It’s hard to imagine a time when The Weeknd wasn’t always one of the biggest pop stars in the world. Nowadays, he’s always extremely visible. Beyond the music, he plastered himself on movies and an HBO TV show. To think there was a point where no one knew what he looked like. But back in 2011, the mind behind House of Balloons was completely anonymous. People spent months trying to put a face to the angelic voice singing about drug binges and sex.
But by 2012, The Weeknd erased some of the mystery around him by finally revealing what he looked like. How come he didn’t do that from the start? It all stems from insecurity, something that would only amplify when faced with the prospect of celebrity. In a 2013 interview with Complex, the Toronto-born crooner admitted that he never did interviews before because he didn’t have anything to say. But eventually, he shed that line of thinking by remembering his musical heroes have done interviews.
“Honestly, I want to do interviews now because it’s one thing that I haven’t mastered. Even Prince did interviews. Michael did interviews,” The Weeknd told the outlet. “And I can tell in the interviews they’re uncomfortable. Why are they doing this? Because they feel like they have to do it to be a complete artist. I felt like this was my time. And maybe I wouldn’t have done it if I thought you were an a**hole. I probably would have been like, ‘F**k this guy.’”
The Weeknd Explained Why He Decided To Stop Hiding His Face
The artist, born Abel Tesfaye, admitted that the decision wasn’t completely intentional. Part of it had to do with sidestepping the pressures of fame. All he wanted was for fans to engage with the music first, rather than the person. However, he was also a bit hesitant out of sheer insecurity.
“In the beginning, I was very insecure. I hated how I looked in pictures… Like crop me out of this picture right now. I was very camera-shy,” The Weeknd admitted. “People like hot girls, so I put my music to hot girls, and it just became a trend. The whole ‘enigmatic artist’ thing, I just ran with it. No one could find pictures of me. It reminded me of some villain s**t. But you can’t escape the Internet. There are super fans, and I was really testing their patience. At the end of the day, you can’t deny the music. That was my whole thing: I’m going to let the music speak for itself. I’ll show them that this is what I do. But I’m very good at letting s**t slide.”
The craziness that comes with fame had already hit The Weeknd at that point. But doing press for his album Kiss Land at the time allowed him something of a fresh start. “That’s why I didn’t want to mix and master ‘House Of Balloons’ or ‘Thursday’ or ‘Echoes Of Silence’. I didn’t feel like they were my albums. Those were my mixtapes,” he stressed.
The post The Weeknd Once Explained Why He Spent His Early Career in Anonymity: ‘I’m Going To Let the Music Speak for Itself’ appeared first on VICE.
