Every time T.I. releases an album, there’s always at least one song that gestures at the type of Instagram-ready, carefree life we all wish we could live (never forget the Paper Trail one-two punch of “Live Your Life†immediately followed by “Whatever You Likeâ€). These songs tend to be massive hits that get played into the ground, so we’re all forced to relive the aural approximation of fun on endless loop. They’re fun for a while, and then they get sort of old, and then they will get fun again at some point in the not-so-distant future. It’s good, then, that T.I. can keep pumping the good-times songs out, considering how much near-death he’s been confronted with, how disappointed he was with Kanye’s recent White House visit, and how angry Melania Trump is about his employment of a Melania look-alike for a video. It is a miracle that he can still make songs about living the kind of life that involves pool parties, glittering metropolitan panoramas, and, like, doing that blissed-out arm-wavey thing where half your body is sticking out of the sunroof of a car (this scene does not appear in this video, but it could).
It remains to be seen whether “The Weekend†(you can guess what this song is about if you live for the weekend and all the endless promise it has to offer) reaches the aforementioned good-vibes heights of “Live Your Life†and “Whatever You Like,†but it still has a lot going for it. Including, but not limited to: grainy party photography (presumably a throwback to the party photography websites of ye olden times), Young Thug’s turtleneck-and-chain combo, the unexpectedly Lynchian moment in the first minute when a car full of robbers lights up ominously, and the half-assed heist concept of the video in general.
Why would we love a heist video that does not deliver on the heist and ends extremely abruptly? Well, much like this heist, the weekend usually does not deliver on its promise, and also ends abruptly (though usually not in —SPOILER ALERT — death). So, logically, aspirational songs about having a lot of fun in the 48 free hours per week allotted to us are important to our very survival. So what if we’ll never be at a pool party so glamorous that someone wants to plan an elaborate robbery around it? So what if we’ll never be as good at rapping as T.I. and Young Thug? So what if Young Thug looks better in a turtleneck than most human beings on this burning planet? At least we’ll always have “The Weekend.â€