‘Saturday Night Live’ music: The Weeknd, Nicki Minaj perform ‘The Hills,’ goes solo for ‘Can’t Feel My Face’

We will go into this “Saturday Night Live” music review with a clear statement: We’re not that familiar with The Weeknd. We didn’t really listen to the radio much this summer, so we know him mostly for collaborations.

Interestingly, for his first performance on the Amy Schumer show (read our review for that here), he brought out someone else as his guest: Nicki Minaj. This is a great coup for the show, given that Nicki is a big star in the music world and more than capable of anchoring the show in her own right. This was also a surprise to us; maybe it leaked on social media, but we don’t really spend all that much time following that in comparison to some other people.

Overall, we’ll say that the performance was solid; we were so thrown off by Nicki appearing, though (and the fact we couldn’t understand most of the lyrics), that it kept our enjoyment down from where we thought it would be. That being said, fans of The Weeknd probably really enjoyed it.

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As for the second song, The Weeknd came out to perform a song that we were actually more familiar with in “Can’t Feel My Face.” This is actually a song we’re reasonably familiar with it, and enjoyed this significantly more than the first. Great beat for one, and it allowed him to really showcase his stage presence and vocals. This is the sort of earworm performance that could get some new listeners hooked and interested in picking up the track on iTunes after the show.

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We’ll have videos of the performances tomorrow, provided NBC makes them available.

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