City Lights

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Lore & Background

Chaplin began developing the script in 1928, deciding to continue working without dialogue and only incorporating synchronized music and sound effects. The main theme, used as a leitmotif for the blind flower girl, is the song 'La Violetera' by Spanish composer José Padilla; Chaplin lost a lawsuit to Padilla for not crediting him.

Reader's Guide

It was immediately successful with positive reviews and worldwide rentals of more than $4 million. Today, many critics consider it not only the highest accomplishment of Chaplin's career, but one of the greatest films of all time. In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked it 11th on its list of the best American films ever made.

Did You Know?

• City Lights has no audible dialogue but was released with a synchronized musical score with sound effects.
• The main theme 'La Violetera' was used as a leitmotif for the blind flower girl; Chaplin lost a lawsuit for not crediting composer José Padilla.
• The film's final scene was called 'the greatest single piece of acting ever committed to celluloid' by critic James Agee in 1949.

Composition & the 1980s Sound

The Weeknd has long carried an affection for music from an era before his own birth, and "Blinding Lights" crystallizes that devotion into a fully realized track. Drawing on new wave, synth-pop, synthwave, and electropop, the song channels the energy of artists like Siouxsie and the Banshees and Cocteau Twins—references he traces back to his earliest mixtapes. The production, helmed by Max Martin alongside Oscar Holter and Belly, employs what one critic called "melodic math": scale-laddering verses that build into a tension-filled chorus, all anchored in a Dorian mode that gives the track a dreamy, euphoric quality before resolving to a minor chord. The Weeknd himself described the collaboration with Martin as akin to a marriage, something that requires time and trust to build. Audio engineer Şerban Ghenea noted the track successfully bridges two worlds—offering a nostalgic throwback for older listeners while feeling entirely fresh to younger ears. The result is a song that feels simultaneously like a time capsule and a brand-new invention.

Chart Dominance & Record-Breaking Run

Few pop songs in modern history have matched the sheer chart endurance of "Blinding Lights." Released in late November 2019 as the second single from After Hours, it went on to top the singles charts in more than forty countries, including the Weeknd's native Canada. In the United States, it claimed four non-consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming his fifth chart-topper in the country. Its longevity was extraordinary: it accumulated the most weeks in both the top five and top ten, and became the first track to maintain a top-ten position for an entire calendar year. For a brief stretch, it held the record for the longest-charting song in Hot 100 history, spending a total of ninety weeks on the chart. By November 2021, Billboard officially named it the best-performing song of all time on that list. Commercial certifications followed in kind—diamond from the RIAA and seven times platinum from the BPI—while the IFPI recognized it as the best-selling global single of 2020 and the top-selling track overall since then by stream-equivalent units. On Spotify, it is the most streamed song of all time and the first to cross both four and five billion streams.

The Music Video & Cinematic Vision

Director Anton Tammi brought a distinctly cinematic sensibility to the "Blinding Lights" video, shooting the entire piece over four consecutive nights. The narrative follows the Weeknd as he speeds through a city after being beaten by bouncers and forced onto the run—a plot that deliberately echoes the visual language of films like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Joker, and Casino. The pacing, the sense of reckless momentum, and the saturated nighttime palette all serve to immerse the viewer in a world that feels both urgent and dreamlike. Musically, the video also introduces a brief modulation to E♭ Dorian, with the tempo dropping for three and a half measures, a detail exclusive to the visual version. The track's live performances extended this energy across major platforms: the Weeknd performed it on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Saturday Night Live, before headlining the Super Bowl LV halftime show. It also became a fixture of his After Hours til Dawn Tour, cementing the song's place as both a studio landmark and a live spectacle.

The Making & Creative Doubt

The path to "Blinding Lights" was neither straightforward nor free of uncertainty. The Weeknd had announced his fourth album—tentatively called Chapter VI—as early as November 2018, yet the project sat largely dormant through 2019. After a five-month absence from social media, he resurfaced in late November 2019 with cryptic captions about starting a "new brain melting psychotic chapter." A Mercedes-Benz commercial first aired in Germany on November 24, featuring a brief clip of the track, before the full single dropped on November 29. Despite the eventual triumph, the Weeknd admitted in a Vanity Fair interview that he initially expected the song to be a commercial failure. His creative process, however, was deeply intentional. In a Variety interview, he compared his working relationship with Max Martin to a marriage, emphasizing that genuine collaboration requires patience and trust. In Billboard, he spoke openly about how 1980s artists shaped his sound from the very beginning, expressing gratitude that audiences were finally embracing that era's aesthetic. The song's lyrics, he explained in Esquire, capture the intoxicating desperation of wanting to reach someone at night—driven by loneliness, blinded by streetlights, unable to stop.