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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 a single woman while the father stayed gone. Abel's story rhymes with it: a grandmother instead of a mother, Amharic instead of English, but the same absence at the center.
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 doing everything in her power to hold a family together.
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 is one of the largest and most diverse suburbs in North America: Ethiopian restaurants next to Trinidadian bakeries next to Korean barbecue joints, immigrant families from dozens of countries building new lives side by side. But every city has its corners, and the blocks around Abel's apartment had their own after-dark rhythm. By his early teens, he 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.
Lonely Star, The Weeknd (2011)
Read the lyrics while you listen. Every line reflects the quiet isolation of a boy raised in a language he barely understood, reaching out for connection in a house where silence was the loudest sound.
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 nights are getting longer. Abel is a teenager now, skipping school and staying out past midnight. Next: the night Abel leaves home for good.
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