It’s a Dark Philosophy: The Weeknd’s Intermedial Aestheticization of Violence

Abstract

This chapter addresses the audiovisual aestheticization of violence in contemporary pop music. Focusing on the Canadian artist The Weeknd, I aim to illuminate how the aestheticization of violence partakes in a broader negotiation of identity in a pop music context. Where much of the literature on the connections between music, sound, and violence focuses primarily on the role of music and sound in violent contexts, I tackle the matter of how violence is represented through audiovisual means. By resituating theories of intermediality within a critical musicological framework, I devote particular attention to the networks of meaning that are mobilized when The Weeknd’s music videos reference the formal and stylistic conventions of other media forms.