That's already my win because I know a lot of people who never had that, and still today in Toronto don't have that. My mom, as a single mother, brought five kids to Canada and we didn't have a place to stay the day we got off the train. We were lucky to get a homeless shelter, we were lucky to get a motel. So, for me, I always tell people, I made it the day that we had a stable housing or income situation. I'm a first-generation immigrant and my first home was Union Station when we arrived. So why do you care about giving back to the community? But the reason we did it is because we always ask ourselves, "If me, Abel, or La Mar would have applied for a project like this, would we be disqualified based on our financial merit? Would we even allowed to get into this program?" So our for accepting people is your talent has to be at a certain level, but we're never gonna judge you on your socioeconomic status.īut why is that your problem? You seem like a really thorough business guy. I think why our programming is important is because we could have been a school that charged hundreds of dollars per course, per person. Success is the same formula- when you've seen it happen once, you know it's going to happen again just looking at a person on first glance, and that's what I saw with La Mar and Abel.
When you've seen a superstar in other industries, you know what another superstar is going to look like. But the talent they had was so raw that you would have to be an idiot to not see it. When I first met him I was a bit more ahead of them in the development, growth, and experience.
La Mar and I laugh all the time because the way that we judge the talent is the way that I'd seen them. When Abel and La Mar started out, they were a lot like the people HXOUSE is now trying to help: young creatives trying to find their way in a broken system.Ībsolutely. My friend said to me, “You don't know this guy? He's from Toronto. Actually, he's from Scarborough. One of my friends played it for me as we were driving and sonically, this thing was one perfect album. So as I was building my company and networking in the US, I heard House of Balloons. I didn't enjoy the corporate side, but I did enjoy working alongside a player like Allen Iverson or these big NBA heavyweights who could change cultures, decisions, and make an impact without having to do it within the system.
I already had my first internships with the NBA, and I enjoyed the talent side of it. I was in DC thinking about leaving Capitol Hill, leaving politics. Abel and La Mar were just beginning their careers. It was a blessing because we were all at a transitionary time. We sat down with Ismail after the event for a candid conversation about HXOUSE's inception, XO's beginnings, and how Canada is failing its young creatives and innovators. You can say things have blasted off since then. “But it doesn't have the rocket fuel to get it off.” “As La Mar is manifesting it in his head, there's this project that's been sitting on my desk that really has a lot of the DNA of HXOUSE in it,” Ismail remembered thinking. To a sold-out crowd-a mix of creatives, business execs, and XO artists like 88Glam-they explained their goal is to ensure young Canadian visionaries won’t have to slog their way through the same broken system XO had to navigate. The event at Toronto’s MaRS Centre marked the first time Taylor and Ahmed Ismail, who both co-founded HXOUSE along with The Weeknd, appeared on stage together to speak about the initiative. But ultimately, the starvation was nothing to us because we were so caught in the moment and we enjoyed what we were doing." We're not going to ask anyone for any money and we'd be on welfare checks,'" said La Mar Taylor, The Weeknd’s high school friend-turned-creative director. We said, 'Fuck it, we're going to take a risk.
That was one of many nuggets revealed last Friday during In-HXOUSE Conversations, the latest in a panel series by HXOUSE, XO Records’ creative incubator. Long before he was a motherfuckin’ starboy, The Weeknd and his XO camp had to claw and scrape to keep their dreams alive.