Abel Tesfaye returns to Toronto to kill The Weeknd

Unlike Taylor Swift’s meteorite-like crash touchdown within the sweaty metropolis of Toronto, there have been no friendship bead-wearing police horses at The Weeknd’s first exhibiting within the Six.

Instead, a extra subdued air surrounded Rogers Centre as followers funnelled in: Low-key Starboy tracks warbling into the 30 C drippingly-wet air blanketing the stadium within the coronary heart of The Weeknd’s hometown. 

But that does not imply an absence of pleasure, regardless of the climate.

“God damn, it’s hot,” Canadian producer and DJ Kaytranada even exclaimed, towelling himself off onstage throughout a well-done if not earth-shattering opening. 

That was as sweltering followers on the first of 4 sold-out nights within the 50,000-seat venue braved the warmth in requisitely darkish garments to match the R&B famous person infamously darkish music.

Just a day earlier than, Mayor Olivia Chow dubbed the previous days “The Weeknd weekend.” That was as a result of, she mentioned, “Abel (The Weeknd) Tesfaye represents the best of our city.” The Scarborough-raised artist additionally obtained a key to the town. 

And it was all simply earlier than viewers members, desirous to expertise what is usually nonetheless described as a once-in-a-lifetime live performance expertise, have been uncharacteristically chatty with journalists — throwing themselves into on-camera interviews as an alternative of ready for the insistent coaxing of harried producers. 

“Everyone here, we are The Weeknd,” a fan named Perry instructed CBC News. “He represents Canada.”

But as Tesfaye took the stage, the seemingly incongruous mixture of feelings immediately made sense. Decked in a black gown encrusted with glittering gold rhinestones and a golden half-mask, you can see he embodied that caustic mixture of the charismatic and subdued that, for anybody else, wouldn’t slot in the identical individual on the identical time. 

As he has confirmed since releasing nameless and unsettling dance-themed mixtapes within the 2010s all the best way to this seemingly final tour below The Weeknd moniker, that is the area the place Tesfaye thrives. While not retiring from music, he plans to no longer perform under the name he has develop into well-known for.

A return house

Quickly barrelling via traditional tracks The Abyss to Wake Me Up to After Hours, he was flanked by equally masked, enrobed backup dancers — shifting in unison round a slowly spinning golden statue of an enormous, nude girl (think about a feminine Oscars statuette, however with seen nipples). 

They stood beneath massive gold rings, in entrance of a mocked up golden skyline of a crumbling metropolis. Even Tesfaye’s microphone was gold, a very heavy-handed metaphor that, early on, he stumbled chaotically towards. 

While roughly 30 girls walked in sync across the statue after which behind to him, and as jets of fireplace shot up 20 toes into the air, Tesfaye held his fingers as much as the mic as if in prayer. None of them needed to dance and even transfer a lot to earn the deafening applause that got here subsequent, as Tesfaye revealed the tiniest little bit of his face, barely peaking excessive of the masks. 

“Well that’s a warm welcome home, isn’t it?” he requested to a different roar. 

It wasn’t the final name out to his hometown. Later, he remarked the stadium is the place he used to return to look at Blue Jays video games “as a little baby,” let loose an extended and prolonged “Toronto” in the course of his monitor Sacrifice and managed to sneak each CN Tower and Rogers Centre references into São Paulo. 

But the main focus was the gold, the ceremony and the performative reverence of it. The impact is spectacular if eerie. A consummate musical skilled with 4 Grammys below his belt and extra Junos than anybody however Anne Murray, Tesfaye is aware of methods to set a scene. 

He additionally is aware of methods to sing, and — greater than that — carry out. He by no means failed to steer the tens of hundreds of cheering attendants in music or simply rapturous applause. It all gives the look of some club-themed spiritual ceremony: A gigantic and enormously budgeted cultic worship service, besides right here the god is hedonism, intercourse and all of the extra outrageous scenes of Wolf of Wall Street. 

Of course, that is by design — each why The Weeknd can outline himself as a generational intercourse image with out gyrating and even revealing a sliver of his physique below saggy robes and ostensibly why he is selecting to depart the schtick behind after this tour. In his exhibits and music, he is enjoying a membership child, fame-obsessed semi-satirical character invented manner again in his debut mixtape House of Balloons days — itself a masks, Tesfaye defined in a 2013 Reddit AMA, he selected with the intention to disguise his title and, by extension, himself.

Vanity and nihilism

In individual, all of it comes collectively like a magic trick. At a Weeknd live performance, we’re each sick of materialism, and sick of being sick of it. We’re letting go of each inhibition, forgetting love, revelling in intercourse and giving up on self-control. It’s all an announcement about nihilism, you see. Or perhaps, it is not. 

“It seems exorbitant when it all ends. A pointless, uncomfortable exercise from an artist who believes vanity means no stone of excess can be left unturned,” music journalist Hanif Abdurraqib wrote of a 2013 Weeknd present in his guide They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. 

“The Weeknd tells the same tale: It’s never about love, but then again, how can it be about anything but love, even if the love is just the love you have for your own ravenous desires.” 

How a lot the separate entity of The Weeknd exists for Tesfaye to discover and mock his most self-destructive tendencies — as an alternative of simply revelling in them — is not precisely clear. You would’ve been exhausting pressed to search out any hints of displeasure from the seemingly ecstatic Tesfaye on Sunday. He hit hits outdated and new out of the park, and was grinning ear-to-ear as he held the microphone to just about fainting followers, screaming out the advert libs of Out of Time. 

Still, it is maybe a wierd message to model, as Chow did, the perfect of the town — and a wierd one to have drawn as many barely five-foot middle-schoolers as Sunday’s all-ages present did. 

At the identical time, it is a theme that has provided diminishing returns. There was the 2022 Los Angeles live performance by which Tesfaye infamously lost his voice due to stress. Then the ill-fated collection The Idol, a Tesfaye-fronted collection in regards to the relentless pursuit of fame that was widely panned by critics and even The Weeknd himself. 

And then there was Hurry Up Tomorrow, the absurdly, incomprehensibly silly filmic tie-in of his most up-to-date album. Intended to additional discover his falling-out-of-love with The Weeknd after the L.A. present, as an alternative it solely managed to compete with Megalopolis as probably the most offensively boring film to premiere within the final 12 months. 

But maybe these failures have been as a result of Tesfaye was performing to the incorrect crowd, on the incorrect stage. His messy, introspective and obscure metaphors work higher in music lyrics than dialogue; higher sung in entrance of a surprising pyrotechnic flame and fireworks present than on a movie display screen. 

If Sunday’s present proved something, it was that. And even when on the within he is completed with The Weeknd, it proved he can definitely nonetheless pretend it.