Slaiby, born in Ghazir, Lebanon, during the civil war of the 1970s and ’80s, spent much of his early life in a bomb shelter. He fled to Montreal, then Ottawa alone at 16 and spoke little English when he arrived there. There, he meets a neighbor named Ahmad Balshe – a Palestinian-Canadian rapper who would eventually become XO artist Belly – who introduced him to Esmailian, whose own family emigrated from Tehran amid the Iranian revolution.
By the early 2000s, the three were doing business together, as Slaiby and Balshe co-founded hip-hop / R&B label Capital Prophet Records (Esmailian was head of street promotions and then became artist manager). Three hundred miles west, in Toronto, Tesfaye and Taylor chased their own. Educated by single moms in the city’s Scarborough suburb, they were, as Tesfaye puts it today, ‘basically homeless’ high school dropouts who posted their music on YouTube and Facebook – without his face on it. “We played that secret for about a year or so,” Taylor says, “until we got to the point where we could no longer hide his face because he was just so famous.”
In 2010, Esmailian lives in Miami and works to break Belly in the hip-hop scene in the city. But when a friend sent him a few tracks by an emerging artist from Toronto who calls himself The Weeknd, he dropped everything and booked a flight to Canada for the next day. “This child is ahead of his time,” Esmailian recalls. “I knew it right away.”
Esmailian and Tesfaye met in the first of a few nights together in the city one night in Toronto with some mutual friends the night Esmailian landed. The pair quickly became friends, and with The Weeknd’s debut mix band, Balloon House, about to blow up, Esmailian becomes ‘the driver, the road driver, security and the driver’. By the end of 2011, Tesfaye had released two more mixes, and the hype surrounding him had increased accordingly. When he hung out at Balshe’s apartment one evening around this time, he and Esmailian met Balshe’s neighbor, Slaiby. “La Mar and Abel went through a difficult time,” says Slaiby. “They had another team that messed up their affairs. The songs fly. Their careers flew. But their business was in a danger zone because they did not have the right team. ”
“We surrounded ourselves with people who thought they knew everything and literally destroyed our chances,” Tesfaye explains. Slaiby’s more pragmatic approach – “You get what I’m good at, and I tell you where to do everything I’m not good at,” he says – appealed and he and Esmailian took Tesfaye out of his bad case . They become The Weeknd’s co-managers, and soon after, the four men form XO.
Early on, they realized that taking risks – and working on their own timeline – often made sense. The Weeknd’s ‘whole mysterious aesthetic’, as Taylor puts it, meant that his music had to speak for itself. “I think that’s really what’s captivating everyone and dropping Abel into the stratosphere,” Taylor continues. The buzz soon translated into huge potential paychecks, but the XO crew did not jump on them: When an Australian promoter presented a $ 160,000 concert, they passed it on and others like to play clubs in Canada instead. . “I knew how important it was to build the tour industry,” says Esmailian. ‘At that point we could have gone to step four or five, but I knew we had to start at step one. We kept 500 people, but there were 2,000 people outside trying to get in. ‘
When important labels inevitably began to spin, the foundation became a leverage effect. Among those interested were Republican co-founders and brothers Monte and Avery Lipman. “They came to Toronto 10 times,” says Esmailian. “These guys are not running a small business – and going to Toronto, you have to deal with customs, but they just kept showing up.”