Sure, some of the music video’s props are played out, but Abel looks damn good in that jacket, and his dance moves aren’t bad either. Still, “I Feel It Coming,” much like The Weeknd himself, has a way of wooing you when you most wish it wouldn’t. Plus, its “plot” is seemingly non-existent until almost halfway through - the first two minutes meagerly show Abel dancing solo against an exceptionally moody, intergalactic sunset. The video’s vintage space theme, initiated right in its opening credits, is such an obvious choice for a Daft Punk feature, as is the revival of a Michael Jackson jacket for a pop music video.
“Then one of the team members did one I liked, and they said it was a lot like something from Cocoon, which I had never seen.Some time between the 2016 release of his moody, sporadic pop spectacle, “Starboy ” the February launch of the album’s touring counterpart, which is set to hit sixteen countries in its first three months his alleged swap from “dating” model Bella Hadid to strutting around the world with actress / singer Selena Gomez and the recent revealing of his joint clothing venture with international fast-fashion house H&M I began to feel exhausted of rooting for Abel Tesfaye to succeed.Īfter all, his superstardom is no longer a coincidence: The Weeknd is a now strategic pop machine, clearly evolved from the blacklight-illuminated-bedroom crooner who we first met on “House Of Balloon.” He seems to put out content according to a carefully plotted schedule rather than based on his own artistic patience, a fact that haunts my fandom and consistently tests it.įrom this perspective, it’s easy to dismiss The Weeknd’s music video for “I Feel It Coming” - the Daft-Punk-assisted finale to “Starboy,” and his most recent radio hit - as the uninspired, natural conclusion to a series of (mostly) disconnected short films that were clearly churned out only to promote the album (and now tour). The best part? Fu says he’s not even really that big a sci-fi fan, and it took someone on his crew to point out that one of the most memorable scenes - when Mizuhara appears out of nowhere in a glowing form - was an unintentional reference to another 1980s sci-fi fantasy/comedy. “That effect where Kiko appears in front of Abel… I couldn’t describe the ‘hot glow’ look I wanted where you can’t quite make out the details,” he says. “I wanted the colors to reinforce the overall aesthetic, so the pink and blues were kind of like the palette from the end of the Knight Rider credits,” he says of the kitschy 1980s series starring David Hasselhoff and his talking car. But after some discussion, he decided to go even more vintage, down to the colors of the sunset.
The clip has the by-now-signature old VHS-tape-fuzz look that Fu has employed in his past work with The Strokes and Daft Punk.
Fu was adamant that the female romantic lead balance out the French robots and Canadian/American singer, so he pushed for Japanese-American model Kiko Mizuhara to give the story a worldwide, non-national feel that makes it seem more timeless. The pastel-colored backgrounds in the film were all created using a rear-projection system with colors Fu researched in an attempt to match the palette of the “dawn of man” scene from Kubrick’s iconic 2001: A Space Odyssey film. The Weeknd & Daft Punk Perform 'Starboy'/'I Feel It Coming' Mash-Up at 2017 Grammys