Looks like he took a knife to a machine gun-fight.
[Video][Website]
[5.00]
Patrick St. Michel: You have to shut so much out of your head when dealing with The Weeknd. First are all the non-musical aspects of “Belong To The World” — the obnoxious seven-minute video with its Japan obsession, which has carried over to some of the promotional artwork. Then you get to more musical matters, like the allegations that The Weeknd grabbed the beat to “Machine Gun” without Portishead’s permission. And then, finally, the lyrical content — “I want to embrace you/domesticate you,” Abel Tesfaye sings. “I just love that you’re dead inside.” The Weeknd has never been much concerned about the women in their songs, but this seems more judgmental than usual for them. There is just too much to sift out — which is a shame, because the actual music of “Belong To The World” is one of the grandest sounding thing from this project yet, and just sounds powerful (regardless of what’s coming out of his mouth, Tesfaye has a great voice). If only it weren’t so complicated.
[6]
Edward Okulicz: Geoff Barrow knew what he was doing when he requested that The Weeknd kindly not use his beat for a song with basically no positive qualities whatsoever. On “Machine Gun,” the beat was stark and taut and even more so underneath Beth Gibbons’ intensity. Speeding it up and using it as the basis for flat, whiney, faux-grand R&B strips it of its discomforting allure and makes it sound awful in its new context. And this fool has the nerve to say it’s not a sample: when Vanilla Ice said the same thing nobody took him seriously, and he at least understood what made his source material great. This song is no “Ice Ice Baby.” The voice quivers to no productive ends.
[2]
Anthony Easton: You know how Spike Lee is doing Oldboy now? Imagine it was culturally reversed, and put in a time machine, so we have Park doing a remixed soundtrack for a Korean horror remake of Logan’s Run, but with a studio romance shoved in the middle. This would be the soundtrack. This is also the second track this summer that uses the line “domesticate you.”
[8]
Brad Shoup: “Belong to the World” is stuffed with Tesfaye’s base assumptions, assumptions about women, dancers, change, love. The interactions here stretch across time: they indict him and depress me, but Tesfaye gives this a lived-in quality that elevates it above canny cash-ins like, say, “Blurred Lines.” Like too much alcohol in a club, the production crowds the mind: seaskimming strings, the sampled drum tattoo, voices stacked on voices, trying to control the conversation. It’s noxious, but it scans like involuntarily honest noxiousness. That’s a problem in pop — I can’t imagine this being played at a party, but doing so ought to be a crime — but taken in an individual dose, it could induce some impressive vomit.
[8]
John Seroff: The-Dream’s protestation that he’s being ripped off by the next generation of troubled, bourgie b-boys is easy to dismiss as the old-man-yells-at-cloud complaint of a producer who is unwilling to allow his little brothers to play with his hand-me-down toys. Then we get fed far-too-on-the-nose lines like “I just love that you’re dead inside/I’m not a fool/I’m just lifeless too” and “Ooooh girl I want to embrace you/Domesticate you” and I sorely miss Terius’… well, not his subtlety certainly, but the man’s music had and has a disarming depth of sorts. He’d make you believe a superman couldn’t fly, that a player’s unbreakable heart could thaw. And here are The Weeknd, all soggy heart on sleeve, swooningly one-note, back of the hand nailed to the forehead and front-loading the track with the echo of an an honest-to-god quiet storm. At his best, The-Dream makes grandiose, self-aware urban opera; compared to the better songs on IV Play, this stuff is more of a gloomy Hallmark card.
[5]
Alfred Soto: It took long enough: five years later an R&B pseud samples Portishead. Pairing it with a string arrangement generates a decent payoff, but I still have a wobbly-voiced pseud to deal with, who at least admits he’s “lifeless too.”
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: THEORY: Every one of these sexless john stories, from “Jenny” to Drizzy, out to pontificate or domesticate, is a dude’s elaborate tale to cover the fact that he can’t get it up. EVIDENCE: Abel has that Portishead rip right there and still can’t manage more than a tired wheedle.
[4]
Crystal Leww: The Weeknd’s sad sack misogyny only kind of worked when there was interesting yet sparse production to go behind it. At least Drake has the decency to admit that he’s the one with the problems, not his lady. Now that he’s far removed from split with producer Jeremy Rose, Abel also sounds far removed from a time where he was worthy of buzz or interest. The most interesting thing about this track is the “Machine Gun” beat, and listening to Portishead’s track is probably a better use of anyone’s time.
[2]