The Idol is a multi-sensorial experience. The twisted tale of Hollywood's industry underbelly isn't just a slick and glossy prestige montage of sex, cigarettes and sunshine, but, with Abel ‘The Weeknd’ Tesfaye a co-creator and star at the helm, an all-consuming audio-visual universe that feeds off itself like the team of vultures surrounding its lead protagonist Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp).
Over the course of its already-aired three episodes, there has been plenty of discourse surrounding what The Idol is even about. Its truncated structure, which seems to want to oscillate between a story about a young starlet up for industry consumption and an erotic sex thriller about cults, has led to much confusion. Still, if we take our eyes off the boobs and the excess for two seconds and listen to the music, which is being released alongside each episode, we can get closer to an understanding of just what this show is trying to achieve.
With each new episode of The Idol, Tesfaye has been dropping tracks that speak not only to the darkly slick nature of the series (think saxophones and haunting synths), but to the actual action happening on screen. As well as its anchoring in-show song “World Class Sinner”, there are supplementary songs. There's a collaboration with Future called “Double Fantasy”, which speaks to tricking a woman into believing you're in love with them, one with actress Suzanne Son (who plays Chloe) called “Family”, about a dysfunctional family and a track called “ONE OF THE GIRLS”, featuring Depp and Blackpink's Jennie, about vying to be the only girl in someone's life. If it all sounds very on the nose, that's kind of the point. And honestly, we're kind of grateful about that.
The biggest problem with The Idol is the Tesfaye-shaped elephant in the room. Depp's Jocelyn, a damaged and bruised pop star pushing through burnout and leaning on people who need her to make money in order to survive, is nuanced and understandable. But Tesfaye's Tedros is much harder to get a read on.
According to Tesfaye, Tedros is supposed feel like a fish out of water in Jocelyn's life. “This guy is in way over his head, this situation is one where he is not supposed to be here”, he told GQ, adding “He rehearses, he’s calculated. And he needs to do that, or he has nothing, he’s pathetic.”
And, if you listen to “Lesser Man”, the song released in conjunction with the show's third (and best so far) episode, all of those insecurities come plainly to the surface. “I'm a lesser man, a lesser man / A lesser man than you think I am / You think you know but you have no idea”, he sings, almost like his brain is playing out like a musical with a monologue set to tune. “What you don't even know / I'm a deadbeat man, never know when to fold / Spent a lot for your soul / You gon' make that back, I'ma take what I own”, is how he opens the song, plainly detailing Jocelyn as a mark he plans to use until she's milked dry.
Ahead of episode four, he's also released a cover of John Lennon's classic ode to possessive love, “Jealous Guy”. In the last episode, Tedros' envy seeped out like dam about to burst, exploding in fits of rage around any man who dared look at or touch Jocelyn. The episode ends with him spanking Jocelyn with the hairbrush her mum used to beat her. She is, it appears, fully submissive to him by the end. In lyrics like "I didn't mean to hurt you / I'm sorry that I made you cry / I didn't mean to hurt you / I'm just a jealous guy", he's covering his tracks, seeing how far he can push his meal ticket before she questions him.
When you read the lyrics alongside the episode, Tedros's internal battle. He's a man wracked with inferiority and superiority, and they're each fighting for supremacy on a main stage. He's a puppeteer drunk on power, but he's massively aware of his own failings. All of this makes for a compelling dynamic – the troubled pop starlet collapsing under he own spotlight and the hanger-on desperate to steal some for himself – but, with some of it not quite coming across on screen, we have to consult secondary texts to fill in the gaps.
