Understanding The Weeknd

This video is brought to you by CuriosityStream. If you sign up for CuriosityStream at the link in the description, you'll also get access to Nebula, a streaming service by and for independent creators like me. Pop stars love attention. Why wouldn't they? The more people talk about them, the more money they can make. Attention translates into ticket sales, streams, and engagement. And one of the easiest ways to get attention as a pop star is by letting everyone know your business. But this kind of celebrity is inherently unstable. Sooner or later, everyone cracks under the pressure. From Ariana Grande's incredibly prolific run during 2018, to basically the entirety of Kanye's career, we've seen again and again that intense fame places a massive burden on an artist's mental health. Yet many artists continue to trade their peace of mind and privacy for a key into the upper echelon. But there's one major exception I want to talk about today. An artist who, above his incredible talent for singing, songwriting, and production, is defined by his enigmatic persona. The artist I'm talking about is Abel Tesfaye, or as he's professionally known, The Weeknd. Of course, we do know a little about The Weeknd. He didn't just randomly pop out of the ground one day singing about cocaine in a Michael Jackson-esque falsetto. In reality, Abel Tesfaye was born in Toronto in 1990 and raised in Scarborough, a district on the east side of the city. His father left when he was very young and never returned, and so Abel was raised by his mother and grandmother who taught him how to speak the traditional Ethiopian language Amharic and took him to Ethiopian church service. Abel has talked about how he only saw his dad a few times growing up, but he didn't have any resentment towards him because he wasn't a mean or abusive man, just completely absent from his son's life. Abel started smoking weed when he was 11, and it didn't take long before he was experimenting with even harder drugs. I think it was during this time that the idea of The Weeknd began to take form. While we might not know much about Abel's youth, what we do know paints the perfect picture of a young man who, being an only child raised by a single mother, was mostly left alone during his childhood. And from that solitude came a sense of confidence that only children often develop as they navigate the world without siblings, and in Abel's case, without two parents. In fact, in 2007, at the age of 17, Abel dropped out of high school and moved out on his own to the Parkdale section of Toronto without telling anyone. This is, in fact, where the name The Weeknd comes from in the first place, from the time Abel left home one weekend and never went back. It's an origin story that tells a lot about his character while simultaneously being secretive and mysterious. Abel, unlike many artists, didn't release a long list of roughshod EPs or mixtapes before finding his voice. He had no real musical track record until 2010 when he met Jeremy Rose, a producer who was working on his idea for a dark R&B project. They made a few songs together, and Rose let Abel keep the tracks for himself, as long as he promised that he would give Rose credit if he ever released them. A few months later, Abel uploaded three songs to YouTube under the name The Weeknd, and for a few different reasons, the songs started getting a lot of attention online. Let's break that down real quick. Firstly, I think one of the biggest things that helped Abel blow up with just three songs out was anonymity. Literally no one knew who he was, even to the point where in Anthony Fantano's review of the first Weeknd mixtape, he incorrectly refers to The Weeknd as a group. There were countless articles dedicated to decoding the clues left by Abel on social media or in his songs. But the truth of the matter is that Abel wasn't exactly trying to hide who he was, rather he was just being himself, and as we learn from the story about how he got his name, he had always been a quiet, secretive guy. The Weeknd also got his start as a protege of Drake, who was only a few years into his own career, but already a huge celebrity in Toronto. The story goes that Drake showed up to The Weeknd's first live performance, asking him about a potential collaboration after the show. And so The Weeknd's big break came after just a year and a half in the industry when he contributed to four songs on Drake's Take Care, as a writer and a featured artist. But during the entire first year or two of his career, The Weeknd didn't take any interviews at all despite the huge buzz he was building in the music industry. Instead he communicated with fans on Twitter. He released two more free mixtapes under his own XO label in 2011, Thursday and Echoes of Silence. After releasing a third mixtape, he compiled and officially released them together as Trilogy, a compilation album that, despite containing only a few new songs, peaked at number four in the US and number five in Canada. At this point the buzz around The Weeknd was so massive that his unofficial XO label was signed to Republic, one of the biggest divisions of UMG, the largest record label in the world. At this point The Weeknd was one of the fastest growing artists around. He played Coachella, toured North America and Europe, and his first album, Kissland, peaked at number two on the Billboard 200. In an interview with Complex, Abel talked about what the name Kissland meant to him and how its meaning manifested itself throughout the album's lyrics and production. He said, I think about Kissland, I think about a terrifying place. It's a place I've never been to before that I'm very unfamiliar with. A lot of it is inspired by filmmakers like John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, and Ridley Scott, because they know how to capture fear. That's what Kissland is to me, an environment that's just honest fear. I don't know who I am right now, and I'm doing all these outlandish things in these settings that I'm not familiar with. To me it's the most terrifying thing ever. So when you hear the screams in the record, and you hear all these horror references, and you feel scared, listen to the music because I want you to feel what I'm feeling. Kissland is like a horror movie. And by the way, if you're interested in winning a vinyl copy of Beauty Behind the Madness, go follow me on Instagram at volks.geist after the video and check out my latest post for instructions on how to win the vinyl. The Weeknd released Beauty Behind the Madness in 2015. The album featured interesting production with distorted beats and an all-around sense of darkness. And in my opinion, it'll probably go on to be one of the defining albums of the 2010s. When people look back and want to know what music was like in the 2010s, the same way we might listen to Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin today, I think Beauty Behind the Madness is going to be one of those kinds of albums. It just encapsulates the sound of its time very well in terms of production, writing, subject matter, and presentation. And Beauty Behind the Madness wasn't just good. Even though it's my favorite album by The Weeknd so far, it also sold ridiculously well. It debuted at number one in eight countries, selling more than 400,000 copies in its first week. To put it simply, at this point The Weeknd was just massive. He became the first male artist to simultaneously hold the top three spots on the Billboard R&B chart and he headlined three festivals in 2015. Lollapalooza, the Hard Summer Music Festival, and the Bumbershoot Festival. But his journey to achieve artistic integrity while also dominating the popular music charts wasn't over yet. Even though The Weeknd has only released one album in the last four years, he's hardly been dormant. His third album, Starboy, went number one again, featuring collaborations with Daft Punk, Future, Kendrick Lamar, and Lana Del Rey. While critics didn't consider it quite as innovative or original as Beauty Behind the Madness, it once again sold in massive quantities, with 350,000 copies sold in the first week. Starboy won a Grammy for Best Urban Album of 2016, making it The Weeknd's second time winning that award. The album racked up billions of streams on Spotify, especially on the Daft Collaboration's Starboy and I Feel It Coming. In the last couple of years, The Weeknd also signed NAV to his XO label, worked on the Black Panther soundtrack album, and released My Dear Melancholy, a darker, minimal project that focused on his experiences with a few high-profile yet private relationships he had been through, specifically those with Bella Hadid and Selena Gomez. My Dear Melancholy was in some ways the opposite of its predecessor, Starboy. Whereas Starboy was an hour long with 18 tracks, My Dear Melancholy features only seven songs with a runtime of 25 minutes. And despite its differences, it hit number one on the Billboard 200 again, being the shortest album to do so in eight years. The Weeknd's fourth album, After Hours, was released yesterday, and its leading singles have already achieved massive streaming numbers in the hundreds of millions. He continues to stand alone as one of the single most successful artists of our generation, and more than that, his brand is amazingly strong. Songs by The Weeknd have an overwhelming air of darkness, tension, longing, and above all, an altered state of mind. His music has risen above the pack as our generation's soundtrack for drinking, hooking up, getting high, or going out. The things that we do despite knowing, deep inside, it might be better if we didn't partake. And The Weeknd has been consistently working on mastering that persona of secrecy and darkness ever since he walked out of his mom's house in Toronto for the last time at the age of 17. While The Weeknd is one of the most popular performers alive today, especially at festivals like Coachella and Lollapalooza, the popularity of music festivals is a fairly recent development for Americans and the Western world in general. In 1952, the Newport Jazz Festival introduced the idea of music festivals to Americans, and just 17 years later, the popularity of the Woodstock Festival in New York ensured that American music festivals weren't going away anytime soon. In fact, it spawned a massive commercial industry that continues to this day. And you can learn more about Woodstock on CuriosityStream. Capturing Woodstock is a fascinating documentary that shows you what it was like at the very beginning of festivals as we know them today. And CuriosityStream is the best place to find documentary content online, with thousands of documentaries on a whole host of topics. And not only that, but if you sign up to CuriosityStream at the link in the description, you'll also get access to Nebula, where you can watch original content by creators like myself, Polyphonic, Real Engineering, or Polymatter. I even produced my own episode for Nebula's original working title series on the legendary anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. Nebula is a great way to find out more about the world around you, and it's also a great way to support creators who are looking for freedom from the constraints of YouTube. 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