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The Weeknd is dominating the pop and R&B charts right now, and recently sat down with Rolling Stone magazine to let us in on his mysterious world.
Check out some excerpts from the interviewing where Weeknd discusses drugs, losing his virginity, Michael Jackson and more.
On being mysterious and press shy:
“We live in an era when everything is so excessive, I think it’s refreshing for everybody to be like, ‘Who the fuck is this guy?'” Tesfaye says. “I think that’s why my career is going to be so long: Because I haven’t given people everything.”
Spend just five minutes with him, though, and he reveals himself: sweet, soft-spoken, surprisingly earnest. When I tell him he’s not what I expected, he nods. “When people meet me, they say that I’m really kind — contrary to a lot of my music.”
On Michael Jackson:
“At home, if it wasn’t Ethiopian music, it was Michael. He was our icon.”
On dropping out of school and being insecure in his intelligence:
“Me not finishing school — in my head, I still have this insecurity when I’m talking to someone educated,” he says. “I don’t want them looking at me like this fucking retard — no disrespect.” For months, no one even knew if the Weeknd was a person or a group. That’s when Tesfaye realized he “could run with the whole enigmatic thing,” he says now. “If it backfired, I probably would have been doing interviews. But people were kind of liking me being a fucking weirdo.”
On his hair:
“I want to be remembered as iconic and different,” he says. “So I was like, ‘Fuck it — I’m gonna let my hair just be what it wants.’ I’ll probably cut it if it starts interfering with my sight. I can kind of see it right now. But if I cut it, I’d look like everyone else. And that’s just so boring to me.”
On drugs:
“I never needed detox or anything,” he says. “But I was addicted in the sense of ‘Fuck, I don’t want to spend this day without getting high.'”
Read the full interview here.
