stickykoalatastemaker

[stickykoalatastemaker]

Nikolai Rachmaninov Tesfaye was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on November 15, 1991. The younger child of Polina Rachmaninov was raised by his paternal grandmother in the suburb of Scarborough after his mother flew back to Russia to take care of his older brother, Kaiser Rachmaninov.

Due to his close proximity to his grandmother, he eventually grew interested into his Ethiopian Amhara ancestry and became proficient in Amharic (official language of Ethiopia, a Semitic language descended from Ge'ez.). But in contrast, Nikolai began to despise his Russian origins and even part of his own family in St. Petersburg, alleging it was too hard for him to "fit" among them. Except for his older brother, who he has become close to.

As he grew old, receiving a decent amount of money from Polina to have a good education, he became fluent in French as he attended an French immersion school, but at the age of seventeen he ended up dropping out of it in an act of a rebel protest against his mother's emotional negligence and distance from him. He left his grandmother's house in a weekend with nothing but a mattress to join two friends in a rented apartment in the neighborhood of Parkdale.

Living on his own and adopting a hedonistic lifestyle, the Canadian was making money by selling weed and doing temporary tasks and jobs to survive, even sleeping at acquaintances' couches when he caught himself not being able to pay for his part of the rent.

After engaging into several different musical projects such as "Bulleez n Nerdz" or the time he used Kin Kane as a stage name, the idea of The Weeknd arosed from the depths of his disturbed mind.

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