The Weeknd had a very close call with some pyrotechnics during his recent Coachella performance, which so easily could have burnt his face and left him with permanent damage.
On Saturday (April 22), a Twitter fan page dedicated to The Weeknd (@NewsWeeknd) shared a video of the Canadian singer’s surprise Coachella performance from last weekend. As he performed his verse on Future‘s 2016 track “Low Life,” the Grammy-Award winner almost got torched by some flames.
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The clip shows the singer trying to hype up the crowd when a sudden burst of fire blows up near him, causing him to back up and shout, “wooo!” Fortunately, he wasn’t burned.
“Be careful Abel,” the fan page wrote in the post’s caption.
Quote tweeting the post, The Weeknd quickly acknowledged that he almost got burned while performing. “ALMOST COOKED ME,” he wrote.
In other Weeknd-related news, the singer’s voice was recently used on an AI-inspired track, “heart on my sleeve” featuring Drake. On the song, the two AI stars trade bars about The Weeknd’s ex-girlfriend Selena Gomez.
After initially being posted on Youtube by someone named ghostwriter, the track was then shared to Apple, Tidal, Deezer and Spotify. It had reportedly racked up over 630,000 listens on the latter.
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“I came in with my ex like Selena to flex/ Bumping Justin Bieber the fever ain’t left/ She know all she need, I need her she blessed, giving her my best/ I got my heart on my sleeve with a knife in my back what’s with that?/ (Aye) 21, I love him that my brother that’s my slatt,” AI Drake raps.
On the same wave, The Weeknd’s cloned voice arrives, making it clear he no longer thinks about Gomez, since their split in 2017: “Got these pearls on my neck, got these girls on my check like Selena baby/ Oh my genie maybe yeah, she taking the lambo for a drive using the fancy door/ When she went out the store, I throw my heart on my sleeve,” he sings.
Universal Music Group, where both Drizzy and The Weeknd are currently signed, has since taken the track off all the aforementioned platforms, and in a lengthy statement (via Music Week) commented on the rise of “deep fakes” and asked which “side of history” its stakeholders wanted to be on.
“UMG’s success has been, in part, due to embracing new technology and putting it to work for our artists — as we have been doing with our own innovation around AI for some time already,” the statement began.
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“With that said, however, the training of generative AI using our artists’ music (which represents both a breach of our agreements and a violation of copyright law) as well as the availability of infringing content created with generative AI on DSPs, begs the question as to which side of history all stakeholders in the music ecosystem want to be on: the side of artists, fans and human creative expression, or on the side of deep fakes, fraud and denying artists their due compensation.”
