The Weeknd's Ethiopian Roots

The Weeknd's Ethiopian Roots

By Hannah Giorgis

At the end of May, the Weeknd (née Abel Tesfaye) released the visuals for his most recent single, "The Hills", a dark, almost discordant meditation on lust, drugs, and fame. The track, with its grating chords and vulgar lyrics, is jarring to the uninitiated. But to those familiar with his repertoire, the only twist in "The Hills" is how it ends: as the final chords fade, a woman’s voice, syrupy and sedate, closes with a lullaby of sorts—not in English, but in Amharic, the primary language of Ethiopia and the Weeknd’s own native tongue.

"Ewedihalew, yene konjo, ewedihalew/ yene fikir fikir fikir, yene fikir fikir fikir," the voice almost cries, an elegiac ending in the language the Ethiopian-Canadian singer grew up speaking with the grandmother who raised him. The closing, when translated directly, is a declaration of devotion that deviates from the rest of the song’s lustful antipathy: "I love you, my beauty, I love you/ my love love love, my love love love." The phrase is in many ways reflective of the world from which it comes: earnest, saccharine, and dramatic.

The Weeknd first performed "The Hills" back in April, during his closing set at the main stage of Coachella, altering the original lyric to "ewedishalew," reflecting the switch in gender from the sampled female singer’s voice to his own (in Amharic, statements must shift to accommodate their objects). The moment, captured on video and shared across the web, may have confused some Coachella attendees, but it sent his East African fanbase into overdrive.

Tesfaye first appeared on the R&B scene with a series of self-released albums in 2011—House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence—released together with additional tracks the following year as Trilogy. Initially reluctant to shed the cloak of anonymity that complemented the haziness of his music, the Weeknd remained reclusive for months, revealing himself as Tesfaye only after securing his major label deal.
But for his Ethiopian and Eritrean diasporic fanbase, Tesfaye’s voice itself (and the length of his songs) had long been a dead giveaway of the singer’s identity. His trademark vibrato, the characteristically pained whine that pervades much of Tesfaye’s music, draws from a long Ethiopian musical legacy of tortured pining. Imbuing our voices with the shaky pain of loss—romantic or otherwise—is a hallmark of Ethiopian musical tradition. Tesfaye, with his staccato wails and aching nostalgia, is a young, North American addition to a dynasty of melodramatic Ethiopian singers.

While "The Hills" is the first track Tesfaye has performed partly in Amharic, it isn’t the first song to feature heavy notes of his Ethiopian background. In February 2012, the Weeknd released a trippy, post-apocalyptic video for "The Knowing", from 2011’s House of Balloons. With its first scenes set in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, the video opens with visuals and audio from a speech by the country’s late Emperor, Haile Selassie I. Selassie, often valorized as a revolutionary in American hip-hop despite his dubious political legacy, makes appearances throughout.

Tesfaye, born in 1990, is the child of an Ethiopia that was irrevocably shaped by the violent overthrow of the Emperor. The Derg military regime, which rose to power in the 1970s, enacted years of unparalleled and indiscriminate violence, referred to as the Red Terror, after overthrowing the Emperor. The Weeknd’s video for "The Knowing", with its references to Selassie, can be read as an attempt to make sense of Ethiopia’s bloody, barren post-Derg landscape—a sort of new world poetics that draws from Ethiopia’s tradition of tizita, ballads centered on loss, memory, and love. Tesfaye’s voice then, with its drawn-out whimpers, functions as both love song and eulogy:

Unsurprisingly, Ethiopian youth in North America and Europe are among some of Tesfaye’s most vocal fans. Tesfaye’s Ethiopian fans rep him online and in their communities, often listening to his music only when away from the attentive ears of parents who would disapprove of his lyrics even and especially if they recognized him as Ethiopian. For these fans, his fame and rebellion from cultural expectations hold particular resonance. Children of a complexly displaced diaspora, his Ethiopian fanbase simultaneously mocks and magnifies Tesfaye’s position as the bad boy of our mythically unified community; when Tesfaye sings liquor-laced sex anthems in a voice so familiar, that seduction is homegrown (and all the more tantalizing because of it).

A common joke in the wake of Tesfaye’s ascendance to fame is that we are all related to him somehow, that he is the prodigal son or cousin or family friend of a god-sibling twice removed on your auntie’s side through marriage. Indeed, the chances of him being a distant relative to many of his habesha fans are not slim, and Tesfaye himself regularly references his Ethiopian-ness via social media, even double-tapping a joke from Instagram page @habeshacomedies that satirizes fans who try to chart him in their family trees.

Distant relation or not, the familiarity of Tesfaye’s strained vibrato makes him the inheritor of musical legacies that Abyssinia has birthed for generations, including Addis Ababa-based singer and activist Teddy Afro (née Tewodros Kassahun). The early 2000s saw the meteoric rise of Afro as both musical and political figure; his (sometimes controversial) music touches on love, loss, and liberation alike. Afro’s voice, omnipresent and recognizable across all of Ethiopia and its diaspora, bears a striking resemblance to the strained tenor of Tesfaye’s.

"Nigeregn Kalshign", from Afro’s 2005 Yasteseryal, is a mournful love song, a ballad whose lyrics predate and prefigure the existential cocktail of love and self-loathing that the Weeknd swirls throughout his own music. When translated directly, Afro’s lyrics are similarly emo: "If I leave you, I’ll be afraid to live/ After all, for how long will I be able to?"

While Afro has courted controversy with political statements, his PG-rated music can still be played in intergenerational Ethiopian social spaces without raising moral offense. Tesfaye in his almost paradoxical fusing of traditional Ethiopian musical modalities with a particular eroticism reads as shocking and inappropriate to the same conservative Ethiopian audiences who’d be instantly familiar with the provenance of his voice.

But the peculiar texture of the Weeknd’s fame reverberates beyond his ever-shifting representational power and the trippy titillation of his raunch. Tesfaye blends classical Ethiopian vocal conventions with lyrics that don’t shy away from strikingly (post-)modern anxiety and loneliness. His music is sinful and soulful, a soundtrack for dystopian, diasporic introspection and coked-out codependence alike. His voice itself, starched with intractable pain like so many Ethiopian singers who came before him, is a way back home.