Where is all the blood and carnage?
The Weeknd decided on Sunday during its Super Bowl 2021 halftime performance to play it safe on one of pop cultures’ biggest stages.
The versatile 30-year-old decides that his own face is good enough for his big, lively – certainly not pre-recorded – performances, rather than the weird prosthetics and makeup he wore during the release of his latest album.
Backed by a chorus of gospel singers, the ‘Starboy’ singer began his performance through a series of labyrinths below the stage. When it comes to his 2015 hit “I Can’t Feel My Face,” dozens of doubles are dancing around him. At least they took a chance with something strange.
Later, the entire field was filled with the masked backup as he sang his TikTok-famous dance jam, “Blinded by the Light”.
During his sultry “50 Shades of Gray” song “Earned It”, the stage lightened its now-characteristic porn stamp – complemented by a sexy camera wink. However, this is the most dramatic thing that happened to the singer’s ever-changing face during the break.
The Weeknd, real name Abel Tesfaye, nevertheless wore his trademark red suit and paid tribute to his ‘transformation’, said the mastermind of the suit, Patrick Henry. His glittering rest-time suit, with pearl nut buttons, was otherwise kept simple. “Everything is made so that he looks very much together when standing still, but he can still move around because Abel wants to move.”
In the year since releasing his fourth studio album ‘After Hours’, he’s had more extreme versions of what he called ‘The Character’. It all started with a bloody face at the end of “Blinding Lights” in January 2020, but increased to a slower pace for his short film “After Hours” which followed in March.
Between April and August, his ‘character’ was even more battered, and he also had blood and bandages. By November, the Weeknd had completely covered his face for the American Music Awards.
He follows up the bloody face with a brand new “plastic surgery” look – achieved by prosthetics – for “Save Your Tears” in January.
In Super Bowl commercials, however, the singer relied on his real face and apparently the frustrated fans of the persona could not stop talking. But he took time to explain the whole thing before the big game to those who have been scratching their heads for months.
“The importance of the whole headband is the reflection of the absurd culture of Hollywood celebrities and people who manipulate themselves for superficial reasons to please and be empowered,” he explained to Variety. “It’s all progress and we’m watching The Character’s storyline reach elevated levels of danger and absurdity as his story progresses.”
He added that fans can ‘assume that it’s not important to me to be attractive, but a compelling story’, and even explained why he went back and forth between himself and ‘The Character’, as he put it mention.
“Why don’t you play with the character and the artist and let those lines blur and move around?”