Blonde is perfectly paced, with no track that could justifiably be removed - even the vocal interludes have a purpose, although they may be less infinitely re-playable than the more vocally-driven tracks.Ĭhannel ORANGE was a spectacular album, but on Blonde, Frank Ocean has mastered his craft as a songwriter and performer. It’s all emblematic of the sensational control Frank has over the listener. My favourite description was “a beach party in the winter.” And it fascinated me that every metaphor described a similar feeling: loneliness in a crowd, that of invisibility. I watched a brief, thoughtful exchange on Twitter yesterday between people talking about the melancholic moods that Frank’s music inspires in them.
Every track that feels like it’s about Frank - like “Solo” or the sensational “Self Control” (my favourite track on the record) - also feels like it’s about all of us. That seems to be the driving momentum throughout Frank’s new record: there’s a sadness to it that strikes a chord in so many of us. How much empathy he has for their stories. But with Frank, it’s somehow clear how much he loves people. They’d be there to engineer an emotional response. But in the last four minutes, Frank goes vocal and asks people on the streets about their lives.įor most musicians, moments like that would be throwaways. The first half of the song is beautiful, Frank’s voice clearly having grown in the past four years. On “Futura Free”, Frank Ocean spends the last half of the track talking to people on the street. He’s writing music about empathy.Īs good as the music is, that’s what I missed the most about Frank’s musical silence over the past four years. He’s writing sad songs about losing our humanity.
Unlike Kendrick, and perhaps unlike Beyoncé, Frank Ocean isn’t writing protest songs about blackness. “Nikes” sets the bar for the rest of the record to come: almost completely beat-less, with a focus on Frank’s voice, encouraging us to get better at living with each other. On “Nikes”, a track that couldn’t be considered a protest song even by the staunchest abusers of the term, Frank mourns Travyon’s murder as a black man. Many musicians have said this in their music, but Frank lives this. It suggests that boys do cry, that the appropriate response to tragedy is to weep and to mourn, and that we’ve lost something with all of our male posturing. If anything, Blonde is a love letter to empathetic people. The answer is simple: it doesn’t matter how you spell it, because Frank doesn’t seem to care, and the name was changed because a certain portion of the population wouldn’t understand that Boys Don’t Cry was a lie. Even its name bears discussion: at the last minute, the name was changed from Boys Don’t Cry, prompting much confusion about whether the title is spelled “Blonde” or “Blond” and launching the Internet into rife speculation. I think Endless is the mostly-empty commercial counterpart to the emotionally involved and far better record, Blonde. I think Endless purposely existed as a filler record to get Frank Ocean out of his contract so he could independently release Blonde. It was released, like Blonde was less than forty-eight hours later, as an exclusive on Apple Music. Endless, if you’ve been living under a rock, is a 45-minute video album of Frank Ocean putting together a spiral staircase. Ocean was also credited as a co-writer on James Blake’s most 2016 LP, The Colour in Anything. His Endless collaborators included James Blake, Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, guitarist Alex G, singer Jazmine Sullivan, producer Arca and more.Īs for music, Ocean’s output between Channel Orange and Blonde has included an original ballad, “Wise Man,” that was scrapped from Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film, Django Unchained the atmospheric, lo-fi “Memrise ” and “You Are Luhh,” a rendition of “At Your Best (You Are Love),” a 1976 Isley Brothers tune famously covered by Aaliyah in 1994 that ultimately appeared on Ocean’s Endless. Since then, Lil B posted a photo on Tumblr showing him in the studio with Ocean. Ocean has been working on Blonde since at least January 2013.
In July, the singer-songwriter hinted that the LP was on its way when he posted a picture of a library book slip showing a range of potential “due dates.” Ocean updated his website with a video featuring a hall with a pair of workbenches a 45-minute version of this video served as the basis of Endless, which featured Ocean constructing a spiral staircase. Word of the album’s impending release first surfaced in late July in The New York Times, not long after an Apple Music-hosted live stream video appeared on Ocean’s website,.
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