Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty Images
“Wow,” Abel Tesfaye remarked while surveying the crowd from the stage at Madison Square Garden in the middle of his concert last night. “We came a long way from the Bowery.”
He was referring to the Bowery Ballroom, where he played his first New York show as The Weeknd back in 2012. At the time he was known mostly for his Drake connections and his breakthrough popularity with otherwise R&B-averse white indie rock fans, but now he returns a fully fledged superstar–probably the biggest breakout success story of 2015–who’s taken four songs to number one in the past year. The Madness Fall Tour 2015 is clearly Weeknd’s victory lap, and the fans that packed into a sold-out Madison Square Garden last night were deliriously happy to come along for the ride for a couple hours.
Tesfaye’s proud of his outsider roots: He launched his career with free mixtapes packed with songs that sample source material like Siouxsie and the Banshees and that discuss a multitude of different kinds of drugs and ways of doing them in endless and minute detail. The ups and downs of his early career, when his promising debut album turned out to be an artistic and commercial disappointment, have helped him hang on to that underdog aura even as he’s climbed to the top of the pop world. He’s the rare kind of cake-eating artist who can pack three nights’ worth of arena shows with people who still feel connected to the guy who played the Bowery, even if they weren’t actually there. (That includes the squad of suit-clad millennial bros in the row behind me who sang along to every word of every song in Tesfaye’s set, who I think were actually in the row in front of me when he played Barclay’s last year, except they were shirtless that time.)
Part of the reason that Tesfaye’s been able to make the leap into superstardom while holding onto his indie cred is that while he’s made adaptations in order to up his pop appeal, he hasn’t compromised his core identity–”that nigga with the hair / singing bout popping pills, fucking bitches, living life so trill,” as he puts it on Madness’s “Tell Your Friends.” That includes ballsy moves like making his big, Max Martin-assisted pop number that represented a real make-or-break moment in his career into a catchy song about cocaine addiction, or getting the line “When I’m fucked up, that’s the real me” on the Billboard Top Ten, or releasing a special edition PAX vaporizer as a tour souvenir.
It also means indulging some of Tesfaye’s less trill quirks. Despite the fact that he’s the center of attention on a huge arena tour, he still only has about four dance moves, including his Michael Jackson-style stomps, a wide-legged hip shake that looks a lot like Elvis in “Jailhouse Rock,” and a high-knees running-in-place thing. He’s also still irrepressibly emo (he’s claimed that “The Weeknd” is supposed to be a shortened version of “The Weakened” and not “The Weekend”), and the past couple times I’ve seen him he’s brought along a hoodie-clad guitarist whose glammy shredding injected into bummer anthems makes his concerts feel at moments like a My Chemical Romance show.
But even Tesfaye’s newer and much more mainstream fans seem totally happy to let him be himself. They don’t need him to learn complicated choreography or bring along a bunch of backup dancers or tamp down his pyrotechnics-loving headbanger side. If anything, he’s bringing them to his own eccentric level. Partway through his set last night he brought out a rendition of “House of Balloons / Glass Table Girls” from his debut mixtape House of Balloons, and on the choruses he had an entire sold-out arena singing along with unrestrained joy to the Siouxsie and the Banshees song it samples. From where I was sitting, it felt like we were all winning.
Miles Raymer is just trying to live for the moment. Follow him on Twitter.
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