It’s been a while! And of course, embarrassingly for me, I started writing this on so-called Drake night (Ummm we get it!! Fred looks hot in his tan!!). And a night when we’re playing the Phoenix Suns and not an East Coast or otherwise ratings-powered team so I actually somehow get the Canadian commentary here in NYC and not the other team’s US drivel. I got to see the Toronto fans and the Toronto dancers and the Toronto rappers.
I had started a few other letters over the past few months but abandoned them. But I’ve been thinking about my hometown a lot lately, and it is sticking to the front part of my brain. My dad is sick, seeing the inside of more and more downtown Toronto hospitals, listening to the uncertainties of more and more Toronto doctors. I should visit soon, I keep thinking. And this week CR Fashion Book published my essay and interview with The Weeknd (on newsstands in a couple weeks, ouch) and wow did it ever take me back. Who remembers this:
It was showtime on a fuzzy July evening in 2011 and I was standing on the floor at the Mod Club in Toronto’s Little Italy for the Weeknd’s debut performance. I had never felt more alive. In front of his three-piece band, he was wearing an army print jacket rolled up to his elbows with a beaded bracelet hugging his right wrist. He seemed a little scared but no one in the audience cared. Four months after the release of the Weeknd’s debut mixtape, House of Balloons, we were just happy to be there, aglow in the presence of a then-mysterious artist music bloggers called “experimental.”
Aliveness was wafting all around me. About 600 of us became a “we” for 90 minutes that night. We—a group of self-described misfits, young Canadian fanatics—were finally joiners. Just days before, the indie weekly Now Magazine called the concert “easily the most anticipated first show by a Toronto act. Ever.” We were watching his every move. Drake was watching from the balcony, people whispered, and so were some major music execs. The very local singer Massari tweeted, “The man is a legend in the making. Even Puffys [sic] People are in the Green Room with us lol amazing!!” But there was nothing funny about the fact that all this hype was happening where we lived. For once we were not on the outside looking in, but inside and looking at each other.
Beth said I wrote a profile on “us” and it’s true. I mean, I tried… Sadly, the piece also took me forward, to a present I have only really experienced from afar:
“He’s going to be major—even though he’s from Canada,” Julia says early in Uncut Gems. The line is played for laughs.
That “even though” is a bigger deal than it seems. Tesfaye was born to Ethiopian immigrant parents and raised in Scarborough, a region east of downtown Toronto, before he dropped out of high school, moving out to Parkdale in Toronto’s west side. For many of the young, black, brown, and poor people in Canada’s most-populous city, Toronto lacks industry connections of all kinds, affordable housing, and creative infrastructures, especially when compared to cities in the United States. In response to his upbringing, along with La Mar Taylor, Ahmed Ismail, and Joachim Johnson, the Weeknd now runs the nonprofit HXOUSE, a “Toronto-based, globally focused think-center” that works with young artists of many disciplines. Global capital obviously floods Toronto through real estate, technology, and development, but in an exorbitantly expensive rental housing market, the lofts of “Lost Music” are unaffordable. A condo company in Tesfaye’s old neighborhood of Parkdale, a 14-story new development, is eerily called XO Condos. Five-hundred-square-foot boxes, currently unbuilt, are being sold for upwards of $600,000 dollars. XO is, of course, also the name of the Weeknd’s record label, which includes Canadian hip hop acts Nav, Belly, and 88Glam.
I used to find games like last night boring, but I mean “used to” as in when we were the losing team. But now I revel in it. I feel like I can dig into the dance of things. When we’re the winning team, when we’re up by so much, when we have an all-star like Spicy P dropping 37 fucking points, when everyone’s pulling these sick blocks, when we have a 22 to 8 run and yet, still: nothing is guaranteed.
By the end of last night’s game, I had moved from my couch to my bed, and so many Raptors had double-digit points (P, Freddy, Kylie, the Chef, TD, OG, am I missing anyone??). We had a balanced albeit somewhat scrappy game, which is, to be quite honest, what I can only dream my life will be like: balanced but scrappy.
And with that, I’m outtie!!!!!