While the football season has concluded and the Super Bowl is long since over, there is still plenty to talk about. This year’s Superbowl was between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Tampa Bay blew out the Chief’s 31-9. During halftime, a famous artist known as “The Weeknd” performed and gave a phenomenal show. There were many mixed reviews from different age groups and how they felt about it. The younger crowd thought the performance was outstanding and one of his best, while the older age groups did not care about it as much since they do not understand the meaning of his performances.
Since Abel Tesfaye (The Weeknd) follows a storyline with his performances, people who don’t listen to him could be confused and weirded out by it. Some of the background dancers wore masks made of bandages. The reason behind the applications of the background dancers and the specific red jacket they all wear is a reference to The Weeknd’s persona in his After-Hours mini-films that relate to his latest number one selling album. The character is nameless but known as “The Man in The Red Suit”; from the films, music videos, and lyrics referring to him, we can conclude that he is a man who has a personality disorder.
“The significance of the entire head bandages is reflecting on the absurd culture of Hollywood celebrity and people manipulating themselves for superficial reasons to please and be validated,” The Weeknd told Variety ahead of his big performance.”
Throughout this whole era, his alter ego goes through a violent facial Trauma that starts with just a bloody nose to his entire face bandaged at the AMA’s. The latest transformation was in his “Save Your Tears” music video, where he gets plastic surgery. ET Online also says, “It’s all a progression, and we watch The Character’s storyline hit heightened levels of danger and absurdity as his tale goes on.” From all the information given now, you can have some understanding of his performance rather than what you did not know beforehand unless you’ve understood the references.
A unique part about this performance is that he wanted to perform a completely live show. Almost all halftime shows performers often lip-sync, but The Weeknd wanted his completely live, which caused his mic to be a bit low. Covid had to limit what he could do and how many backup performers he could have. He invested seven million dollars of his own money into the halftime show. Many people were comparing him to J. Lo and Shakira since their performances were very different. People aren’t used to The Weeknd’s aesthetic, for example. He only wears a red suit at his concerts, which upset some people because performers would have multiple outfit changes in past performances at the Superbowl.
According to Billboard, fans of Abel were delighted with the outcome of this performance since he stayed true to his storyline and said that his streams have increased by 41% since the halftime show. His most recent album was released back in March 2020 and has been an enormous success. His biggest song right now from the album After Hours, “Blinding Lights,” broke the record for most weeks spent in the top five hot 100 charts, and he played that song as the closing for his performance.
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