From The Weeknd to David Bowie, why pop stars kill off their personas to survive

In Hurry Up Tomorrow, The Weeknd literally sets himself on fire. More than a dramatic moment in a bleak film, now available for streaming, the act is a symbolic reset.

The Canadian pop star, real name Abel Tesfaye, kills off the hedonistic alter ego that dominated the charts and helped sell nearly 100 million records over the past decade.

It’s not just the climax of a psychological drama and its companion album about an artist hitting a professional and emotional dead end. It’s also the beginning of something new, the first step for Tesfaye towards escaping the creative limits of his own success.

The shift was a long time coming. In 2023, Tesfaye told The Fader he had reached a creative crossroads: “The Weeknd, whatever that is, has been mastered. I’ve overcome every challenge as this persona.”

The turning point reportedly came during a sold-out 2022 show in Los Angeles, when his voice gave out during Can’t Feel My Face. Tesfaye walked off stage and later described the moment as a “mental breakdown”.

That rupture would shape the arc of Hurry Up Tomorrow, both the film and the album. Tesfaye’s farewell echoes a long tradition in pop music, a genre filled with artists jettisoning the very identities that made them successful. Sometimes the farewell is loud and theatrical, other times it’s quiet and gradual. But the impulse is the same: the character outlives its use and the artist moves on.

An early precedent of the high-profile persona kill-off remains David Bowie’s retirement of Ziggy Stardust. Introduced with 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, the flame-haired, androgynous alien gave Bowie space to embrace glam theatrics and otherworldly sounds like Moonage Daydream and Starman.

More than a typically mercurial gesture, the move now looks prescient. Ziggy had reached a creative cul-de-sac. The arc, of an alien rock star destroyed by fame, had run its course. Bowie would later say the character began to overtake his own personality and continuing would have come at too great a personal cost.

By letting go, Bowie returned to earth with a more grounded, soul-inflected sound, heard on 1975 album Young Americans and his first US number one hit, Fame. It marked another phase in a path built on reinvention, soon giving rise to characters such as the emotionally detached Thin White Duke in 1976.

Tesfaye arrived at a similar moment. He introduced his character as mysterious, brooding and emotionally numb on 2011’s House of Balloons.

The underground acclaim only deepened his self-destructive leanings, eventually earning him the title “king of toxic romance”. In Hurry Up Tomorrow, that figure reaches a breaking point. The persona, also explored in the risque TV series The Idol, is swallowed by the very excess he once glorified, a perhaps fitting end for a character built on desire and destruction.

Other artists reached that turning point in different ways. For Eminem, the unhinged alter ego Slim Shady was introduced on the 1999 album The Slim Shady LP. As the shock factor wore off, the character became a creative crutch, reappearing for occasional late-career hits such as Berzerk. It also became a stick some critics used to beat him with, often overlooking the more soulful and socially conscious terrain he explored over the past decade under his real name Marshall Mathers.

It’s no surprise, then, that Eminem bid farewell to the character in last year’s aptly titled The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grace). The album conceptually served as one last ride with the figure that made him famous, while also reckoning with the controversies that have dogged his career, particularly on sombre and reflective tracks such as Somebody Save Me and Fuel.

Fellow rapper Tyler, The Creator pulled off a similar low-key retreat. He emerged as the latest face of horrorcore, the abrasive hip-hop subgenre, with the blood-curdling rhymes of 2011’s Goblin, before moving towards introspection, vulnerability and self-empowerment on Flower Boy in 2017 and his latest stellar effort Chromakopia last year.

Sometimes these shifts serve a practical purpose. Flush from the near-instant success of her 2003 debut solo single Crazy in Love, Beyonce had to quickly learn how to command the stage on her own, away from Destiny’s Child. To do so, she created the assertive Sasha Fierce, as introduced on the 2008 album I Am... Sasha Fierce, to reportedly overcome stage fright.

By 2011, with a few tours behind her, Beyonce retired the character, telling Allure magazine: “I’ve grown, and now I’m able to merge the two.” That decision was reflected in a run of deeply vulnerable and powerful albums, including Lemonade.

Meanwhile, Lady Gaga adopted a relative subdued figure to tone down her image with her 2016 album Joanne, named after her late aunt.

She stripped back the spectacle, glamour and high-octane maximalist pop of her “Mother Monster” era – as heard in blockbuster hits Poker Face and Bad Romance – to adopt a less flamboyant sound and image, ditching theatrical costumes and the meat dress for simple denim and leather, while featuring acoustic guitars and country influences.

The ready-made pop blueprint, of course, lies with Madonna, who viewed each persona as a strategic shift to the next cultural zeitgeist.

Whether as the “Material Girl” during former US president Reagan’s free market era or embracing a club sound as electronic music rose in the charts at the turn of the century, she was never emotionally attached to her personas, treating them more like career chapters than characters.

And maybe that’s the best path for Tesfaye’s next move. Rather than fully embracing and committing to whatever he becomes next, even if he believes it is his authentic self, he shouldn’t be too wedded to it.

Pop music, after all, is about continuous reinvention and clearing the stage for what or who comes next.