The Weeknd: "The Birds Part 1"

Nearly every Weeknd track functions as a paean to throbbing hedonism that would turn out stillborn and joyless in the hands of more scrupulous artists, those less innately at ease with debauch. American music consumers are versed in the language of gaudy opulence; we have a high tolerance for shows of excess, even in a recession, and a dialed-in bullshit meter attuned to expose those whose orgiastic boasting doesn’t ring true.

“I bet that guy’s never bathed with Frieda Pinto in a heated mixture of Cristal and calf’s milk even once,” we’ll say, turning the channel.

And that’s why the internets are abuzz with Weeknd tracks, posted on blogs, linked to Facebook pages…Tweeted. We love the Weeknd, in a word, because the Weeknd comes correct. Often unsettlingly so.

And so, Glow Nation, I give you “The Birds Part 1.” Doc McKinney and Illangelo’s production, per usual, is both heavy and lush. The beat is an adamant cadence. The overall texture is rousing and more than a little bit grimy. This is the dodgy cousin of 808s and Heartbreak. The one that shows up to Sunday dinner with its hair mussed, smelling damp and stale, and still bleeding a bit from the night before. This is 808s and FuckStink.

Wielding charisma as a weapon is not a new mechanic of hip-hop braggadocio, but few have wielded it with such a perfect balance of explicitness and equanimity. “Don’t make me make you fall in love,” taunts Abel Tesfaye; an mocking and ineffective warning to the lover that ends up decimated in “The Birds Part 2.” The chorus shoves past the nodes of the brain that tingle with titillation and thuds into the deeper, darker grey matter where cruelty and eroticism mix in disturbing ways that we’ve convinced ourselves never to think about.

Like “Glass Table Girls” before it, “The Birds Part 1” is a song that you may evoke twinges of guilt when you think about how much you love it. But that won’t matter. You’ll thump it on repeat through your car speakers anyway, because you’re not listening to Tesfaye’s warnings either. You’ve made him make you fall in love, and you may regret it.