![]() ![]() People love musical performances – or art, more generally – because it’s pleasurable to soak in the talented work of other people. The racial dynamics of the video are hard to miss: The women seem to exoticize Blackness and reduce the body parts of two Black men to objects that give them pleasure. Two wealthy white women with bandaged heads find his severed head and swoon over it, before deciding to murder a Black male stripper so they can attach The Weeknd’s head onto that muscular body. ![]() In his most violent music video to date – for the song “ Too Late” – the themes of plastic surgery and fandom collide. It’s more a commentary on how his celebrity status makes him vulnerable to a prying gaze at all times. It’s not that he fears his fans will hurt him. In both cases, he seems to be comparing fandom to an unsettling loss of privacy, one where his very safety is at stake. In all the videos, people are constantly watching him, whether it’s the crowd of stiff, masked fans in the “ Save Your Tears” music video or the frantic crowd reaching out to grab him as he tries to escape at the end of “ Until I Bleed Out.” However, another key emerges in the videos from the “After Hours” album. Thompson, played by Johnny Depp, often hallucinates or spirals out of control. He’s noted that, when scripting his music videos for “After Hours,” he was inspired by the film “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” in which writer Hunter S. Initially, I’d assumed the bruises and bandages were a metaphor for The Weeknd’s struggle with drug addiction, a topic he has long explored in his music. The Weeknd/YouTubeĪs an anthropologist who has been analyzing the societal implications of plastic surgery for over 15 years, I was struck by The Weeknd’s use of this medical practice. In The Weeknd’s music video for ‘Save Your Tears,’ the bandages come off, revealing a face changed by faux plastic surgery. ![]()
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