The Weeknd- “The Knowing”
From their House of Balloons EP

This is my favorite song off The Weeknd’s debut, which a lot of people have spilled virtual ink over since it came out last week. (If you want to appeal to music critics’ worst grass-is-greener instincts, release a free mixtape during SXSW week, tricking them into huddling around their computers instead of going to see the live music for which they’ve traveled hundreds of miles. This was a masterstroke, nebulous quartet of Canadian industry types who make up The Weeknd.)

Anyway, the sound The Weeknd crafts has been christened PBR&B because it is “rhythm and blues by or for hipsters.” I like a lot of the music that falls under this heading—especially How to Dress Well, who made one of my favorite records of last year. And I like this EP enough—it’s too derivative of The-Dream—but what fascinates me the most about that PBR&B label is that it has absolutely nothing to do with the music. This is interesting to me because, besides maybe glam-rock or IDM, I can’t think of any other subgenre that has no defining musical features. If you can think of one, please comment. Even grunge had swampy guitars and lo-fi production values.

Sonically, there is very little separating The Weeknd from deliberately-paced mainstream R&B like 40 and Drake’s work on Thank Me Later or, as I mentioned above, The-Dream. What gives it that tag is the attitude and identity informing it. No one is sure who is officially in this group, but some of them might be White. They have a tumblr that gives away the music for free a la Odd Future and their PBR&B associate Frank Ocean. They show a girl’s boob on the black-and-white album cover. (Everything is typed in Helvetica, naturally.) The songs are on the long side. From a musical standpoint, there’s nothing really “hipster” about them though, other than the fact that they sample Beach House in one song—but I can picture almost any rapper doing that now. Jay-Z has been name-checking them for two years.

So are they hipster because all Black music is turning hipster? Or has hipster music taken on the same vague, know-it-when-you-see-it definitions that we use to define the term “hipster” itself?

One thing is for sure: NSFW album art stays winning.