The Weeknd's Scarborough

Abel Makkonen Tesfaye was born in Toronto in 1990 to Ethiopian immigrant parents and grew up in Scarborough, dropping out of high school as a teenager. Performing as the Weeknd, he uploaded his first songs to YouTube in December 2010 in near-total anonymity, giving no interviews and showing his face rarely, which fed a mystique around a set of moody, R&B-influenced mixtapes — House of Balloons, Thursday and Echoes of Silence, all released free in 2011 — that critics credited with reshaping the sound of mainstream R&B over the following decade.

From mixtapes to arenas

Toronto producer and OVO founder Drake was an early, public champion of the Weeknd's music, helping introduce it to a wider audience, and the two have remained closely linked in discussions of the "Toronto sound" that emerged in the early 2010s. The Weeknd went on to headline the Super Bowl LV halftime show in 2021 and became one of the best-selling music artists of his generation, while keeping Scarborough and Toronto as consistent reference points across his lyrics and public identity.

Sources

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — The Weeknd
• Wikipedia — The Weeknd

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