DARK AND HANDSOME: THE BEAUTY OF BLOOD ORANGE

themes of isolation, loneliness and displacement, especially as they pertained to race; he wanted to get at what he calls “the different weight of life” for marginalized people, “how it’s tackled and how you live with it.” He uses a curated sound to tell a story about memories that still haunt him and thoughts that plague him, still while clinging to a hope of a brighter future. “The underlying thread through each piece on the album is the idea of hope, and the lights we can try to turn on within ourselves with a hopefully positive outcome of helping others out of their darkness.”

Part of Negro Swan’s influence stems from its specificity. The album’s opener “Orlando” tells the story of Hynes being bullied throughout his childhood and adolescence, comparing the experience to something that should be magical: “First kiss was the floor,” he sings. The juxtaposition between something so violent yet so intimate shows the ways in which the traumas we experience in our lives can poison our innocence and sincerity from a young age. The depth, softness and warmth of the instrumentation emphasize the masking of the horrors we experience. Negro Swan unequivocally understands the authentic and humane nature of heartbreak and longing. mewhat easy to write, but there’s a sort of bravery in the amount of vulnerability it takes to admit that you have tasted love, but could not hold onto it through your own faults. Expressing these difficulties in combination with the overall existential crisis of just simply existing is threaded throughout Negro Swan.

Coming in at over eighty million streams, Blood Orange’s most popular song “Charcoal Baby” tackles the microscopic feeling of having to represent oneself in one direction to justify one’s worth in another, Hynes sings “No one wants to be that odd one out at times/No one wants to be that negro swan/Can you break sometimes” over the almost eerie synth drone and stripped down beat. Negro Swan shares similar connections to Frank Ocean’s Blonde. Both albums perfectly capture melancholy in similar fashions, implementing experimentation with vocals, warped guitars and midi keyboards. The overlapping concepts addressed in both albums are nothing short of breathtaking.

My personal favorite song off Negro Swan is “Dagenham Dream,” which feautres a clip of Janet Mock, an American writer, director, producer and trans rights activist speaking on belonging and her struggles with identity at the end of the song. “Growing up I have always heard, or I was always hyperaware of the things that the people around me who were charged with my care or told me, be silent or be quiet or be ashamed or hide or perform a version of myself that wasn’t really me. And so, I think that through my life I’ve always been hyperconscious and aware of not going into spaces and seeking too much attention. Because part of survival is being able to just fit in, to be seen as normal and to ‘belong’ but I think that so often in society in order to belong means that we have to shrink parts of ourselves.”

Each song on this album pertains to a certain human experience. That is one of the main things I truly admire about Devonté Hynes’s music. He takes his life experiences and turns them into art, thus creating incredibly complex works that almost anyone can relate to, find comfort in, or simply enjoy.