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The Weeknd · S1 E2
Scarborough
Growing up in one of Toronto's toughest neighborhoods, caught between Ethiopian tradition and Canadian streets
Makkonen Tesfaye walks out of their Scarborough apartment and does not come back. Abel is a toddler, and the silence where a father should be will echo through every song he ever writes.
2Pac -- Dear Mama (official music video, 1995). Tupac wrote the definitive song about being raised by one woman in a tough neighborhood while the father stayed gone. Abel's story is a mirror image: a grandmother instead of a mother, Scarborough instead of Oakland, Amharic instead of English.
Dear Mama -- 2Pac (1995)
Built around a sample from the Spinners' "Sadie," "Dear Mama" became 2Pac's most personal hit and was inducted into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2010. Tupac acknowledges his mother's crack addiction in the same breath he thanks her for keeping him alive. That honesty, the willingness to love someone without editing their flaws, is the same thing Abel would later bring to his own music. Both men were raised by a single woman in a neighborhood with very few exit routes.
Who primarily raised Abel Tesfaye after his father left the family?
TAP TO REVEAL: How did Abel teach himself to sing?
Scarborough After Dark
Scarborough in the late 1990s was a place of quiet tension: immigrant families working double shifts while their children navigated a neighborhood where the pull of the streets was never more than a block away. By his early teens, Abel was staying out late, skipping school, and discovering that the darkness he would later sing about was not a persona but a lived experience.
Lonely Star -- The Weeknd
"Lonely Star" from House of Balloons captures the isolation that defined Abel's childhood: a kid in Scarborough, raised by a grandmother who spoke a different language, father gone, alone in a way that no one around him could see. The ethereal production floats above a heartbeat-like pulse, and Abel's vocal is distant, like someone singing from inside a memory.
Scarborough Town Centre
The commercial hub of Scarborough, surrounded by the apartment complexes and public housing where families like the Tesfayes built new lives.
The apartment is getting smaller and the streets are getting louder. Abel is a teenager now, skipping school and staying out past midnight. Next: the night Abel leaves home for good.
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