A Response to The Weekend "House of Balloons"

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English Written Task

A response to The Weeknd Album “House of Balloons”

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One Saturday night, in a late drive home with my girlfriend, I was dozing off and decided to turn on the radio. It was more of a reflex movement, and I really wasn’t expecting anything special to keep me up, and was strongly considering stopping on the side of the road and sleeping in my car. However, seeing that I had to drop her off at her house, and that my parents wouldn’t freak out if I were not to return home, I decided to try my luck, and was praying for something along the lines of heavy metal. What I got was Abel Tesfaye’s High for this. The song starts off with a low churning tone, which made me feel uneasy from the start. Then there’s the drop, and that’s where Abel’s honeyed vocals come into fore. He begins the song by whispering tunefully “you don’t know what’s in store, but you know what you’re here for”. It sounded like my kind of music, it sounded like my kind of tune, and I felt like a new surge of energy had just been generated in my body, and I shot up awake. However I noticed that this song was scary, evil and very twisted. My girlfriend looked at me and said, “this music scares me”, and it scared me too, but I also liked it.

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From the first chorus of the song, I knew Abel was something different. The song in general had the lifting beautiful vocals of any R&B hit, but the sourcing was all wrong. We all know that R&B is the croony style of music that circulates around topics such as one-night stands and soft drug taking. The Weeknd takes this established style and adds darkness to it. High for this is a song about a man pushing hard drugs onto a girl because she’ll want to be high for what he’s planning to do to her, which is clearly not a ...

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