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He dropped out of high school when he was 17 and persuaded his best friend, La Mar Taylor, to join him. Scarborough was stifling, and he constantly plotted ways to leave. ‘‘Like a Coen brothers movie,’’ he said, staring out the window. Tesfaye found the stillness in Scarborough to be, by turns, bucolic and sinister. His father wasn’t in the picture, and the two haven’t spoken since he was a boy. They never married, and after they split up, Tesfaye’s mother moved with him to this dull expanse northeast of the city center. His parents emigrated from Ethiopia in the 1980s, when the country was reeling from civil war and drought, and came to Toronto. ‘‘It’s a small apartment,’’ he said, ‘‘about the size of this car.’’ The vehicle pulled into a parking lot behind a low-slung apartment complex, and he pointed at an upstairs window, to the flat he used to share with his mother and grandmother. one evening last December while being driven through Scarborough, a dreary suburban district of Toronto just a short ride from his luxury apartment downtown. Tesfaye was slumped in the back of his Mercedes S.U.V.
#The weeknd takes his drivers test full
His new album, ‘‘Beauty Behind the Madness,’’ is the end result of a year’s worth of molting old habits, a creative upheaval that has begun to teleport him from the margins right to pop’s center.īy taking his old, gloomy gestures and repackaging them in ecstatic, radio-friendly arrangements, he has made one of the most sonically ambitious pop albums of the year, full of swaggeringly confident music indebted to the arena-size ambition of the 1980s, from Guns N’ Roses to Phil Collins to Michael Jackson. ‘‘I felt I had to change who I was,’’ he says. But he began to wonder if there was another way. His approach to songwriting, both in subject matter and production choices, was characterized by obscurity and darkness. The old Weeknd was comfortably, even enthusiastically, numb - the poet laureate of ruinous nights ending in bleary sunrises. Still, he began to feel that he had hit a ceiling - a high one, and maybe even a sustainable one, but a ceiling nonetheless. By last year, he was a fringe superstar, selling out shows at huge venues like the Barclays Center, the Hollywood Bowl and the O2 Arena in London. Tesfaye slowly began revealing himself in 2011 with a handful of live performances. Their loyalty was to the songs and, in a way, to the idea of the Weeknd. His reticence was an asset - fans devoured the music without being distracted by a personality. The only photos of him in circulation were deliberately obscured he didn’t do interviews. When he began releasing music in 2010 - murky Dalí-esque R.&B., sung in an astrally sweet voice, vivid with details of life at the sexual and pharmacological extremes - Tesfaye chose to be a cipher. Until that song and, in a sense, that moment, Tesfaye had been a no-hit wonder: a cult act with millions of devotees and almost no mainstream profile.Įven though he had just performed for an audience of millions, Tesfaye was still, to many of them, a total stranger. He was scheduled to make a surprise cameo here at the end of a Grande medley.
#The weeknd takes his drivers test cracked
He’d just had his first flash of true pop success: ‘‘Love Me Harder,’’ his duet with Ariana Grande, the childlike pop star with the grown-up voice, cracked the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. Casually, Tesfaye did some vocal warm-ups and sat indifferently as his underutilized makeup artist dabbed foundation under his eyes and balm on his lips. It spills out at the sides of his head and shoots up over it, like a cresting wave.
#The weeknd takes his drivers test plus
He stands 5-foot-7, plus a few more inches with his hair, an elaborate tangle of dreadlocks that he has been growing out for years, more or less letting it go where it wants.
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Tesfaye, 25, was dressed down by comparison, in a black corduroy jacket and paint-splattered jeans (Versace, but still).
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![the weeknd takes his drivers test the weeknd takes his drivers test](https://www.nme.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/GettyImages-932147672-1392x884.jpg)
In the middle of it all, Abel Tesfaye, better known as the Weeknd, remained calm, slow motion to everyone else’s warp speed.Īllergic to these sorts of scrums, he found his way to his trailer to hang with his friends, five or so fellow Canadians, all of them art-goth chic, wearing expensive sneakers and draped in luxurious, flowing black. The scene backstage last November at the American Music Awards, that annual gathering of pop perennials and idiosyncratic arrivistes, was carnivalesque: Niall and Liam of One Direction toddled about trying to snap a picture with a selfie stick, while Zayn, their bandmate at the time, smoked coolly out of frame Ne-Yo was there in a leopard-print blazer two sizes too small Lil Wayne was wandering around, alone, wearing absurd shoes.