By Tyler Wheatley, Staff Reporter
Scarborough, Toronto. 2010. Abel Tesfaye, otherwise known as The Weekend, was a semi-homeless high school dropout. Today he is one of the biggest stars in the world and is performing at the Super Bowl.
On Nov. 12, 2020, The Weeknd announced that he will be headlining the Pepsi Super Bowl LV Halftime Show on Sunday, Feb. 7.
As Pepsi’s tenth year of being the official sponsor of the halftime show, they are going all out. This year is turning the Super Bowl performance into a national marketing strategy, including a new look for the website which fully promotes the Super Bowl, three new TV spots; “Get Ready:60” and “The Walk”, with new special packaging for the product.
“We’re expanding the 12 minutes of entertainment into a multi-platform, six-week campaign,” Pepsi Vice President of Marketing Todd Kaplan said.
Pepsi cut some of their commercials to add more time for the halftime show. However, Pepsi isn’t the only one putting in a lot of time, effort, and resources into the show. The Weeknd is also going all in for this year’s show. The singer has put $7 million of his own money into the performance to, as his manager Wassim Slabiy said, “Make this halftime show be what he envisioned.”
The Weeknd is hoping the show will be a “cinematic experience.” Although it was rumored that the show was going to be twice as long with a runtime of around 24 minutes, it was confirmed by his team that the performance will be the usual length of around 13 minutes.
Despite not receiving any nominations for his album “After Hours,” which debuted at number one and was the biggest album of the first half of 2020, The Weeknd's hard work will definitely not go unnoticed. The album includes the song, “Blinding Lights,” one of the most streamed songs on Spotify of all time. The record was also on Billboard’s No.1 record of the year and has set an all time record for the top 5 and top 10 longest-running records in the Hot 100’s 62-year old history.
The Weeknd commented on receiving zero nominations and whether or not he feels it was a racial topic.
“If you were like, ‘Do you think the Grammys are racist?’ I think the only real answer is that in the last 61 years of the Grammys, only 10 black artists have won the album of the year," The Weeknd said. "I don’t want to make this about me. That’s just a fact.”
Many people assumed that he didn’t get any nominations because of the upcoming Super Bowl performance but the Grammys recently confirmed that wasn’t true. However, this lack of nominations doesn’t seem to bother The Weeknd as much as it once did.
“Look, I personally don’t care anymore," he said. "I have three Grammys, which mean nothing to me now."
At the American Music Awards he was seen wearing full face bandaging which turned out to be a set up for his next music video “Save Your Tears” in which he is sporting an after plastic surgery look. The Weeknd was recently asked if he was going to continue the storyline at the Super Bowl.
“I will still incorporate some of the storyline," he said." It’s a very cohesive story I’m telling throughout this year, so the story will continue, but we definitely will keep it PG-[rated] for the families. I’ll do my best."
Even though he’s keeping things under wraps for his appearance at the Super Bowl, it’s fair to say that he’s going all out and that it will be a day to remember for fans of his music and the Super Bowl alike.
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