February 16, 1990 – Abel Makkonen Tesfaye a.k.a. The Weeknd, Canadian singer & songwriter, is 33. Happy Birthday Sir |
Tracklist :
1 . Starboy (w/ Daft Punk)
2 . The Hills
3 . Can’t Feel My Face
4 . I Feel It Coming ft. Daft Punk
5 . Ariana Grande, Love Me Harder
6 . Save Your Tears
7 . Earned It [from Fifty Shades Of Grey]
8 . Blinding Lights
9 . Often
10 . Reminder
11 . Wicked Games
12 . Lust For Life (w/ Lana Del Rey)
13 . False Alarm
14 . Secrets
15 . Heartless
16 . You Right (w/ Doja Cat)
17 . Party Monster
18 . Call Out My Name
19 . M A N I A
20 . In Your Eyes
21 . Take My Breath
22 . In The Night
23 . King Of The Fall
24 . The Zone (w/ Drake)
25 . Tell Your Friends
26 . Rolling Stone
27 . Belong To The World
28 . Twenty Eight
29 . Sidewalks (w/ Kendrick Lamar)
30 . Lost in the Fire (w/ Gesaffelstein)
31 . Power Is Power (w/ SZA, Travis Scott)
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PROLOGUE
In the apartment, no one speaks English. They speak Amharic. Television offers something else, school imposes French, the street runs on standard North American English, but at home the language carries a precise elsewhere: a geography, a religion, a political memory whose episodes are left undescribed. The child learns very early that a voice can circulate without belonging entirely to one territory. No single language occupies the center. He moves from one to another the way one passes through rooms where the furniture is never the same.
The household is run by two women. The mother works, the grandmother prays, Ethiopian records spin. Aster Aweke, Mahmoud Ahmed, Tilahun Gessesse: not claimed influences, but daily presences. Orthodox services extend that sonic density—long chants, minor modes, stretched repetitions—a gravity without display. The mother comes from a country marked by war and dictatorship, but she chooses to pass on culture without saturating the family story with catastrophes. Silence is not ignorance; it is protection.
The father appears only intermittently. No spectacular rupture, no public conflict. Simply a regular absence. Later, Abel Tesfaye would sum it up with a dry phrase: “me and my mother.” The sentence calls for no psychological commentary; it describes a configuration. The environment is female, disciplined, stable on its own terms. The street is more fluid.
Scarborough is not a social tragedy; it is a functional periphery. French immersion first—speaking English can be punished—then repeated transfers in secondary school following disciplinary trouble. The schools change, the situation changes little. Absenteeism sets in, and so do the associations. The school system consolidates nothing; it fragments. At seventeen, he leaves high school. No manifesto against the institution, no speech about a thwarted calling. Just a departure. His friend La Mar Taylor leaves with him. An administrative decision more than a heroic one.
La Mar—with a Jamaican mother and an absent father—is not just a companion in drift. He will become a visual architect, image manager, co-founder of XO. Later, Hyghly Alleyne, another child of Caribbean immigration, will document the dark aesthetic of the early years. The initial core shares one condition: cultural periphery, absence of strong institutional capital, identity mobility. It is not an ideological collective; it is a convergence of drifting trajectories.
The departure from his mother’s home happens over a weekend and is never reversed. The pseudonym preserves the trace: “The Weeknd,” with one letter removed for legal reasons, as if the word too had to lose something along the way. Parkdale becomes the new ground. 65 Spencer Avenue: a subdivided Victorian house, mattresses on the floor, cables, continuous parties. It will become the “House of Balloons.” The night stretches on without a clear program. They survive more than they plan.
Livelihood is fragile: welfare, odd jobs, stolen food, eviction, temporary shelter. He will mention a few nights in detention and a “near miss with the law” as a discreet warning. Drugs circulate—cannabis, MDMA, cocaine, ketamine, codeine syrup—not as an artistic manifesto but as environment. He will call them a “crutch.” The first long songs, sometimes without a classic structure, are born in this dilated temporality where the hours no longer stand apart clearly. Nothing is staged; everything is empirical.
Before music becomes a main activity, he works at American Apparel. He folds clothes while his songs circulate anonymously online. One day, they play in the very store where he works. Customers listen without knowing that the artist is arranging the racks. Validation without a face. Anonymity is not shyness; it is strategy. Withdrawal creates attention.
Between the Orthodox home in Scarborough and the nocturnal shared house in Parkdale, there is no frontal opposition. There is suspension. Inside: discipline, liturgy, Ethiopian music; outside: nocturnal R&B, rap, instability. The two worlds do not cancel each other out; they coexist. In “The Hills,” a few measures in Amharic appear at the end. In “False Alarm,” a sample of Aster Aweke appears. Ethiopian influence is not displayed as an identity banner; it infiltrates the sonic texture. He will say that his way of singing owes more to those records heard in childhood than to an American soul tradition. Continuity is carried by the voice.
The instability does not concern culture alone. It concerns language, family, schooling, musical genre. Neither pure rap, nor classic soul, nor standard Canadian pop. The voice itself oscillates between fragility and control, falsetto and gravity. There is no declaration of intent, only a gradual organization of the interval.
The themes of the first mixtapes—blackout, unpaid rent, solitude, detached sexuality—reflect Parkdale more than Scarborough. Yet maternal discipline remains in the background: work, discretion, endurance. Later, during crises in Ethiopia, he will make major donations. Geographic distance never meant rupture. The diaspora is not decorative; it reappears when the context requires it.
One might look for a clear founding scene, a moment when everything shifts. There is none. There is an accumulation: multiple languages, an intermittent father, fragmented schools, a liturgical home, a nocturnal shared house, friends shaped by migrant trajectories as well, a pseudonym with a missing letter, cultivated anonymity. The system takes shape without proclamation.
“The Weeknd” is not a spectacular rebirth; it is a position. Neither fully rooted nor fully uprooted. Neither confessional nor purely hedonistic. Neither explicitly Ethiopian nor generically Canadian. An identity held in suspension, organized rather than endured.
What begins then is not the resolution of an inner conflict but the methodical use of a long-standing instability. Between Scarborough and Parkdale, between Amharic and English, between liturgy and the night, Abel Tesfaye does not choose a side. He builds an intermediate space. And that space, instead of closing in, becomes his field of work.