Frank Ocean

Your hickeys on my aorta and tattoos you could only see

Blonde is a very interesting case of an absolute downer of a record, opening with a massive drum beat and then never basically never peaking again. It’s ambient pop in vast stretches in the model of the second half of Brian Eno’s Before and After Science, and its best song—and the best thing Frank Ocean has ever done—doesn’t even have a beat or bass. The album it reminds me most is Joni Mitchell’s Hejira: two singular artists turning their backs on pop for atmosphere. No roads taken here though because there’s no movement. Just blue. Blue skies over your blue swimming pool in your lakeshore condo, and still never being able to shake off grief and heartbreak. The album turns eight years old today, which isn’t a milestone worth celebrating except that it has taken me that long to realize that it’s the best Frank Ocean album, so I’ll celebrate it.

Frank Ocean has always been the most sensitive of modern R&B, but maybe that doesn’t say much when you consider that he broke through in the same year the Weeknd did. But that sensitivity is what separated him at the start when he started gaining traction as a member of the Odd Future collective. His falsetto, clear and beautiful, shone like a beacon in the context of what was mostly ugly, juvenile rapping. On The OF Tape Vol. 2, Ocean’s solo spot “White” is one of the very few standouts for that reason, testing the waters for Blonde as early as 2012, but back then felt like a demo or mere interlude. Other Odd Future members like Tyler, the Creator, Earl Sweatshirt, and Syd all started getting increasingly personal in their solo music too, but they got to the party many years after Ocean did, and in the case of Tyler, it feels like he never would have made Flower Boy if Ocean didn’t pave the way for him in the first place.

His brave open letter on Tumblr about his first love—left ambiguous enough to make a lot of people look like absolute morons on top of bigots, and with some stunning prose that I honestly think of more than most of his music—frames his confession as a mistake, “I sat there and told my friend how I felt. I wept as the words left my mouth. I grieved for them, knowing I could never take them back for myself.” And he makes plenty of mistakes in his songs that I’ve come to realize that’s part of his charm. He’s a human being, and unlike other R&B artists who fancy themselves to be untouchable, Ocean wants to be touched — not just sexually, but obviously that too. I can’t imagine any other artist writing a song like “Forrest Gump,” which even samples the movie, singing about the title character from the perspective of Jenny about the title character that’s obviously a metaphor for his own feelings about someone else at the time. There’s an honesty throughout Ocean’s music that makes it compelling, even when he falters, which is something I cannot say the same about Miguel or The-Dream or The Weeknd or Drake, who are all just so terminally vapid at their worst.

He falters often. I dislike the “ad-libs” on would-be early masterpiece “Novacane” (“Cocaine for breakfast — YIKES!”). I dislike “Feeling like Stanley Kubrick / This is some visionary shit / Trying to film pleasure with my eyes wide shut” so much that I skip the second half of that song entirely. I dislike how he doesn’t think “We’ll all fade to grey soon…” is potent enough on “White” and feels the need to jam “…on the TV station” there, voiding the closing line of its power. I dislike a lot of his “social commentary” about the rich lifestyle because it’s often wafer-thin; “My TV ain’t HD, that’s too real” worst of all. I dislike his need to flex that he has Andre 3000 on call since both “Pink Matter” and “Solo (Reprise)” are among the lesser tracks of their respective albums. I dislike his puns that come from his immersion in rap culture because they’re all beneath him. I cringe at “The best song wasn’t the single, but you weren’t either,” and I cringe harder at “With a cup in a cup, Actavis / That’s a double edge, ‘issa knife,” and I cringe hardest at “She must be on that white like Othello,” which comes way too early on Blonde. It’s such a shame he resorts to these so often when his verse on Earl Sweatshirt’s “Sunday”—the best verse on that album, and sticking it to Chris Brown is only icing on the cake—proved he could be captivating on the microphone without resorting to such tactics.

Nostalgia, Ultra feels like an EP that’s been padded out to an acceptable mixtape length with what are essentially karaoke versions of Eagles and MGMT. The two singles that Def Jam released are the best songs from it. For anyone that goes out of their way to tell you that “American Wedding” is better than “Hotel California,” yes, you’re very special: the Eagles are such an easy target that hating them doesn’t make you cool.

Channel Orange is the official debut, released one year later. The drum programming—the best part of his mixtape—is more thoughtfully textured, and many of the songs are surprisingly spacious, especially “Thinkin Bout You” and “Super Rich Kids.” The former gives Ocean space to swish around words to see what kind of musicality he can get out of them that’s not just melody; “My / eyes / don’t / shed / tears,” he sings with a light staccato, and then finishes the thought with “But boy, they pour,” emphasizing the harder sounds to imitate said pouring. Earl Sweatshirt figures out his new aesthetic on his verse in “Super Rich Kids,” effortlessly making his way through some insane rhymes, “Xanny-gnashing, caddy-smashing, bratty ass / He mad, he snatched his daddy’s Jag / And used that shit for batting practice / Adamant and he thrashing…” It’s honestly my favourite verse from Earl. “Pyramids” is the centerpiece, testing the waters on a bi-partite song structure that ambitiously tells the story about a woman who has to work as a stripper to keep up with the bills that doubles for the history of the black woman at large: from the pharaoh of Egypt all the way to modern day, a woman taking on the name Cleopatra for anonymity. (Smart move rhyming “Cleopatra” with “Your six inch heels catch ya.”) “Pilot Jones” looks ahead to “Solo” in Ocean’s love for birdsong as a sound, but the opening lines are embarrassingly bad. “Lost” is the super catchy one built around drum programming that betters “Dust” from the previous mixtape, but no one seemed to really care about that song until Tik Tok caught onto it. Skip the John Mayer interlude but don’t skip “Fertilizer.”

The Tumblr letter ends with “If I listen closely.. I can hear the sky falling too,” but there was no sound of skies falling on Channel Orange even if the record was clearly an emotional one. That sound is there on Blonde, whose best songs are so beyond his previous best. “Nikes,” with its pitch-shifting of one of the most beautiful voices in pop into something twisted and even grotesque; the line “R.I.P. Trayvon, that n***a look just like me” hits much harder with these sonics than it would have otherwise, and then the song turns to acoustic guitar that makes you feel the “Rain… glitter…” that Ocean raps about. “Ivy,” with the turquoise tone of its slippery guitar line that made me running to see who helped produced it (Rostam Batmanglij, who handles a lot of Vampire Weekend’s best work but never got this deep); “I broke your heart last week / You’ll probably feel better by the weekend” might be his best lyric. “Pink + White,” with its gentle pop of the bass letting the song gently ebbs and flow into funkier guitar parts and thin string lines. “Solo,” with nothing else but organ and birds as Ocean gets much out of the title word… is it “Solo,” or “So low?” Both, obviously. “Nights,” with the way the guitar has been processed (between “Nights” and “Ivy,” Blonde has some of the best sounding guitar of the 2010s), and then disintegrates in the stunning bridge transition into the last third. “White Ferrari,” with the way “You—” seems to glitch in and out, a song so beautiful in its afternoon daze that it earns the Beatles interpolation.

And yet, I don’t think it’s perfect. I think that Andre 3000’s solo spot should have been taken off this album and put on a Kendrick Lamar one where they could wax fast and hard about their shared disinterest in ghostwriters (“I’m so naive I was under the impression that everyone wrote they own verses”); a good verse, certainly, but it has nothing to do with “Solo” which it supposedly reprises. I think that Jonny Greenwood should have been asked to do more on “Siegfried.” I think that the first half of “Skyline To” is just biding time for the far prettier second half, and the line “We smell of Californication” sucks ass. I think the second of the candid skits knocks the flow out of the album’s very brief second wind, and both skits are too long. The album is more flawed than Channel Orange but the best songs—I think I hate this phrase but there’s no other way to describe it—hit a vibe that I frankly can’t get anywhere else, and certainly not in anyone else’s discography. You would think that we’d get at least one or two Blonde imitations but no one’s been brave enough to make the leap.

Blonde was self-released and heralded by Endless, dropped one day prior that screams contractual obligation to Def Jam. After the Isley Brothers cover, it starts to feel like sketches that didn’t make it to his grand artistic vision; the thought of an Arca-Ocean collaboration was mouth-salivating since the best songs from FKA twigs and Kelela were thanks to Arca, but we get a 30-second experiment that shouldn’t have left anyone’s hard drive; there’s a fun rap verse that ends in a hook that I feel was only written for the “cum” pun (“Commes des garçon”). There are some sonics worth hearing like the wintry piano of “Alabama,” and Sampha’s voice peaking in like the sun through a cloud at the end, something that Ocean learned after working with Kanye West on “New Slaves,” Nico Segal’s faraway trumpet on “U-N-I-T-Y,” the electric guitar that comes early on “Higgs”—a trick the song should’ve used one more time—and Vegyn’s playful production on “Mitsubishi Sony.”

Ocean launched Blonded Radio in 2017, airing loose singles. “Chanel” sees more of Ocean’s great drum programming, a strange little squelch, but the rapping is more haphazard than ever before, with flashes of conversations with the police that end up being discarded for the greater themes of love (“It’s really you on my mind”) and luxury (“My pockets snug, they can’t hold my 7”) that only appear at the end. Better yet is “Biking,” with Frank Ocean drawing the beautiful melody in his verse, “Arm stretch a tee like I nailed it…”, and nice of Jay-Z to record a verse while he was in the bathroom. The songs on Blonded Radio exhibited far more rap influence than his previous work, and as he rolled them out each month, it felt like it was going to eventually coalesce into enough songs for his first rap project, but after seven episodes—and not enough good songs—it just ended.

That’s it for Ocean. We waited four years between his first two albums, and it’s been almost twice that long since. The modern D’Angelo. I look forward to his Black Messiah.

Nostalgia, Ultra - B
Channel Orange - A-
Endless - B
Blond - A-