YMMV / The Weeknd

• And You Thought It Would Fail: The runaway success of "Earned It" on radio was completely unexpected, as it was rather unlike anything heard on pop radio. Additionally, the song was on the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack and looked like it would be dubiously overshadowed by another cut from the soundtrack, the cleaner and more radio-friendly "Love Me Like You Do" by the much more established Ellie Goulding. The Weeknd's song wound up being the only one with an Oscar nomination between the two.
• Award Snub: Most everyone with even a passing interest in him come The New '20s, from fans to pop music nerds to outsiders, was shocked when the 2021 Grammy nominations were announced and Abel was completely shut out, even though 2020 was a major year for him, with After Hours becoming a huge critical and commercial success and "Blinding Lights" becoming arguably the single biggest song of the year. Because of this, he has completely excluded his future label releases from being submitted for Grammy consideration entirely.
• Awesome Music:
  • "House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls", "High for This", "Wicked Games", "Lonely Star", "The Birds Part 1 and 2", "XO/The Host", "Montreal", "Kiss Land", "Pretty", his remix of "Drunk In Love", "Often", "King of the Fall", "Earned It", "In the Night", "The Hills", "Angel" and "Can't Feel My Face".
  • "Life of the Party," which is probably the closest The Weeknd has come to making outright industrial music.
  • "I'm in love with something bigger than love, you believe in something stronger than trust: Wanderlust, Wanderlust..."
  • "I'm a motherfuckin' starboy!"
  • "Oooooh, I'm blinded by the lights..."
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: One Reddit user believes that all his music videos since "Rolling Stone" are a depiction of a man descending into darkness and making a Deal with the Devil.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: It's The Weeknd, not "The Weekend"! And he's a singer, not a band! (Both of those attributes can be assigned to the Canadian band The Weekend, whose pre-existence at the time of Abel starting out is what forced the name alteration.)
• First Installment Wins: House of Balloons has gotten the most critical acclaim of everything he's released. There are a few factors: the universally praised songwriting ("High for This" and "Wicked Games" still get big receptions at gigs), the confidence of the atmosphere and general aesthetic, its role in establishing alternative R&B as a genre along with Frank Ocean, plus the deliberate mystery cultivated around it — when it first came out, people assumed The Weeknd was a band, or even Drake's producer Noah "40" Shebib.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Bruno Mars. Both artists are huge fans of both Michael Jackson and The '80s in general, and both show this in their music. However, because Bruno pursues a lighter, flamboyant style of music whereas The Weeknd goes for a darker, somber style, many believe that it's easy to like both artists as they take 80's appreciation in different directions without stepping on each other's toes. Additionally, Abel's song "Can't Feel My Face" is sometimes noted to sound quite similar to Bruno's throwback style. Fans of both often wish they could make a collaborative track.
• Funny Moments:
  • During a live performance for Vevo, he performed "Starboy". At first, he sang the clean version of the song ("main main out of your league" instead of "main bitch"), but after he gave the mic to the crowd, who sang the normal version ("side bitch out of your league"), he decided to roll with it.
  • "Here We Go Again" on Dawn FM has some fun with the sound design; when Abel sings the lyric "And you didn't expect to fall for me once you got this dick", it's followed by loud cheering and applause.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Quite a few Daft Punk fans only ended up listening to Starboy because of the duo's contributions to both the title song and the album's closer "I Feel It Coming". Considering that it would be the last two songs they would ever publicly release before breaking up in 2021, it's not entirely unjustified.
• Harsher in Hindsight: His song "Blinding Lights" features the line "I look around and Sin City's cold and empty". Just four months after its release, Las Vegas, along with the rest of Nevada, would be locked down due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
• He Really Can Act: Not that there was really any doubt before, but Jim Carrey's performance as the DJ on Dawn FM was met with immediate acclaim, with his spoken word coda "Phantom Regret by Jim" being considered one of the best parts of the album.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: His cameo on American Dad! features him revealing that he is a virgin and uses his virgin powers to win Grammys. Fans jokingly attribute his Award Snub mentioned above to him losing his virginity in a recording studio while recording "Escape from L.A.", where he sings "We had sex in the studio..."
• I Am Not Shazam: An odd case where, in his early days, many people thought The Weeknd was a band.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • His face in the "Save Your Tears" music video caused fans to compare him to Handsome Squidward, The Mask, The Joker or even the late Bogdanoff twins.
  • Him going around in the bright, narrow, mirrors-covered hall under the stage in the Super Bowl LV halftime show quickly spawned memes of him both running around frantically with a Shaky Cam and holding the camera incredibly close to his face like a selfie cam.
• Misaimed Fandom: As with most music that features copious drug abuse and an Unreliable Narrator, there's a certain subset of the fandom that takes the whole thing at face value. Abel himself lampshades this in "Reminder", talking about how he was nominated for a Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Award for "Can't Feel My Face" — a song about cocaine!
  I just won a new award for a kids show
  Talking 'bout a face numbing off a bag of blow
  I'm like: "Goddamn, bitch, I am not a teen choice"
  "Goddamn, bitch, I am not a bleach boy"
• One-Scene Wonder: The mysterious appearance of Daft Punk in The Stinger of the video for "I Feel It Coming" was one of the most talked-about things of said video, with many demanding to know what it means from them.
• Refrain from Assuming:
  • "The Hills" is not called "Half Past Five", "Feel Me" or "The Real Me".
  • "Party Monster", as a Non-Appearing Title, has most people assume it's called either "Don't Even Know Her Name" or "A Girl Who Gon Really Understand".
• Signature Song: For some time, it was "Can't Feel My Face" (with "Earned It", "The Hills", "Starboy" and "I Feel It Coming" not far behind), but "Blinding Lights" has likely usurped it, given it has the distinction of being seen by many as the Signature Song of 2020 itself, as it was the biggest hit song released before the COVID-19 Pandemic and remained near the top of the charts for the remainder of the year, even after other hit songs would see release.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • The industrial drums of "Belong to the World" got some attention for their close resemblance to the drums in Portishead's "Machine Gun", to the point that a bit of publicized legal drama ensued after Portishead's Geoff Barrow insisted the song used an unauthorized sample of their song. While the details of what unfolded afterward were a bit muddy, the consensus seems to be that "Belong to the World" was made using the "Machine Gun" drums, after which the Weeknd's management sent a letter requesting clearance of the sample, and following Barrow's refusal, the drums were recreated.
  • Some have accused "Secrets" off of Starboy as being a ripoff of "Talking in Your Sleep" by The Romantics. It doesn't help that Abel directly interpolates the original song's chorus for the chorus of his song.
  • "Blinding Lights" is basically Rod Stewart's "Young Turks" with the drum track from a-ha's "Take On Me".
  • In a less obvious case, the bassline for "Save Your Tears" sounds incredibly like the one in Post Malone's "Circles".
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: He is a perennial favorite of Nickelodeon’s Kids Choice Awards despite his work containing strong language, explicit sexual content, and pervasive themes of drug abuse. He even talks about this phenomenon in "Reminder".

---