Lil Nas X and The Weeknd are placed in R&B almost exclusively because they are black. In your eyes, sung by a white person in 1986, would be synth pop.
Did Billy Ray Cyrus make Old Town Road suddenly country? Is Montero (call me by your name) rap or a gay dance anthem?
As an X'er, The Weeknd's latest music does sound amazingly to me like a callback to early 80s's new wave synth pop. "Save Your Tears" could've been an OMD single. As such, to me, it's a powerful challenge to existing musical categories.
But to how many people younger than me does this really register?
Younger millennial/Z-adjacent here. I don’t claim to speak for everyone younger than me, but I am continually impressed by the level of genre awareness today’s youngsters have.
Genres like synth/vapor wave are very conscious remixes of periods of time many of us were barely alive during, and their popularity comes in part, I think, from the tenuousness of their connection to the time period from which those genres draw their audiovisual cues. For me, at least, my earliest memories are a dream half-remembered, and music that draws from but does not emulate music from that time period can be a way for my imagination to fill in the blanks.
Lil Nas X and The Weeknd are placed in R&B almost exclusively because they are black. In your eyes, sung by a white person in 1986, would be synth pop.
Did Billy Ray Cyrus make Old Town Road suddenly country? Is Montero (call me by your name) rap or a gay dance anthem?