“It was pure,” he says. “It was natural. It was a singing voice. People that I played it for were like, ‘Holy shit,’ you know?”

When he was 17—as The Weeknd’s followers will know as part of his origin story—he moved out of his mother’s home. His mother stood and watched him pack and cried; Abel was filled with self-loathing but wasn’t able to express that, or anything else. In the biopic version of his life story, he moved out because he knew he was going to be a star. He was taking a gamble on himself. But that’s not how it happened.

“It was so scary, man,” he says. “If I had been living in L.A., and it was like, ‘Hollywood, here I come…’? But it’s different. I wasn’t even from Toronto. And even making it from Toronto—this is before Drake and everything—it’s not really a believable, realistic thing.

“I don’t think I did it to make it. I don’t think I was like, ‘I’m leaving. I’m going to go become a star.’ It was more like, ‘I need to get the fuck out of here and live another life.’ You know? Be somebody else. Not a star, just someone else.”

Suit jacket, $2,500, pants, $790, Dior Homme. T-shirt, $128, Wilhelmina x Hiro Clark. Sneakers, $65, Puma. Necklace, Chrome Hearts. Leather jacket, $1,595, Burberry. T-shirt, $1,225, Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci. Jeans, $218, J Brand. Boots, $1,175, Giuseppe Zanotti Design.

You have to remember that when the Weeknd became the Weeknd, he was a figure of complete anonymity, just a guy transmitting genre-melding atmospheric songs from inside his apartment. So when he emerged from out of that darkness, he had to learn how to sing in front of people. He had to learn how to perform. I have to imagine that growing that tree-person hair was a function of needing some armor against being seen; he could wear that hair as his identity, without it revealing anything real about him.

“Listen,” a record executive familiar with his career said to me, “it all comes from him—the music, who he is. Those first records—he made them by himself. I don’t know what you think, but the music industry is dominated by radio play. Everyone talks about Spotify and the Internet and how everything’s been changed and anyone can be a star and everyone’s connected individually with their audience. It’s not true. It’s almost always radio play. He was playing to sold-out 2,000-, 3,000-seat arenas, and he had no songs at all on the radio. And that’s just very unusual. And I’m telling you, it all came from him. It was a sound and a music and a lifestyle that he dreamed up.”

Sex is probably The Weeknd’s greatest subject—cocaine is a close second. But it’s not like regular sex (or drugs). He sings about perversion, darkness, and ecstatic releases that you should probably feel bad about. How it feels to know you’re only getting high/sleeping with a groupie to try to fill some unfillable psychic hole, so we’re bound to be disappointed, but fuck it let’s do it anyway. How it feels to get a blow job while driving a luxury automobile (as in these lyrics from “Ordinary Life” on Starboy): Heaven in her mouth, got a hell of a tongue / I can feel her teeth when I drive on a bump / Fingers letting go of the wheel when I cum /…David Carradine, I’ma die when I cum.

The Weeknd is almost certainly the only pop singer of his generation, or any generation, who sings beautiful love songs that pivot on the death by auto-erotic asphyxiation of a 72-year-old former television star in a closet in a Swissôtel in Bangkok.

He also says that the content of his songs derives mostly from his personal experience.

I’m the kind of guy that would have kids before getting married. The first thing would be kids. Marriage is scary to me, man.

I ask him a little bit about that sexual history he’s recorded in our national pop-music archives. What is it like to kind of emerge from anonymity as a shy Toronto kid in 2011 and suddenly be accosted by probably a lot of fans who want to sleep with you? What are the effects of that? Does the constant solicitation do anything weird to you? Does it alter the way you look at sex? Does it warp your humanity?

He challenges the idea of being constantly propositioned for sex. “I don’t think that’s real,” he says.

But it has to do something to you. Like, take Leonardo DiCaprio, a gentleman who has probably had more, and more varied, sexual invitations than any single human man in the past 20 years. How does that affect someone? Can the act still be meaningful? In order to even be interested at this point, does he need like a dead body or someone with the hindquarters of a goat and the head of the Mona Lisa or something?

Abel says, “I don’t think it’s like that. I know Leo and—when Leo parties, he parties. But when he works, nobody works like this guy.”

Does the nature of, say, groupie interactions give you an oversize sense of self?

“Listen, I’m not walkin’ around like fuckin’ Idris Elba, know what I mean? It’s like…” and here he points at himself: “You’ll probably describe me in this fuckin’ thing. I’m not—look at me, this is who I am. I’m not gonna walk into the club and be like, ‘Oh shit, I’m the sexiest guy in here.’ The reason why they want to fuck with me is because of what I do [in the studio]. So I’d rather just focus on doing that.”

But there does seem to be something about that dynamic that messes people up. I said: Look at Donald Trump. Maybe Donald Trump is sui generis, and whatever type of screwed-up that guy is, well, that’s special to him. But there’s another explanation that goes: After a while, famous men start to see the world that way: When you’re a star, they let you do it.

“I don’t know anybody that would do that,” he says. “I know a lot of people in the industry, and I don’t know anybody. Like, a random girl that, like, you just spoke to? No. I mean… No. How do you even grab a pussy? Like, is it even grabbable?”

He shakes his head.

“America, man. They never fail you.”

Jacket, $1,060, pants, $720, Prada. Shoes, $1,150, Louis Vuitton. Socks, Pantherella. Necklace, Chrome Hearts. Jacket, $2,095, jeans, $325, Emporio Armani.

A month before we meet, Abel and the model Bella Hadid broke up. He doesn’t want to talk about it. He says, though, that while he thinks he wants to have kids, marriage he’s not so sure about.

“I feel like I’m the kind of guy that would have kids before getting married,” he says. “The first thing would be kids. Marriage is scary to me, man.”

But he also says that he’s in a different place, psycho-sexually, than he was when he was the person in all those song lyrics.

“Right now,” Abel says, “I’m much more, like, self-regulating than I was four years ago, when I first started getting everything and enjoying life. I don’t focus on it as much as I used to. You know what I mean? Before, it’s like, ‘Holy fuck—this is amazing.’ Right now, it’s like a good song turns me on way more. Like, that gets me horny, like, literally gets me horny.”

The Gospel According to Chance the Rapper Look at Lil Chano from 79th.

It’s not just the hair. That Sex God who drives around in a $1 million McLaren with a live black leopard in the passenger seat (as The Weeknd does in the video for “Starboy”)? The man who sits in the Aeron chair at Conway Recording Studios just is not that person. In conversation, Abel doesn’t even swear that much. When I ask him what he thinks the craziest, dirtiest lyrics on his records are—lyrics which, mind you, he sings to hundreds of millions of men, women, and children from the stages and Spotifies of the world—he says: “I’m not going to say!”

But is it all real, I ask, the stuff you sing about?

“Yeah, a lot of it is experience,” he says. “House of Balloons [his first mixtape, on which he says 'She give me sex in a handbag / I get her wetter than a wet nap'] is based off of a one-bedroom apartment I shared with all my friends. And we did what we were doing and then put it into music.

“And then the newer stuff,” he says, “is like that character in this lavish lifestyle, you know?”

Because, of course, he can’t sing about what it’s like to live in a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto anymore. Now the character he’s playing is an actual pop star.

How did you feel about pop music, I ask, when you were making the Trilogy mixtapes?

“I hated it,” he says. “And then the sound of Trilogy became pop music.” Later he says, “I’m mainstream. I’ll obviously have those purists who will be like, ‘Okay, this guy is too popular, this fuckin’ sounds nothing like Trilogy, so this fuckin’ sucks.’ ”

I wonder if that kind of criticism might make him want to disappear. Do you care about that? I ask.

“No,” he says. “I don’t care at all.”

Devin Friedman is GQ’s editorial director

This story originally appeared in the February 2017 issue with the title “The King of Sex Pop”.

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