The 2010s File Feature
Might Not
Might Not: How Belly and The Weeknd Built a Quiet Anthem of Doubt "Might Not," released in 2016 by Ottawa-born rapper Belly featuring The Weeknd, arrived as …
01 The Story
Might Not: How Belly and The Weeknd Built a Quiet Anthem of Doubt
"Might Not," released in 2016 by Ottawa-born rapper Belly featuring The Weeknd, arrived as one of the more unexpected chart entries of that spring, drawing attention to a collaboration between two artists with deep roots in the same XO creative ecosystem and a shared aesthetic language that prioritized dark atmospherics over conventional hip-hop accessibility. The song's chart performance on the Billboard Hot 100, reaching number 68 and spending 17 weeks on the chart, demonstrated that there was genuine audience appetite for this harder-edged, more emotionally ambiguous strain of rap-R&B hybrids.
Belly, whose full name is Ahmad Balshe, was born in Ottawa, Ontario, to Jordanian parents and spent portions of his childhood in Jordan before returning to Canada. His path into the music industry was circuitous, involving early independent releases and regional recognition before he developed the professional relationships that would define his more commercially visible phase. His signing to XO Records, the label founded by The Weeknd, and to Roc Nation management gave him access to both creative collaborators and industry infrastructure that his earlier independent work had lacked.
The Weeknd, born Abel Tesfaye in Scarborough, Ontario, was by 2016 one of the most commercially dominant forces in popular music. His trilogy of mixtapes released between 2011 and 2012 had established him as a singular voice in R&B, and the transition to major-label releases with "Kiss Land" in 2013 and "Beauty Behind the Madness" in 2015 had propelled him to mainstream superstardom. "Beauty Behind the Madness" had produced two number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100, "Can't Feel My Face" and "The Hills," and had established The Weeknd as a commercially reliable artist capable of dominating multiple radio formats simultaneously. His appearance on "Might Not" represented not a star turn in the conventional sense but a genuine creative partnership rooted in a shared artistic vision.
The production on "Might Not" was crafted by Murda Beatz and Vinylz, two producers who had developed significant reputations within the Toronto and broader North American hip-hop production community. The instrumental is built around a dark, sparse framework: minor-key melodics, trap-influenced percussion that sits in the lower frequency range, and a sense of space that gives both Belly's verses and The Weeknd's hook room to breathe. The atmosphere is heavy without being claustrophobic, a quality that distinguishes it from more aggressive trap productions of the same period.
The song debuted on the Hot 100 on March 12, 2016, at number 100, and spent the following weeks climbing steadily before reaching its peak of number 68 on April 30, 2016. The 17-week run it achieved was remarkable for a track from an artist, Belly, who had not previously registered on the Hot 100 with anything like this kind of sustained momentum. The song served as both an introduction and a sustained commercial statement, keeping Belly's name in the chart conversation long enough to establish him as a genuine mainstream presence rather than a one-off beneficiary of his collaboration partner's popularity.
The music video, directed with a visual aesthetic consistent with the XO label's broader artistic identity, leaned into muted color palettes, urban nightscapes, and a general atmosphere of late-night menace. Both Belly and The Weeknd appear in the video, and the visual chemistry between them reinforced the sense that this was a genuine creative partnership rather than a transactional feature arrangement. The video circulated widely on music video platforms and YouTube, accumulating more than 85 million views and helping sustain the song's streaming numbers throughout its chart run.
Critical reception of the song was largely positive within the hip-hop and R&B press, with reviewers noting both Belly's commanding verse delivery and The Weeknd's ability to adapt his vocal style to a darker, harder-edged context than some of his more polished pop productions. Publications covering the XO aesthetic observed that the collaboration illustrated what the label's approach to music could produce at its best: a fusion of rap and R&B elements that refused easy genre categorization while remaining formally coherent and emotionally effective.
For The Weeknd, whose own releases during this period continued at a prolific pace, "Might Not" represented one of many collaborative projects that illustrated his commitment to nurturing the XO ecosystem rather than reserving his creative energy exclusively for solo work. His willingness to bring Belly's name alongside his own on a record that received significant promotional support from RCA and Roc Nation reflected the collaborative ethos that had characterized the early XO years.
Belly continued to build on the momentum generated by "Might Not" through subsequent releases, deepening his critical reputation even if mainstream radio success proved intermittent. The song remained a touchstone in discussions of the Toronto and broader Canadian hip-hop scene's reach during the mid-2010s, a moment when artists from that ecosystem were demonstrating that their influence extended well beyond the local market to shape the sound of global popular music.
02 Song Meaning
Uncertainty as Identity: The Themes of Belly and The Weeknd's "Might Not"
"Might Not" by Belly featuring The Weeknd is built on a grammar of conditional negation, an insistence on describing what the narrator will not or might not do rather than making positive declarations of intention. This structural choice gives the song an unusual psychological quality: rather than asserting confidence or vulnerability in the usual ways, it positions uncertainty and refusal as its central emotional statements. The title itself embodies this: "might not" is a phrase that denies commitment while leaving possibility technically open.
The song's relationship to romantic expectation is complicated and deliberately uncomfortable. The narrator addresses a partner or potential partner with a kind of brutal honesty that refuses to offer the reassurances that conventional love songs provide. There are no promises of fidelity, permanence, or emotional availability, and the song's refusal to offer these things is not presented as a failure or a regret but as a statement of self-knowledge. The narrator knows who he is and what he is capable of, and he communicates this rather than pretending otherwise.
This stance connects to a broader tradition within The Weeknd's catalog in particular, where romantic and sexual relationships are depicted with a psychological realism that acknowledges the damage that a certain kind of celebrity-adjacent lifestyle can do to the capacity for genuine intimacy. The persona constructed across The Weeknd's early work is one of someone who has traded conventional emotional development for extraordinary experiences, and who now finds himself unable to re-enter the relational world on ordinary terms. His contribution to "Might Not" inhabits this same territory, adding a layer of melancholy to what could have been a straightforwardly cold text.
Belly's verses bring a different but complementary energy to the song's thematic framework. His background as a rap artist who navigated the transition from underground credibility to mainstream visibility informs the specific concerns his verses articulate: the distrust of those whose loyalty is contingent on success, the awareness that relationships formed in the context of fame are structurally different from those formed before it, and the difficulty of knowing who or what to trust when the stakes have changed. These are themes with deep roots in hip-hop's tradition of financial and social scrutiny of the world success creates.
The production's atmospheric darkness is itself a meaningful thematic choice. The music creates an environment that feels night-time, private, and slightly threatening, a space in which the emotional disclosures of the lyrics feel appropriately intimate and raw. There is no daylight aesthetic here, no brightness that might soften the edges of what is being said. The sonic environment insists that the listener take the narrator's conditions seriously rather than filtering them through a more comfortable emotional framework.
The song also participates in the ongoing conversation within R&B and hip-hop about the ethics of transparency in romantic communication. Is it admirable to disclose one's limitations to a potential partner before expectations are formed? Or is the very act of articulating these limitations while continuing to pursue the relationship its own form of manipulation, using honesty as cover for behavior that would otherwise be indefensible? The song does not resolve this tension, and its refusal to resolve it is one of the things that makes it intellectually interesting beyond its atmospheric qualities.
The cultural context of 2015 to 2016 gave the song's themes additional resonance. A broader cultural conversation about emotional availability, communication in relationships, and what is sometimes called situationship culture was developing on social media, and "Might Not" fit neatly into that conversation as a piece of art that gave musical form to experiences many listeners recognized from their own lives. The song circulated in social media contexts precisely because it named something that people had experienced but struggled to articulate.
The collaboration between Belly and The Weeknd, two artists from the same creative ecosystem with shared aesthetic values, meant that the song's thematic content felt internally consistent rather than assembled from incompatible pieces. When both performers inhabit the same emotional world and the same sonic vocabulary, the listener can trust that the statements being made cohere into something unified rather than being pulled in contradictory directions. This coherence is one of the reasons the song works as well as it does, despite or perhaps because of its emotional difficulty.
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