucks and sense. But you know what's really weird about this, Nate, is that human nature, which came out in 1983, sounds more contemporary with more sheen than the weekends kind of nod to it out of time. Like, listen to Out of Time one more time and what are you catching? Right. There's some almost like static in the background. Like listening to like a cassette tape that someone recorded of a radio broadcast that's got some artifacts. acting on it. Yeah, it sounds like we're listening to a radio station.

That's the point here. I think that's a very important and bizarre creative choice. Like, has anyone ever produced an album that is made to be a major pop hit and make it sound worse like it's coming out of an older technology? And then voiceover it with actor Jim Carrey again? I think we both know the answer to that is a resounding no. Don't you dear touch that dial? Because like the song says, you are out of time. You're almost there, but don't panic.

There's still more music to come before you're completely engulfed in the blissful embrace of that little light you see in the distance. Right, we've moved from After Hours' last album to now Jim Carrey is selling us the afterlife, this commoditized identity for sale that is going to lead you to a transition state beyond. it feels like we're not just talking about life and death. We're talking about consumerism. We're talking about celebrities. We're talking about everything that we're constantly being sold to do. And it makes me think of like, what are we supposed to make of all of this? And for me, the biggest clue of what are all these sounds?

Why the FM thing? Why this dark narrative that references 80s consumer culture and life and death and tunnel vision and dissociation comes from. the people that the weekend is collaborating with. In particular, the producer, Oneotrix Point Never. Which is fascinating because here's a producer whose name references a radio station. Like, it's just all coming full circle.

Tell me more about Oneotrix, who I initially thought was Oneotrix, but now I know better. What's his role here? So Oneotrix Point Never is the producer name of Daniel Lopiton. He takes his name from the Boston radio station Magic 106.7.

It's kind of a joke about it. He's a sort of avant-garde electronic musician who had worked on the album After Hours. The weekend has collaborated with him on other records. He music directed the Super Bowl. And it's kind of strange to me because he comes from this super niche

genre of electronic music that goes by many names and kind of died almost like a decade ago. You familiar with the world of hauntology, hypnagogic pop, chill wave, vapor wave? Uh, God bless you. What?

Okay, this is kind of like an impossible history to tell because these are a series of genres that are critical of and evasive of the idea of origins themselves because they're kind of this like world of art music. But in order to really get Don FM, I think we have to understand this sub-niche electronic music world beginning with hauntology. Mm. Of course. Hauntology. What on earth is that? It's a portmanteau made up by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida of the words haunt and ontology. And it's this loose idea of how the specters of the past are more, our present culture, misremembering and refracting the past through the lens of the present.

It's kind of like the memory that you had. It's like there's a ghost of the idea of Nate when he was a kid, which is a story that you tell yourself as a musician, and you don't know. how much is the original memory versus what is the present idea of that memory. Right. Whoa. Okay. Interesting. And it's a world of music that takes off in Britain in the 2000s connected to the record

label Ghostbox and artists like Burial, who uses found sounds to evoke cityscapes and nostalgic memory. This song Archangel has these off-kilter beats and gritty samples of noise in video games. Oh, did you? Cool. Wow. Yeah, and it's a sound that the weekend is clearly inspired by, I think we can hear versions of a burial-like track on the weekend's

hardest to love off of after hours. Got the off-kiltry drums. You're crying out behind the smiles. And I can see right through the light. Got the off-kiltery drums. it's got some noise in the background, very cavernous. The next genre that we have to talk about is hypnagogic pop, sometimes called Chill Wave. Okay, that'd begrudgingly accept.

A bunch of American artists inspired by artists like Burial and those weird found sounds and sampling, nostalgic style of production. Make this kind of music that the critic David Keenan from Wairobi, magazine called pop music refracted through memory of a memory. You can hear it on an artist like Ariel Pink's song, Trepanated Earth. Lo-fi, it's psychedelic. It sounds kind of like music coming out of a radio, resampled, twisted, and converted. Working in the same genre is the artist James Ferreira, who adds sort of new-age soundscapes and really cheesy sounds, like the worst sounds of the 80s, but turns them into something beautiful.

I love that. It's at once kind of bright and happy, but there's also kind of something dark and sinister lurking around the corners of it. It's that refraction effect that the critic was talking about. Yeah, you're onto something. This is what the genre is getting at. The music critic and friend of the pod, Simon Reynolds, says that hypnagogic is the term for a state between being awake and falling asleep. I'm definitely hearing how this musical philosophy can be heard on Dawn FM. But then there was one more iteration you were talking about. Yeah.

Vaporwave. That brings us to vapor wave. Because a bunch of musicians are inspired by this world of Beryl's hauntological pop, Ariel Pinks and James Frero's hypnagogic pop slash sometimes called Chill Wave also. and make this very kind of cynical, ironic, but artful music called Vaporwave that is kind of like the intellectual Marxist version of hypnagogic pop that uses old commercial sounds of the 80s,

like sometimes even like Kmart shopping musac, as well as samples of classic 80s records, but way reinterpreted. Which brings us to One Otricks Point Never, whose song knows, Nobody here, I think perfectly encapsulates the sound of Averwave. Hmm. The song is a sample of The Lady in Red.

Lady. By taking just that moment, nobody here, he's sort of revealing the false sheen and the gritty underbelly of 80s consumer culture. It sounds like the most mall music ever, but as if nobody's in the mall, just the music playing by itself, saying, nobody here, nobody here, nobody here. Dark eerie. I know, right? Dawn FM.

Kind of the unsettling thing about the world of Vaporwave is that it becomes quickly an internet meme that explodes and dies off as fast as it rises. All of a sudden people are like, okay, this is an internet thing, it's over, this interesting musical commentary on consumer culture, we get it, done, you're done, this is over. Yeah. And then the weekend is like a decade later, let's go back and revive this aesthetic. He's taking these commercial sounds. He's working with 10 Otrick's Point Never, formerly a vaporwave producer. And they're updating that vibe, making a very commercial pop record referencing FM radio. He's even using kind of the methods of vaporwave sort of sampling and nodding to the music of the era.

Like you can hear it on a song like Take My Breath. Remind you of anything? It reminds me of that Kmart supermarket sample vapor wave sound. It also reminds me of Stevie Nix Edge of 17 mashed up with Daff Punk's defunct. And if you put them both together. Well, it's like if you were walking through a supermarket and they were playing Stevie Nix and daft punk and you recorded it onto a a crappy cassette player and then played it back. That would be that song.

Very cool. And it's not just like, okay, he's making an homage to these songs that he likes. I think these are important references because Edge of 17 is just like a super FM radio hit. And so using those sort of muted guitar sounds puts our memory right into that place. But then Daft Punk's defunct is kind of like a reference of a reference because Daft Punk are making. this style of French house music, which is kind of referencing earlier disco and house music stuff. And so you have this sort of a mashup of like a reference plus a reference of a reference degraded into this tape sound.

It's like the unreliability of memory. It's like being lost in purgatory, not knowing what we're hearing, not trusting what we're hearing, not sure exactly where we are. Intuitively, it just seems right to me that when you reach the afterlife, Stevie Nix and Daft Punk are waiting for you. That checks out. So where does that leave us? Like how does this grand experiment all come together?

It ends in this really weird sort of Dr. Sousian like poem pondering the worlds of life, death, heaven, purgatory hell. The song Phantom Regret is set against a similar A minor chord progression, looping us full circle to the opening track, Don FM. And we're given the most bizarre end. by our narrator. God knows life is chaos, but he made one thing true.

Unwind your mind between your... We love wondering, is he dead or alive? Is it a hallucination, what was this? And we're just being sent by Jim Carrey into the divine boogaloo. The divine boogaloo. I mean, this is not just a narration. This is a poem.

This is like an epic, quasi-religious outro here. And the conclusion, at least to me, seems to be life, death, heaven, hell. The future is uncertain, but you have to remember to dance through it. And that's like the weekend's whole career, too, right? Exactly.

That's the thing. He's the most unusual pop star. He's like giving us the darkest music and the most twisted messages buried into pop songs that are often at their core, frankly, like vague love songs with a bunch of nostalgic references for FM radio, 80 sounds. But in there we have this narrative critiquing consumer culture and celebrity commodification and identity and his own rejection of that world. It's multi-leveled.

It is not a snake eating its tail. It feels like it's a ghost of a ghost, of a ghost of a ghost of a kind of music that just won't stop haunting you. And it'll be number one for the next six years. Definitely. Yeah. Switched on Pop is produced by Nate Sloan, me, Charlie Harding. We're edited by Jolia Myers,

Farland, engineered by Brandon McFarland, illustrations by Harris Godlead, community management by Abby Barr. Our executive producers are Nashok, Karwa, and Hannah Rosen. We're a member of the Box Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture. You can find more episodes anywhere

you listen to podcasts, and our website, Switchedonpop.com. Hit us up on Twitter, Instagram, at Switch on Pop. Let us know what you think of the weekend's latest and your favorite ontology, hypnagogic pop vaporwave tracks. I'm particularly interested to hear what people think about the song. Don't break my heart because I hear some very specific references in there. I want to hear what other folks are hearing. Okay, gauntlet thrown.

We'll be back again next Tuesday. And until then, thanks for listening.