In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
Pop stars are so dramatic. A new album can’t just be a new album; it has to be a new era. The star has to emerge with a whole new look, aesthetic, and maybe nickname. They love insisting that they’ve basically become new people. I’m making fun of this tendency, but please understand that I love it.
In the opening seconds of his “Starboy” video, the Weeknd takes that conceit to its logical conclusion. Ominous horror-movie chords ring out as we pan in on an expensive-looking kitchen, and there we see the Weeknd tied to a chair. A menacing figure sits across from him — black mask, black gloves, black leather jacket. This guy crosses the room and strangles the Weeknd with a plastic bag; we see the singer’s now-lifeless head splat down on the floor. The murderer then takes off his mask to reveal that he’s… the Weeknd, but now with a different haircut.
“Starboy” is the title track from what I guess is the third Weeknd album, though the count is complicated by the early mixtapes that are so central to the Weeknd’s mythology. Starboy was the first album that the Weeknd made as a fully formed superstar, and it came out just a little more than a year after Beauty Behind The Madness, the record that turned the former online-critics’ darling into one of the central figures in global pop music. As you might imagine, the transition was not without bumps. You can really apply every possible definition to the word “bumps” there, and it’ll still be accurate.
A few songs into Starboy, the Weeknd sounds a peevish note about the strange places that his success has taken him: “I just won a new award for a kids’ show/ Talking ’bout a face numbing off a bag of blow/ I’m like goddamn, bitch, I am not a Teen Choice.” (The Weeknd was a triple-nominee at the Teen Choice Awards that year, but he didn’t really win anything. Maybe it wouldn’t have sounded as good if he’d sung, “I just lost a new award for a kids’ show to One Direction.”) In the album’s advance press, Abel Tesfaye talked about embracing darkness and returning to his mixtape roots. But Starboy is not a reinvention record. It’s a slight gloss on what the man was already doing. His act wasn’t broken, so he didn’t fix it.
Even the mere act of murdering himself in the “Starboy” video was really something that the Weeknd of Beauty Behind The Madness could’ve easily done. Over the years, the Weeknd has been both murdered and murderer many times over in his videos. In “Starboy,” he checks all of the above. After asphyxiating his floppier-haired doppelganger, this new Weeknd — the Starboy, if you will — struts all around his dead self’s lavish mansion, smashing all his old shit up with a glowing pink cross that looks like a magical sword. Then a black cat transforms into a panther as the Weeknd pilots a fancy Batmobile-ass car through the Hollywood hills. The director, Grant Singer, is the same guy who made the videos for the Weeknd’s two previous chart-toppers, and the vibes are consistent.
Nothing is really different in the “Starboy” video besides the haircut, but there might be a bit more sleekness in the production and a bit more swagger in the delivery — not exactly momentous breaks for a guy whose music already had plenty of sleekness and swagger to it. The Weeknd already commanded a big budget and a lot of attention when he made Beauty Behind The Madness. On Starboy, the adjustments are slight, but they probably felt much bigger if you were the Weeknd. For instance: If you were the Weeknd, you could now afford a Daft Punk track.
Really, the biggest historical distinction of “Starboy” isn’t even about the Weeknd. Instead, it’s this: The song is technically the only Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper for Daft Punk, one of the most influential groups of the past quarter-century. For most of their existence, Daft Punk were a cult phenomenon, at least in the US. The French duo’s first three albums yielded a grand total of two Hot 100 hits: 1997’s blinky-blink electro-cartoon bounce “Around The World” and 2000’s horn-dazed party mantra “One More Time,” both of which peaked at #61.
Before the EDM boom, the US was notoriously resistant to most derivations of rave music. Daft Punk arrived alongside the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers in the hyped-up electronica wave that was supposed to reshape the way Americans thought about music in the late ’90s. That probably did happen; it just took a long time and a few pop-star figureheads. But Daft Punk’s sound — hypnotic, repetitive, shiny to the point of abrasiveness, full of sharp samples and vocodered robot voices — was a much bigger deal in Europe. They led a wave of French filter-disco that ran wild on the UK charts for years. They also figured out a very cool look.
I don’t remember anything about Daft Punk’s public profile during the release of their 1997 debut album Homework. I guess they DJ’d at some American raves while unmasked, but group members Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo never appeared in their (great) videos, and they rarely did much press. When they launched their classic 2000 sophomore LP Discovery, Daft Punk took to wearing robot suits that made both of them look a bit like the mysterious killer in the 1986 sci-fi flick The Wraith. Maybe that was inspired by the breakdancing spacemen from the “Around The World” video, or maybe not. It’s always a good idea to have a gimmick, and that gimmick really worked for them.
A bit like the Weeknd after them, Daft Punk made the transition from cult stardom to pop-icon status. It probably started with an instantly legendary performance at Coachella in 2006, which led to a stadium tour that fully melted my brain when I saw them in Brooklyn a year later. By that time, Kanye West had sampled the duo’s Discovery track “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” on his chart-topper “Stronger,” which does not count as a #1 hit for Daft Punk. The robots showed up in the “Stronger” video, a courtesy that they did not extend to the Weeknd and “Starboy.” (Their sole appearance in that video is in an oil painting on the Weeknd’s wall.) From “Stronger” on, Daft Punk were as instantly recognizable as Kiss must’ve been in the ’70s.
Daft Punk liked to take forever between albums, and they have a much better claim than the Weeknd at the record-to-record pop-star reinvention thing. They scored the forgettable 2010 blockbuster Tron: Legacy, but they didn’t come back with a full album until 2013’s Random Access Memories. For that one, the duo left house music behind completely. Instead, they embraced the retro side of their retro-futuristic aesthetic, recruiting a squad of legendary session musicians to make a sleek, luxe love-letter to the big-budget disco and pop of the ’70s. The American music-biz establishment loved that. At the Grammys, Daft Punk performed with Stevie Wonder and won Album Of The Year. At that point, Daft Punk were real-deal popular, too. “Get Lucky,” their single with Pharrell and Nile Rodgers, became a huge summer jam, but it wasn’t quite big enough to dislodge Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” from the #1 spot. Instead, “Get Lucky” was stuck at #2 for a two-month stretch. (It’s an 8.) If that loss made Daft Punk emotional, you couldn’t tell.
In the months after Beauty Behind The Madness, the Weeknd took no time off. He toured hard, and he made constant appearances on other people’s records, popping up on songs from people like Beyoncé, Future, Travis Scott, and Kanye West. During that stretch, the Weeknd met Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo when he was out partying in LA one night. The Weeknd was unsurprisingly starstruck. Abel Tesfaye came up as a Toronto hipster-club kid, and Daft Punk were deities to hipster-club kids worldwide.
The Daft Punk guys liked the Weeknd’s music, too, so Tesfaye went off to Paris to work with the two of them. Daft Punk were always ultra-selective collaborators, but when perhaps the world’s fastest-rising pop star wants to get into the studio with you, it’s usually a good idea to say yes. Not long ago, the Weeknd told Variety that he and Daft Punk took four days to make two songs. That wouldn’t be an overwhelmingly quick run for most pop producers, but given Daft Punk’s usual pace, they must’ve been deep in the zone.
The Weeknd and Daft Punk’s two collaborations sound more like the Weeknd than Daft Punk. There’s very little dance-music pulse on “Starboy” or “I Feel It Coming.” They’re both lush, slinky tracks, and the production on both has plenty of synthetic depth, but the Weeknd’s personality cuts through the robots’ glossiness. The first song that they worked on was “I Feel It Coming,” which the Weeknd also released as a single and which peaked at #4. (It’s an 8.) While Tesfaye was freestyling his “I Feel It Coming” verses in the booth, he heard a bit of a drum loop from another track that was on Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo’s phone. He wanted to hear more of it, and that drum loop soon formed the backbone of “Starboy.”
Daft Punk are credited as featured guests on both “Starboy” and “I Feel It Coming,” which was pretty rare for producers at the time. (And yes, that means that two of Daft Punk’s three biggest chart hits are featured-guest credits on Weeknd songs.) Daft Punk add some robotized backing vocals to both tracks, but I’m guessing that their billing has less to do with those voices and more to do with name recognition. Daft Punk have credits as lead producers on both songs, and they almost certainly did more than the drum loop and the backing vocals on “Starboy.” But on both songs, Daft Punk aren’t the only producers. The credits list a bunch of other guys.
In the case of “Starboy,” three other people are in there as co-writers and co-producers. One is the Halifax-born behind-the-scenes pop specialist Cirkut, who’s already popped up in a bunch of these columns and who will show up in many more. Cirkut is one of these people who isn’t super-famous but whose hit-rate is absolutely bonkers. Another is Martin “Doc” McKinney, a Canadian-born and Minneapolis-raised producer who got his start as the production half of the boutique-friendly downtempo duo Esthero. (Late-’90s downtempo types have done pretty well on the charts in the past decade.) McKinney kicked around the pop universe for years before he became one of the production forces on the Weeknd’s early mixtapes. The third “Starboy” behind-the-scenes guy is another regular Weeknd collaborator, the Quebec native Jason “DaHeala” Quenneville, who started working with the Weeknd on his Kiss Land album and who’s earned most of his credits on Weeknd-related projects.
I don’t know who did what on “Starboy,” but I always thought it was interesting that the Weeknd locked down these exceedingly rare tracks with Daft Punk, one of the most sought-after units on the musical landscape, and still brought in a pop pro like Cirkut and two of his regular guys, Doc McKinney and DaHeala, to do whatever they did on the song. Like: Working with Daft Punk was a major achievement, but it wasn’t enough. The Weeknd was trying to make Weeknd records, so he relied on the people who know how to make Weeknd records.
“Starboy” definitely sounds like a Weeknd record. The drum loop, the one that attracted the Weeknd’s attention in the first place, really is cool. It’s this tingling, percolating ripple that seems to come from all sides at once. The various producers surround those drums with strings, plangent pianos, and ominous ear-candy synth-sustain. The tone reminds me less of any actual Daft Punk records and more of a particularly haunted offshoot: “Nightcall,” the 2010 Kavinsky track that Nicolas Winding Refn used for the Drive opening credits and that went viral again this year when Phoenix and Kavinsky performed it during the Olympic closing ceremony. Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter co-wrote that track, so there’s a connection, but it’s not a Daft Punk track. Instead, it’s the Weeknd tapping into a vibe that he’s already throughly explored.
The “Starboy” instrumental track has a cool, dark swirl to it, but it doesn’t exactly seize your attention the way “Can’t Feel My Face” and “The Hills” do. Instead, that work is mostly left to the Weeknd, and he does it by talking his shit. The Weeknd isn’t a rapper, but on song like “Starboy,” he sings like he’s rapping. Later on, the Weeknd told Genius that “Starboy” represents his take on “that hip-hop culture of braggadocio” — music critic-ass terminology — and that he likes doing it because it “just sounds good, man. I was a teenager when I saw Scarface, and even though it was unbelievable, it’s kind of cool Tony Montana could survive all those gunshots and not feel them.” (Point of order: Tony Montana does not survive all those gunshots; he just doesn’t die right away because he’s too gakked up to feel pain and too insane because he’s just murdered the people closest to him. Shit-talk does just sound good, though.)
In his “Starboy” verses, the Weeknd reels off the names of cars so expensive that I’ve never even heard of them, though I do recognize some dorked-out wordplay when I hear it: “Star Trek roof in that Wraith of Khan.” Some of the punchlines on “Starboy” are truly slick: “I’m tryna put you in the worst mood/ P1 cleaner than your church shoes.” (A P1 is a million-dollar McLaren; I had to look it up.) He informs us that his main bitch and his side bitch are out of our collective league. He brags about his girlfriend snorting coke off ebony tabletops. Look what we’ve done: He’s a motherfuckin’ starboy. The word “starboy” is Jamaican slang with pretty obvious meaning, and the Weeknd has also said that it was a tribute to “Starman” star David Bowie, who died about nine months before “Starboy” came out.
The Weeknd talks tough on “Starboy,” but he doesn’t sound tough. That’s probably the most interesting thing about the song. He glides over the track, finding the same pockets that a rapper would while remaining in fragile, breathy tenor mode and coming up with lots of little melodies. Plenty of rappers were putting melody into their verses at the time; the Weeknd was merely coming at that approach from the opposite side. He did it well. It’s fun to hear someone barking out self-aggrandizing chest-puff shit in a silky Michael Jackson-type tenor. Those two things seem like they’d counteract each other; but the juxtaposition makes it cooler. Honestly, that was a big part of why guys like Jackson and Prince and Barry Gibb were so magnetic a couple of generations before the Weeknd.
“Starboy” is a fun exercise. I like hearing the Weeknd getting triumphal while still sounding soft and scared, and I like the way his voice bounces against Daft Punk’s digital lushness. But “Starboy” has never struck me as a major work, the way that “Can’t Feel My Face” and “The Hills” were. It fades into the background too easily. It’s cool background music, and that’s not nothing. But the Weekend made more interesting hits before “Starboy,” and he would make more interesting hits after.
The “Starboy” single came out in September 2016, and it debuted at #40 before jumping, in its second week, all the way to #3. For the next few months, “Starboy” held steady in the upper reaches of the Hot 100, and it finally snuck into the #1 spot just after Christmas, briefly interrupting the reign of Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles.” The Starboy album came out in November. In its first week, it moved a few hundred thousand equivalent copies, and all 18 of its tracks made the Hot 100. Maybe the album didn’t have the same impact as Beauty Behind The Madness, but the Weeknd was a fully formed superstar. He wasn’t always guaranteed a #1 hit whenever he released anything, but everything he did would at least get a look.
I liked Starboy pretty well when it came out, and I like it pretty well now. The album is overlong and indulgent, and it reflects both the Weeknd’s taste and superstar reach. Besides Daft Punk, the album has guest features from Future, Kendrick Lamar, and Lana Del Rey — a nice summation of who the Weeknd had in his coalition at the time. Max Martin contributes to some songs, and other notable names turn up in the credits: Benny Blanco, Cashmere Cat, Metro Boomin, Diplo, A Tribe Called Quest’s Ali Shaheed Muhammad, a Romantics interpolation, a Tears For Fears sample. Today, I don’t really think of Starboy as a full-album experience, but certain songs enter the rotation from time to time. I really like “Party Monster,” the even-more-vicious floating-hovercraft darkness-wallow that immediately follows “Starboy” on the tracklist. (“Party Monster” peaked at #16.)
Starboy was a big album, but it didn’t feel like a dominant blockbuster. Other than “Starboy” and “I Feel It Coming,” the record didn’t launch any big hits — not immediately, anyway. Today, the “Starboy” single is platinum 11 times over, and the album is quadruple platinum — a couple of million behind Beauty Behind The Madness, but a huge hit regardless. It’s had a long tail. Many years later, a deep cut from Starboy took off on TikTok, and it will eventually appear in this column.
At the 2017 Grammys, the Weeknd performed “Starboy” and “I Feel It Coming” with Daft Punk, and that was the last time that Daft Punk ever gave any kind of stage performance. In 2017, Daft Punk co-wrote and co-produced “Overnight,” a track from an Australian band called Parcels, and that was it. For four years, Daft Punk remained silent. Some people were bummed when Daft Punk didn’t appear during the Weeknd’s Super Bowl Halftime Show in 2021. A couple of weeks after that Halftime Show, Daft Punk announced that they were breaking up through an oblique video of the two robots walking away from each other — a big surprise, even from a group that hadn’t done a single thing in a long time. They remain a key cultural reference; earlier this year, Kendrick Lamar told Drake that he “better walk around like Daft Punk” if he didn’t want to get shot in the head.
In 2018, the Weeknd followed Starboy with a cool little EP called My Dear Melancholy, and he reached #4 with the ballad “Call Out My Name.” (It’s a 6.) Around the same time, the Weeknd also teamed up with his past collaborator Kendrick Lamar on “Pray For Me,” a track from Kendrick’s Black Panther soundtrack that peaked at #7. (It’s a 7.) Even when he was between album cycles — or, if you prefer, eras — the Weeknd was a pop-chart force. He waited a little while longer for his next big album launch, but when that happened, he went right back to the top. We’ll see the Weeknd in this column again.
GRADE: 7/10
BONUS BEATS: Panic! At The Disco covered “Starboy” in a 2016 visit to the BBC Live Lounge, and they made me feel like I was watching Glee, which is not something that I would ever do on purpose. Here it is:
(Panic! At The Disco’s highest-charting single, 2018’s “High Hopes,” peaked at #4. It’s a 2. Frontman Brendon Urie also guested on Taylor Swift’s “Me!,” which peaked at #2 in 2019. It’s a 3.)
BONUS BONUS BEATS: Oh, what? You didn’t like that Panic! At The Disco cover? Well, how about this? How about motherfucking Daughtry covering “Starboy” at a 2016 show in Niagara Falls?
(It’s better than the Panic! At The Disco version, honestly, though Daughtry should get a stern talking-to for throwing in “whatever that is” after namechecking New Edition. Daughtry’s highest-charting single, 2006’s “It’s Not Over,” peaked at #4. It’s a 3.)
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now on paperback via Hachette Books. Look what you’ve done! I’m a motherfuckin’ bookboy. Buy it here.
