Dark times & starry eyes: Substance use themes in the Weeknd’s discography
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Societal preoccupations are manifest in popular culture, including music. Canadian award-winning musician, The Weeknd, explores substance use and pain in his discography. This study employs inductive thematic analysis to explore how substance use and pain are referenced in his songs. Lyrics from his five studio albums and three mixtapes were reviewed, revealing 399 substance use references. The analysis revealed seven overarching themes, including substance use as a symbol of celebration and luxury, its role in coping with hardship but also potentially leading to problematic use and romantic turmoil. Uncovering these recurrent themes highlights how the narratives that The Weeknd's music constructs around substance use. Knowledge of these themes and narratives could be leveraged in educational initiatives to engage a wide range of trainees on substance misuse, addiction, and its societal impact.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".