Dawn Came Too Soon - an essay (Patreon)

I recently posted on Instagram about attending The Weeknd’s Friday night LA stop during the final leg of his After Hours Til Dawn Tour, mostly because he opened the show wearing a mask that was a clear reference to Lon Chaney’s mask from the 1925 adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera, and The Weeknd making a phantom reference was too perfect not to remark upon. Even as I was watching the concert (from a partially obstructed view no less) I was flirting with the idea of buying some tickets to the Saturday show the from someone selling last minute tickets at a discount (there are always some, that’s my pro-tip). By around 4:30 PM the next day I had talked myself into it, and talked my mom into coming with me.

She wasn’t very familiar with The Weeknd outside of what she’d heard on the Top 40 stations, and had only learned recently from me that The Weeknd was a “he” and not like a band or something. On the drive up to SoFi Stadium I gave her a quick Weeknd crash course, including the fact that the tour was meant to promote his new album Dawn FM, which I wasn’t wild about. It’s not that I have anything against the album, or even that I think it’s something he put out just to put out; it legitimately feels like a passion project. Mostly, I feel like the album would have benefited if he’d have waited. “I’m glad I got to see him on tour at least,” I said. “But mostly, I just wish he’d take a break.”

“But,” I added as we left for the concert, and my mom corroborates that I did indeed say this, “I’ve never met the guy, and I’m sure he knows what he’s doing.”

Having seen the show, I knew one didn’t need to be familiar with his catalog to enjoy it, so we hopped in my smart car and I hauled ass to Inglewood for the second time in 24 hours. My impulse-bought seats, while expensive, were probably less than I would have paid had I bought them the second they’d become available and were regardless much better than previous night’s. We hung out in the “SoFi Social Lounge” which was a restaurant and bar area reserved for our section (??? I think?), and then around 9:00 PM, the show started.

And then, about five minutes later, it ended.

The stadium was so loud I didn’t really notice that he’d lost his voice. I must have been singing along to the opener, “Alone Again,”, so I didn’t hear it when it dropped. But then, during “I Can’t Feel My Face,” he ran off stage for about a minute, then came back out on stage and said that he had lost his voice, and that he was very sorry, and he loved us all, but he couldn’t give us the show he wanted to give. Goodnight, everybody!

And then the house lights went up.

Reports of booing are overstated — a few people did, but most were too shocked and confused to boo. At first I didn’t believe him, and only later realized that his stated reason appeared to be 100% true, that there were audio recordings of the moment he lost his voice. That whole night I was trying to find the bright side – we did have some fun before and during the (very brief) show in the “SoFi Social Lounge.” I put the show on a credit card with money I really should not have been spending, and at least now I wouldn’t have to pay for my impulsivity as we were promised a refund. I had a much easier time that second night now that was familiar with the stadium and I knew there were nicer backstage areas to hang out in. We even got a “photo” with a computer superimposition of the LA Rams, our … Super Bowl champions? I forget if they won or not.

Pictured: us with X-Wing @Aliciousness and Hingle McCringleberry. And yes I told her to wear that shirt.

But all the same, I spent that night and the next couple of days feeling rotten. I felt bad that I had dragged my 71-year-old mother to Inglewood and made her walk a few miles over the course of a few hours for basically nothing. I felt rotten that I’d been so impulsive to throw down that money. But mostly, I was feeling rotten because I was worried about him. I wasn’t worried about The Weeknd, I was worried about Abel, and I felt guilty for having such intense feelings of worry in the first place. The guy is a 32-year-old gagillionaire dating a revolving door of supermodels, one of the most successful pop stars of the 21st century. Surely I can, well, save my tears for someone who actually needs them.

—

After Hours is a 2020 studio album by Abel Tesfaye, who goes by the stage name The Weeknd, and is his most successful album to date. It functions as a sort of negaverse response to one of my other favorite albums of the last ten years, 2016’s 24k Magic by Bruno Mars. Both focus on their relationships with women, but where 24k Magic just wants to buy you diamonds and make love to you, girl, After Hours is a breakup album, going through all of the different stages of a very bitter, very public breakup. Both rely heavily on Las Vegas, but where Bruno parties up in the executive suite of the Caesar’s Palace and rides a jetski through the Bellagio fountains (no, really), Abel gets wasted, licks literal toads and has a bad trip running through a deserted Fremont Street. Both deal with fame, but where 24k Magic revels in how much fun being rich and famous is, After Hours is a deconstruction of fame, an exploration of its destructive nature.

As much as After Hours deals with addiction to literal substances, it’s clear that fame is its own addictive substance, as several songs deal with how much being famous is harming him. I saw some people surprised that he didn’t perform “Escape From LA” during the LA show, when like… of course he didn’t. The song is not kind to LA:

This place will be the end of me

Take me out, LA

Take me out of LA

And of course a fan favorite line:

LA girls all look the same

It’s true, but then again, I live in Long Beach.

“Snowchild” is another somber reflection on fame and how it has changed his life, which I include because it feels particularly relevant now:

Going on tour is my vacation

Every month another accusation

Only thing I'm phobic of is failing

I was never blessed with any patience

Damn.

But my favorite song from After Hours is the song that leads into “Blinding Lights”, which is called “Faith.” His earlier catalog, well, I wouldn’t say it glorifies substance abuse but it certainly revels in it. In “Faith,” we get the following:

I've been sober for a year, now it's time for me

To go back to my old ways, don't you cry for me

Thought I'd be a better man, but I lied to me and to you

I take half a Xan' and I still stay awake

All my demons wanna pull me to my grave

I choose Vegas if they offer Heaven's gate

The “blinding lights” in the context of this song are accompanied by the sounds of sirens, as he sings, “I ended up in the back of a flashing car … the lights are blinding me.” 

After Hours and 24k Magic are stark contrasts with their portrayal of fame, but perhaps most significantly, both albums were the biggest hits of their respective careers, so much so that Bruno was starting to court some serious backlash after he won his eight hundredth Grammy for 24k Magic. In this respect, the major difference between these two albums were how their artists decided to follow them up, and in Bruno’s case the follow up was … nothing. He had a few small scale projects here and there, but for the next five years he didn’t release anything until reemerging not as Bruno Mars, materialistic craps-playing Bellagio fountain-skidooing superstar, but as one half of the 60’s soul pastiche duo Silk Sonic. Sharing the stage with the comparatively less famous Anderson.Paak not only lends him artistic cred but also demonstrates a level of humility – 24k Magic was just an era of Bruno Mars, but wasn’t who Bruno Mars was. Moreover, Bruno was willing to disappear for a bit, let people miss him.

Abel, conversely, was only too eager to keep the momentum going. By the time things were opening up enough again that tours were happening, Abel seemed to have moved on from After Hours, which on a personal level makes sense. That the album came out in March of 2020, just as everything was shutting down, feels like serendipity. Here everyone is as isolated as they’ve ever been in their lives, and along comes this album that is an absolute wail of pain, a perfect picture of bitterness, isolation, and the futile desire for things to go back to the way they were. But by the time he was ready to start touring, whatever demons he had meant to exorcize with After Hours were gone. He was ready to move on. He didn’t want to be the guy in the red jacket anymore.

As such, barely two years after the release of After Hours we got Dawn FM, which in tone is a steep departure from anything he had done before. He was (at least in presentation) in a different place. He was past the era of The Weeknd, breaker of hearts and doer of drugs. That was all a part of the oeuvre, of course, but he was in his 30’s now, so he wanted to evolve that image. If one thing After Hours makes clear it’s the awareness that if he keeps abusing substances as he had in his youth, it was going to kill him.

But many fans and the mainstream weren’t so eager to follow him in this new direction, but it wasn’t that the new direction was bad so much as, why now? When he released Dawn FM's first single, “Take My Breath”, “Save Your Tears” was still in the Top 10 and “Blinding Lights” was still in the Top 20. Do we need a new album when “Blinding Lights” had only just achieved its status as the most successful song of all time on the Billboard Hot 100 and was still in the Top 20? Why are we trying to introduce the next big thing when the last big thing, the biggest thing there has yet been, is still quite big?

But this was clearly what he wanted, and I think that eagerness to jump into the new era before the old was over was what led to the album underperforming. I don’t think the album was a failure (although response from the fandom was mixed), but I don’t think it pulled the numbers he wanted. A few weeks after the album’s release, my friend and music critic Todd in the Shadows observed that The Weeknd had multiple songs in the Top 20 that week, and none of them were from Dawn FM.

It’s hard to put a finger on the certain je ne c’est quoi that After Hours had that Dawn FM lacked. It certainly wasn’t a bad album, and featured some of the best production and vocals of his career. Really if anything I think it was simply that his fans and the mainstream weren’t ready to move on. The pandemic wasn’t really over. It was still after hours, dawn had not yet cracked. Maybe he was eager for the next phase, but we weren’t.

But I didn’t notice many of Abel’s fans seeing Dawn FM being the harbinger of him falling off so much as a creative era of his that didn’t hit for everyone – after all, he has had many eras, an incredibly prolific career for his relatively young age, and everyone has some albums of his they could take or leave (my hot take is I’m not a huge fan of Kissland or Thursday). Moreover, his career wasn’t hurting; he still had plenty of collaborations with the likes of Post Malone and Doja Cat that were doing huge numbers, he had that sold out stadium tour, he was producing and starring in a new HBO show—he's fine! He's fine.

My main takeaway, both from Dawn FM and from the bigger, better stadium tour meant to replace the After Hours tour, was that a lot of this was too much, too soon. Perhaps it is the aftermath of the 2008 crash that has encouraged this elevation of “the grind”, of constant, ceaseless work being a mark of virtue, especially in the arts. Our culture is one that has terms like "quiet quitting" that describe people who merely do the job they are being paid for rather than pushing themselves above and beyond expectation. It’s taken me the better part of a year to deprogram the idea that every activity I engage in, every movie I watch, every piece of media I pass fleetingly has to be tied in with some project that I might monetize later. That he did a stadium tour instead of an arena tour isn't what gives me pause, it's that he did it in the midst of the shit billion other projects and collaborations he has going on. Every article and interview written about him in the last few years praises his intense work ethic, his dedication to his craft, that he never seems to stop, but they never question the cost.

—

As I was walking back to my car the night before the canceled show as a part of the stream of humanity leaving SoFi Stadium, I passed a homeless man unconscious in the middle of the sidewalk. Hundreds of people must have moved past him like water around a rock, not even looking down, and I was about to be one of those people before I stopped to rouse him. I don’t mean to imply that I do this all the time–living in LA means that in order to get anywhere or get anything done, you have to turn a blind eye to most of the human misery that surrounds you, and you promise yourself that you’ll vote for the correct systemic change that will help remedy the homeless blah blah blah. It’s not that I always stop when I see a homeless guy passed out on the sidewalk, it was that hundreds of twenty-somethings dressed in club attire (LA girls all look the same) had already passed him by, and I found myself gripped by the dystopian horror of the situation. I got him to his feet, and he told me his name was Jeffrey, and that he needed some water or Gatorade. The nearest open bodega was at least a twenty minute walk, and he clearly wasn’t in walking condition. He then asked if I had any cash, and I said no; I only had my phone, ID and health insurance card. He then asked if I could call his mother, giving me her phone number and telling me she lived not far down the road on Century Blvd. I called, but it being almost midnight she didn’t answer, and it being a landline I couldn’t text. He told me there was nothing more I could or should do, and so I continued to my car. At any rate at least he was ambulatory again and no longer passed out on the sidewalk.

I brought the interaction up to my mom the following night on the drive home when talking about how, well, guilty I felt that I was so worried about the gagillionare dater-of-models and (former) doer-of-drugs; was it not a moral failing that I couldn’t muster up the same worry for Jeffrey? Why was I so worried about Abel when I knew that he would have the finest medical care money could buy, and would be crying into his pillows in that 20 million dollar house he sang about in After Hours that he never even lived in?

She responded that of course I would feel more for Abel than for Jeffrey Thomas. Jeffrey was a random guy on the street that I would never see again; Abel had created music that I had spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours listening to. Maybe I didn’t know him, but I knew his art and that art had resonated with me. I had paid hundreds of dollars to see that art live, and now that art had pushed his body too far, and he was devastated that he couldn’t give his fans the show they had all spent so much money and time to see. I was far from the only person worried about Abel that night in the same way one might worry about a friend. 

I kept using this term “parasocial relationship” to describe my distress – one that gained popularity in online circles a few years ago but has largely gone unexamined since. Speaking from experience, it is an uncomfortable reality to know that there are thousands if not millions of people who feel a certain way about you, positive or negative, and you will never even know who most of them are, let alone why they feel the way they do. But while I think it’s important that people need to understand how one-sided these relationships are, especially in the context of platforms like YouTube, Twitch and OnlyFans where the illusion of friendship is a part of the product, it’s also unrealistic to expect people to engage with content creators, from Twitch streamers all the way to The Weeknd, and not form some emotional attachment.

I know how condescending it can feel when someone you don’t know says that they’re “worried” about you because a lot of the time they are completely off base. But at the same time, strangers aren’t always wrong–I saw many people saying about me in the wake of my December 2021 Patreon post, “this person is clearly not well,” and what can I say? They were right. There was the missing context of some pretty intense antenatal depression, but the underlying observation wasn’t untrue; I was not thinking clearly. When I said in “Mask Off” that “I will be fine” because I had money, privilege and a support system where others did not, and therefore I was resistant to damage where others weren’t, it wasn’t true.

Money, privilege and the love of faceless millions can’t protect you from the burden of being famous, as we see time and time again with artists dying young, from Kurt Cobain to Amy Winehouse to Prince to the pop star Abel had been subtly emulating in style and fashion for both After Hours and Dawn FM, Michael Jackson. Being at the top of your field won’t protect you–the early deaths of Heath Ledger, Juice WRLD and Phillip Seymour Hoffman show us that. We don’t know for sure what Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins’ cause of death was, and possibly never will, but we can’t escape the fact that he did die in the midst of an absolutely grueling tour schedule. Famous people falsely project the illusion that they are in control of their lives, burn themselves out, and end up paying the ultimate price all the time.

After Hours is first and foremost a breakup album, which is why I think it resonated with me so intensely. I wasn’t going through a traditional breakup, but rather was in the process of breaking up with my old life. Try as I might to win it back, it was gone, it was time to let it go. The last song on the album, “Til I Bleed Out,” particularly speaks to this – you have to cut The Thing out of your life, from a dead relationship to a life choice that is harming you, even though it feels like it might kill you to do so. The last lines on the album, he repeats, “I keep telling myself I don’t need it anymore, I don’t need it anymore.”

No matter how well-adjusted you are, fame is both destructive and addictive, and I don’t begin to know what the solution to that is. I don’t think “no more famous people” is a helpful or realistic suggestion. I don’t know Abel, but I have been worried for a while that he’s pushing himself too hard, and I feel that now more than ever. I think he pushed things bigger and bigger because he thought it was what people wanted, and maybe there’s some truth to that. I would have preferred the arena tour, but I would be lying if I said his stadium show wasn’t one of the most spectacular things I’d ever seen a single human accomplish, while at the same time seeing how it being too much was inevitable. His set went for two straight hours. He didn't stop, didn't slow down, didn't get a breather, didn't sit down even once. I get to enjoy the fruits of his labor while that labor steadily grinds him down, causes him harm, and may end up killing him.

That’s the paradox of fame – if he wasn’t famous, we wouldn’t know there was someone to worry about, while at the same time that fame is the same thing that harms him, as it harms everyone it touches. Moreover I think it’s naive and reductive to say that even if he fully recovers soon (which I hope he will) he will “be okay.” Navigating fame requires constant vigilance. He will be, in his own words, swimming with the sharks for the rest of his life. And so that second night, stumbling through the streets of Inglewood a couple hours sooner than anticipated, in trying to lift our spirits, I found myself singing not The Weeknd, but Billy Joel:

Where's the fire, what's the hurry about?

You better cool it off before you burn it out

You got so much to do and only so many hours in a day

Slow down you crazy child

Take the phone off the hook and disappear for a while

It's alright, you can afford to lose a day or two

When will you realize, Vienna waits for you?