#Hit me harder how deep is your love song movie
He starts out the movie with a go-nowhere job by the time it ends, he doesn’t even have that. He doesn’t like his friends much, and they don’t like him much either. His parents don’t understand him, and he doesn’t understand them. Brooklyn teenager Tony Manero - John Travolta, who will appear in this column pretty soon - is an electric dancer, a joy to watch, but his life is a mess. And he boasts about a movie-star girlfriend on “Here We Go … Again.In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.Īs a movie, Saturday Night Fever is one hell of a downer. “I Heard You’re Married” - which features a crisp, dexterous guest verse from Lil Wayne (“If I ain’t your husband I can’t be your hybrid”) - is about what happens when your old weapons are turned against you: “Your number in my phone I’m gon’ delete it/Girl, I’m way too grown for that deceiving.” “Is There Someone Else?” is a remarkably chill song about being a reformed cad.
Though there are moments - like “Sacrifice” (“The ice inside my veins will never bleed”) and “Gasoline” - that recall the louche desperation of his early albums, he’s more often the victim.
If anything has changed for Tesfaye, it’s his relationship to dysfunction. (There are echoes of Jones’s 1981 album “The Dude” here as well.) Jones is an obvious antecedent for Tesfaye, who aspires to be an orchestrator as much as a singer and songwriter. What does hit harder is “A Tale by Quincy,” in which the influential producer and mogul Quincy Jones relates a story about learning to grow up rough. The album is threaded with interstitials from a fictional radio station, mainly voiced by Jim Carrey - amusing but not particularly meaningful. Done wrong, it can come off as icy and algorithmic. There’s a reason no one is currently trying to emulate what Tesfaye is achieving - it requires the meticulousness of an engineer, the ego of a superstar and the scars of the deeply wounded. On “Dawn FM,” Tesfaye occasionally edges up against simu-funk, like on “Sacrifice,” which samples Alicia Myers’s dance-liberation thumper “I Want to Thank You.” And “Here We Go … Again,” which has the faintest mist of “How Deep Is Your Love” by the Bee Gees, is the album’s weakest and least characteristic moment, a lyrical jolt into the deeply specific present for a performer who is trying to make music that exists outside of time. “How Do I Make You Love Me?” is a super-sweet version of the Michael Jackson-esque pop Tesfaye has been reaching for, as is the majestic “Take My Breath.” These songs, which appear back to back early on the album, are the best arguments for Tesfaye’s vision, and crucially, both are songs where Martin is there as an amplifying force. This is breakdancing music, touching on everything from Afrika Bambaataa’s seminal “Planet Rock” to Man Parrish and Mantronix to the first Force M.D.s album to the tuneful Los Angeles proto-rap of Egyptian Lover and World Class Wreckin’ Cru to Maurice Starr and Arthur Baker’s early work with New Edition. On “Dawn FM,” they land squarely in the window between 19, when New York’s emergent hip-hop production was coalescing into the electro that was streaking its way into pop. Tesfaye pulls Lopatin closer to blunt rhythm while allowing himself to get absorbed in the producer’s endless shimmers. Together, they make work that is mesmeric, both for its quality and its seamlessness. But Tesfaye’s true consigliere is Daniel Lopatin (a.k.a Oneohtrix Point Never), who began his career as a channeler of interstellar rumble but evolved into a soundtracker for space disco. What’s striking is the path he’s chosen to get there - yes, Martin is here, as are Oscar Holter and Swedish House Mafia. Tesfaye, 31, is interested in world-building, and he remains obscure - at this point, evolving past strategic anonymity into full-scale character work - hiding behind hits. He has succeeded by remaining, even at peak saturation, enigmatic.
And as he’s become one of the biggest pop stars on the planet, this has required both tremendous skill and a not insignificant amount of faith - in an era of microtargeting and niches that explode into ubiquity, he is choosing a far less assured top-down path. Since the Weeknd, born Abel Tesfaye, first arrived in 2011 with a trio of dank, sleazy mixtapes that radically reconstructed R&B, he has steadfastly, maybe even stubbornly, committed to thinking of his albums as discrete eras with evolving ideologies.
mix, it is, as with so many things that he has made in the last decade, an all-or-nothing proposition. An uninterrupted set of iridescent megapop anthems blended like a D.J. There’s not a moment to breathe on the new album by the Weeknd, “Dawn FM” - no spaces for resolution and calm, no indications of a world outside of its borders.
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