In a recent piece for die Welt exploring spirituality in both contemporary art and popular culture, my friend Anna-Lisa Dieter observes that while today the wellness industry at times traffics with religious belief as type of self-care, religious belief has as much history as a force that can disturb the human soul as much as heal it. Anna-Lisa ends with a citation that practically every German speaker knows by heart, from the opening stanza to Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem cycle Duino Elegies: “Jeder Engel ist schrecklich” - Every angel is terrifying.
Thus Rilke’s expression was still ringing in my ears this week when I checked the tracklist for The Weeknd’s new album, Dawn FM, and discovered those words again as the title of track 12. What was a R&B singer in 2022 doing repping a German-speaking poet from 1923?
The album track itself, Every Angel is Terrifying, isn’t really a song, per se, but a two-part sound piece that advances the album’s surrealist metaphysical drama.
You see, in the world of the Weeknd, Dawn FM is actually a supernatural radio station broadcast to you, the listener, as you sit in your car in a kind of purgatorial tunnel traffic gridlock. The FM’s announcer, played by Jim Carrey, speaks to you like an underworld guide, preparing you for your transition into the light. In other words, the whole album is kind of a Book of the Dead, a music trope I’ve written about before.
Back to terrifying angels. The track opens with the Weeknd reciting a mildly truncated version of the opening lines from Rilke’s Elegies:
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ order?
Even if they pressed me against their heart, I’d be consumed
For beauty is the terror we endure
While we stand in wonder, we’re annihilated
Every angel is terrifying
The metaphysical world beyond our world, Rilke/Weeknd seems to be saying, the world of angels, which we usually think of as being blissful and welcoming is in fact unknown, overwhelming, and so utterly other as to induce fear and terror if we were to experience it directly.
Then the track switches gears and we get…a radio advertisement for a movie called Afterlife, which is pitched to us with all of the breathless marketing superlatives we expect from promo campaigns for Hollywood movies. Suddenly the world beyond our world no longer seems terrifying, rather it seems exciting, escapist, spectacular.
The Afterlife ad is ironically answering the Rilke quote. Every angel is terrifying, unless you’re seeing on the big screen. A bloodthirsty dinosaur in real life? Hell on earth. In a blockbuster movie? Popcorn time.
Are movies, tv, pop songs, etc, our only means of turning the terrifying into the thrilling? When the gridlock is over and we pass into the light, will even our experience of death be converted into entertainment? The French writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s most well-known novel was called Death on the Installment Plan—in an era of streaming services, maybe today it feels more like Death on the Netflix Plan.