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Born in Ghazir, Lebanon, during the civil war of the 1970s and 1980s, Slaiby spent much of his youth in a bomb shelter. He fled to Montreal, then to Ottawa alone at 16 and spoke little English when he arrived. There, he met a neighborhood kid named Ahmad Balshe – a Palestinian-Canadian rapper who eventually became artist XO Belly – who introduced him to Esmailian, whose own family had emigrated from Tehran in the midst of the Iranian revolution.
By the early 2000s, the three had gone into business together, when Slaiby and Balshe co-founded hip-hop / R&B label Capital Prophet Records (Esmailian ran street promotions and then became artist manager. ). Three hundred miles west, in Toronto, Tesfaye and Taylor had their own commotion. Raised by single mothers in the suburb of Scarborough, they were, as Tesfaye puts it today, ‘mostly homeless’ dropouts who posted their music to YouTube and Facebook – without her face on it. “We kind of played in this mystery for about a year,” Taylor says, “until we got to the point where we couldn’t hide his face anymore, because he was just so famous.
As of 2010, Esmailian was living in Miami, working to break Belly into the city’s hip-hop scene. But when a friend sent him some tracks by an up-and-coming Toronto artist who called himself The Weeknd, he gave it all up and booked a flight back to Canada for the next day. “This kid is ahead of his time,” Esmailian remembers thinking. “I knew it right away.
In the premiere of what would become Many Nights on the Town together, Esmailian and Tesfaye hit a Toronto club with mutual friends the same night Esmailian landed. The two were quick friends, and with The Weeknd’s first mixtape, Balloon house, on the verge of exploding, Esmailian became “the manager, the manager of the road, safety and the driver”. By the end of 2011, Tesfaye had released two more mixtapes, and the hype around him had intensified as a result. Hanging out at Balshe’s apartment one night at this time, he and Esmailian met Balshe’s neighbor, Slaiby. “La Mar and Abel were going through a difficult time,” says Slaiby. “They had a different team that screwed up their business. The songs were flying. Their career was flying. But their business was in a danger zone because they didn’t have the right team.
“We surrounded ourselves with people who thought they knew it all and almost literally ruined our chances,” Tesfaye explains. Slaiby’s more pragmatic approach – “You get what I’m good for, and I tell you where to go for whatever I’m not good at,” he says – called, and he and Esmailian took out Tesfaye. of his bad business. They became the co-directors of The Weeknd, and soon after, the four men founded XO.
From the start, they understood that taking risks – and operating on their own schedule – often made sense. The Weeknd’s “mysterious aesthetic,” as Taylor puts it, meant his music had to speak for itself. “I think that’s really what captivated everyone and propelled Abel into the stratosphere,” Taylor continues. This buzz quickly translated into potential big paychecks, but the XO team didn’t jump on them: When an Australian promoter offered a $ 160,000 gig, they passed it on and others. liked it, choosing instead to play in clubs across Canada. “I knew how important it was to develop tourism,” says Esmailian. “At that point we could have moved on to stage four or five, but I knew we had to start from stage one. We were making rooms for 500 people, but there were 2,000 people outside trying to get in.
When the big labels inevitably started to spin, this tidal wave became a lever. Among those interested were Republic Records co-founders and brothers Monte and Avery Lipman. “They’ve been to Toronto about 10 times,” Esmailian says. “These guys don’t run a small business – and go to Toronto, you have to deal with customs – but they kept showing up.
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