These visuals borrowed from notable if obvious touchstones in films like Blade Runner, The Fog, Enter the Void, and the Joel Schumacher Batman films, contrasting bright city lights with a suffocating, smoky darkness. The robot choirs and dark cityscapes seen as “Call Out My Name” melted into “Starboy” brought into greater focus the feeling that the Weeknd makes music for unseen movies, soundtracks for the listener’s own personal spells of debauchery.
![i feel it coming the weeknd glamor i feel it coming the weeknd glamor](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tcWIbx6nDso/maxresdefault.jpg)
The Weeknd’s specialty is escapism, pulling you into a world grislier than your own, and in the introductory minutes of his performance, the seedy, cyberpunk landscapes conjured in his latest records seemed to cross over and touch the real world.
![i feel it coming the weeknd glamor i feel it coming the weeknd glamor](https://townsquare.media/site/625/files/2017/02/The-Weeknd-Daft-Punk-Performs-at-2017-Grammy-Awards.jpg)
Pressuring performers to pepper their music with overarching social messaging is how we end up with J-Lo screaming “Let’s Get Loud” at the presidential inauguration.
![i feel it coming the weeknd glamor i feel it coming the weeknd glamor](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ed/0e/42/ed0e42f00a77c6b8fcf6532bedf056cb.jpg)
To be fair, the Weeknd isn’t American, nor has he mixed politics with his music. The halftime show - the whole night, really - felt piped in from a timeline where nothing ever went wrong. The show delivered a vivid array of elaborate, expensive set pieces that hit the necessary notes for a halftime gig - no matter who you get as talent, you’re getting snazzy lighting rigs, fireworks, and a massive dance routine on the field - and never missed a mark but also never really tapped into the gravity of the reality that this is probably the only live arena show most Americans have seen in a year, and it will most likely be the last that any of us will catch again until sometime next year. The grit from those early days was lost amid the Hollywood glamour of the display, an interesting choice for an artist whose last album spoke profoundly to a desire to leave all that behind. And on Sunday night, Tesfaye took the stage for the Super Bowl LV halftime show a decade after the early rumblings about the Toronto singer making perfect, cherubic filth. He put together an accomplished live show. Tesfaye sought out pop and dance music veterans like Daft Punk and Max Martin and duetted with Ed Sheeran and Ariana Grande. In the intervening years, Tesfaye has evolved from an invisible man into a ubiquitous one, careful pivot by careful pivot, logging increasingly successful hits increasingly removed from the chunky, post-genre soup of his early mixtapes. Without glossy videos or a lively social-media presence - this in the days before Instagram caught on - Abel lingered in your head like stifled urges. The Weeknd turned R&B on its head without showing his face. In March 2011, the Weeknd released House of Balloons, a mixtape sequenced like a journey through the highs, lows, and lonesome aftereffects of a wild night out, setting the scene by advising the listener in the first song that “You’ll wanna be high for this,” then wandering through strip clubs, parties, and after parties to the inevitable anxieties and pangs of withdrawal that surface as you sweat everything out the next day. The singer, an East Toronto native and recent college dropout named Abel Tesfaye, gave voice to our darkest late-night moods, to the allure of pushing a body past its limit in pursuit of pleasures both psychedelic and carnal. They were studies in stark contrasts: “Loft Music” floated gossamer samples of Brooklyn indie rockers Beach House over trap drums, and “What You Need” sunk a sample of Aaliyah’s voice under gauzy synths, her whisper bubbling up through the watery mix like a lover emerging from a warm bath, all of this in service to an angelic voice uttering the most devilish advances. Ten winters ago, a trove of snaking, lascivious R&B tracks appeared seemingly out of thin air, credited to someone or thing called the Weeknd.
![i feel it coming the weeknd glamor i feel it coming the weeknd glamor](https://y101fm.com/images/articleimages/112016/new-music-britney-spears-bruno-mars-the-weeknd-banner.jpg)
From stem to stern, it was a night of keeping up appearances, a simulation of normalcy in a year where normal doesn’t seem possible.