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The Weeknd · S1 E4
The Come Up
Petty crime, drugs, and the years Abel never talks about in interviews
Toronto, 2009. Abel Tesfaye has no address, no legal income, and a relationship with substances that is accelerating faster than anything else in his life.
Mobb Deep -- Shook Ones Pt. II (official music video, 1995). The coldest production in hip-hop history over the realest street rap ever recorded. This is the sound Abel carried in his headphones while navigating the same kind of paranoid, survival-mode nights in Toronto that Havoc and Prodigy lived in Queensbridge.
Shook Ones Pt. II -- Mobb Deep (1995)
Produced by Havoc, "Shook Ones Pt. II" is built on a piano sample so cold it sounds like winter itself. The drums hit like footsteps in an empty stairwell, and Prodigy's opening line became one of the most quoted in rap history. The Weeknd's production aesthetic, claustrophobic beats, paranoid atmosphere, the feeling that something dangerous is always just off-screen, lives in the same emotional space that Havoc built on this track.
TAP TO REVEAL: What does XO actually stand for?
“Everything I went through ended up in the music. That's why I don't need to talk about it.”
— Abel Tesfaye, Rolling Stone, October 2015
The Voice
It started at house parties. Abel would sing over beats playing from a laptop, and people who had been talking all night would go silent. He had no training, no stage presence, no plan. But the voice was undeniable, and it was the first thing in his life that worked purely on talent.
Initiation -- The Weeknd
"Initiation" from Echoes of Silence is the closest Abel has come to putting his street years on record. Over suffocating production, he describes a ritual of excess and control, pulling someone into a world they are not prepared for. The song is a warning wrapped in a seduction.
What does Abel credit with pulling him off the streets?
Abel has a voice and a city that cannot stop listening. Now he needs someone who can turn that voice into a sound no one has ever heard before. Next: the producer who hands him the keys.
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