Starboy Review
By: Anthony Ramirez, Laura Herrera, Karen Martinez
The album Starboy by The Weeknd was released by XO and Republic Records on the 25th of November, it features multiple guest artists such as Daft Punk, Lana Del Rey, Future, and Kendrick Lamar, It consists of mostly R&B/Soul music. Some may say that the lyrics and singing is the main attraction of the album, others feel as if the instrumental music is more important than the words in the music. The album had all its 18 songs on the top 100 most popular songs at one point meaning that a good amount of people enjoyed the tracks featured on the new album. We asked a student whether she feels the instrumental composition or the actual lyrics are more important, 11th grade Andrea Gallardo stated, “I think the lyrics are more important, when you understand the lyrics is when you start to feel the song, especially if it’s something you can relate to.” We also asked Karen’s brother Miguel Martinez, a former APB student, what his point of view is on this topic, he claims, “The lyrics are more important because that’s the whole point to the song, the beat plays a part but the whole point is to understand what they are saying throughout the song.”
We listened to one of the album’s more popular songs which is “Sidewalks”, which features Kendrick Lamar as a guest singer, which may be one of the reasons that this is one of the more popular songs on the album. The song has an arguably slow tempo compared to other songs in the album such as “Six Feet Under” that features Future, who is a Hip Hop/Trap music artist which probably explains why the tempo is much more faster. The songs have a hidden message that is about the way that they made their way up to where they are as of now in terms of success. Overall we like the song but feel like some of the lyrics and lines are a little repetitive and out of tune when Kendrick begins to sing.
We also listened to the least popular song on his album based off Spotify, with 14,590,536 plays total is Ordinary Life. The song has a good beat to it but the lyrics are not as deep as some of his other songs. Surprisingly the song isn’t of low quality to be the least popular song and we feel that this song is better than some of his other songs on the album. The instrumental is pretty good, however the lyrics are somewhat confusing to those who aren’t capable of analyzing the words quickly created the illusion that the lyrics make little to no sense whatsoever. For the most part we share similar ideas when it comes to the album being pretty good and would definitely recommend those who have not listened to it to go give the songs a try.
