(Given the song’s success, the Weeknd is justly aggrieved by his recent Grammys snub). Since then, seemingly every radio format, adult contemporary included, has played the song on repeat, making it the longest-running entry in the Hot 100 top five and top ten. Using the song’s opening instrumental as inspiration, countless families performed the dance together while sheltering in place. The song vaulted up the charts in March 2020, supported by a viral TikTok challenge. While his sheer volume of Hot 100 hits have rightly earned him mainstream status, even his most commercial material is hardly PG - the 2015 hit “ Can’t Feel My Face” is an ’80s throwback laced with on-the-nose cocaine metaphors.īut over the last year his subversive image has been rewritten by the song “Blinding Lights,” from his 2020 album After Hours.
On the surface, the alter ego of Abel Tesfaye was a strange pick for the ostensibly family-friendly main stage - for more than a decade, the Weeknd has fused the sounds of pop, R&B, and trap into a cinematic horror-thriller about drugs, sex, and the excess of fame. Break My Heart openly relates back to INXS’s Need You Tonight, and properly credits the original writers, whereas Blinding Lights is more about drawing on multiple sources, instead of one reference tune, and combining those with original music and lyrics to create a certain 1980s mood.On Sunday, the Weeknd performed his distinctly dark (though highly meme-able) brand of pop at the Super Bowl halftime show. Some 80s-inspired contemporary pop songs, such as Dua Lipa’s Break My Heart, borrow material directly from the tracks that influenced them.
But other than that beware - it might get you in trouble with sample clearance and copyright later. Yes, you could go all-out and just sample a favourite song from the 1980s if nothing else, it’s a good way to study and map out arrangements, as you can see here. This can be represented by the lyrics, the arrangement, choice of instrumentation, and of course the effects and production techniques. There’s nothing wrong with imitating songs that have inspired you, or that represent a particular time period that you want to bring to mind it can be very effective. Have a listen to Rod Stewart’s Young Turks or Laura Branigan’s Self Control, for example. Listeners have identified many influential source songs in this one, where stylistic touches have been borrowed, without any downright plagiarism taking place. Blinding Lights is an acknowledged '80s-style piece, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
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