First there is a glow between the skyscrapers. And then he doesn’t come, but his ghosts. Through the skyline of a dystopian metropolis, which is reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” as a backdrop on the stage of the Olympic Stadium, masked dancers scurry without faces onto an endless catwalk that divides the auditorium in half. The ghosts surround the metal statue of a robotic woman who can shoot lasers from her eyes and looks like she’s about to leap into the sky – it may also be a homage to the classic film.
And then he comes: The Weeknd. He trudges through the street canyons of his city. Some towers are missing stories, as if a storm had broken them in half. He wears a silver mask. He is MF Doom. He’s the beast. He’s an Avenger. The bass kicks in. And then the hits come. Because he doesn’t have just one of them. “Starboy” is one of the early highlights. This is the dance-pop that made him famous around the world, perhaps the artist of his generation. The sold-out Olympic Stadium bears witness to this. The masked man is celebrated frenetically.
Who is this The Weeknd hiding behind a silver mask for an hour at the start of his “After Hours Till Dawn Tour” concerts? The Guinness Book of Records, which is always quoted when attempting to quantify incomprehensible phenomena, states: The Weeknd is “statistically the most popular musician on the planet.” And this is justified by the number of listeners of the Canadian pop giant on Spotify per month: 111.4 million.
From the start, Abel Makkonen Tesfaye hid behind the pseudonym The Weeknd. This is how he summed up the termination of his school career at the age of 17: “Left on a weekend and never came home”. He quickly rose to become the messiah of a new R’n’B wave. What he always succeeds in doing is sounding familiar.
The appearance in Munich will probably have been the last of The Weeknd. He wants to keep making music, he says, but he wants to “kill” The Weeknd, his mask, his shield, his corset. In the future he will continue under his birth name, in parts of his social media channels he has recently called himself Abel Makkonen Tesfaye.
You can read a detailed review on Saturday at sz.de/muenchen