Transmitting the Waves by Autumn Beane

Transmitting the Waves A Collection of Frank Ocean Articles

Transmitting the Waves

This is some visionary shit Transmitting the Waves

// 06 thank you’s

// 30 Creating His Own Gravity

// 61 Frank Ocean: Blonde First-Listen Album Review

// 18 Channel Orange, Meeting Odd Future and His Tumblr Letter

// 44 Frank Ocean is Finally Free, Mystery Intact

// 68 Frank Ocean’s 10 Best Songs: Critic’s Picks

thank you’s

WHOEVER

YOU ARE, WHEREVER

YOU ARE //// Transmitting the Waves // thank you’s

//////

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m starting to think weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re alot alike. Human beings spinning on blackness.

all wanting to be seen, touched, heard,

Transmitting the Waves // thank youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

paid attention to // My loved ones are everything to me here. In the last year or 3 I’ve screamed at my creator, screamed at clouds in the sky. For some explanation. Mercy maybe. For peace of mind to rain like manna somehow. 4 summers ago, I met somebody. I was 19 years old. He was too. We spent that summer, and the summer after, together. Everyday almost. And on the days we were together, time would glide. Most of the day I’d see him, and his smile. I’d hear his conversation and his silence...until it was time to sleep. Sleep I would often share with him. By the time I realized I was in love, it was malignant. It was hopeless. There was no escaping, no negotiating with the feeling. No choice. It was my first love, it changed my life. Back then, my mind would wander to the women I had been with, the ones I cared for and thought I was in love with. I reminisced about the sentimental songs I enjoyed when I was a teenager.. the ones I played when I experienced a girlfriend for the first time.

I realized they were written in a language I did not speak. I realized too much too quickly.

Transmitting the Waves // thank youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

Imagine being thrown from a plane. I wasn’t in a plane though. I was in a Nissan maxima, the same car I packed up with bags and drove to Los Angeles in. 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. He patted my back. He said kind things. He did his best, but he wouldn’t admit the same. He had to go back inside soon. It was late and his girlfriend was waiting for him upstairs. He wouldn’t tell me the truth about his feelings for me for another 3 years. I felt like I’d only imagine reciprocity for years. Now imagine being thrown from a cliff. No, I wasn’t on a cliff, I was still in my car telling myself it was gonna be fine and to take deep breaths. I took the breaths and carried on.

I kept up a peculiar friendship with him because I couldn’t imagine keeping up my life without him. I struggled to master myself and my emotions.

I wasn’t always successful. The dance went on…I kept the rhythm for several summers after. It’s winter now. I’m typing this on a plane back to Los Angeles from New Orleans. I flew home for another marred Christmas. I have a windowseat. It’s December 27, 2011. By now I’ve written two albums, this being the second. I wrote to keep myself busy and sane. I wanted to create worlds that were rosier than mine. I tried to channel overwhelming emotions. I’m surprised at how far all of it has taken me. Before writing this I’d told some people my story. I’m sure these people kept me alive, kept me safe…sincerely. These are the folks I wanna thank from the floor of my heart. Everyone of you knows who you are…great humans. Probably angels.

Transmitting the Waves // thank you’s

I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know what happens now, and thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s alrite.

I d nâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have any se rets I need kept ymore Transmitting the Waves // thank youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

There’s probably some small shit still. But you know what I mean. I was never alone, as much as I felt like it...as much as I still do sometimes, I never was. I don’t think I ever could be. Thanks to my first love, I’m grateful for you. Grateful that even though it wasn’t what I hoped for and even though it was never enough, it was. Some things never are...and we were. I wont forget you. I wont forget the summer. I’ll remember who I was when I met you. I’ll remember who you were and how we’ve both changed and stayed the same. I’ve never had more respect for life and living than I have right now. Maybe it takes a near death experience to feel alive. Thanks. To my mother, you raised me strong. I know I’m only brave because you were first...so thank you. All of you. For everything good. I feel like a free man. If I listen closely...I can hear the sky falling too. -Frank

// Did you know Frank Ocean was gay before he came out last year? // Transmitting the Waves

“Yeah, I was one of the first people he told// I kinda knew, because he likes Pop Tarts without frosting on them, so I knew something was weird. [Laughs] But that’s my nigga.” – Tyler

Channel Meeting Odd Future, and His Tumblr Letter

Orange,

If Frank Ocean wanted to play you a song, you’d drive across town in the pouring rain, right? That’s how we’ve ended up at Jungle City, a sound studio in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. When we walk in, Ocean leading the way, Pharrell Williams turns down the music and greets him warmly. “Here you are,” the prolific rapper and producer tells him. “You’ve walked in at the right time.” “Sweet,” Ocean replies, picking up Pharrell’s diamond-studded gold chain that sits—fat as a tow rope—at the edge of the mixing board. Ocean, dressed in a gray Supreme hoodie, jeans, and black Wallabees, smiles as he dons the weighty necklace—it jibes with the new Rolex on his left wrist, the Cartier Juste Un Clou bracelet on his right. In a bit, he’ll Instagram a bejeweled portrait of himself, but first he unveils three new tracks, stored on his phone, that Pharrell pronounces “crazy, with a lot of comprehensive layers just sort of living harmoniously.” When Ocean says he worries a rap number called “Blue Whale” is “risky because I’m rhyming,” Pharrell shakes his head. “That’s not risky. That thought is dead,” he says. “It’s like, ‘You know, I rhyme, too.’ “ Turning to me, Pharrell says, “I always call him James Taylor. He’s probably the closest thing to a writer’s perfect emplifica-

Transmitting the Waves // Channel Orange, Meeting...

tion of the unconscious. All the songs are like movies. All you need to do is close your eyes.” Now it’s Pharrell’s turn to spin a track-in-progress. They listen, bobbing their heads slightly, occasionally both bursting into song. When the room is quiet again, Ocean says the song “feels like a Rubik’s Cube melodically. You want something emotionally rich on that, you know what I’m saying? But if I listen to it enough, I could map a way out.” Before we exit, they agree Ocean will come back later this evening to work on it. Pharrell is attending the first show of Jay-Z’s eight-night run at the brand-new Barclays Center in Brooklyn, but he says he’ll come back, too. “Ain’t no afterparty more important than this.” “Map a way out”—it’s a phrase Ocean will use more than once during the next four hours as we talk about his life and especially his last few months. He’s still just 25, but it feels like he packed ten years’ worth of living into 2012 alone, releasing a heralded album, Channel Orange, in July and headlining _Saturday Night Live’_s season premiere in September. Throughout this period he has also been handling the reverberations of something he revealed on Tumblr just before _Channel Orange’_s debut: his memories of an intimate relationship with his first love, a man—a rare admission in the macho world of hip-hop and R&B. It’s important to Ocean to be the master of his own identity: Last year he changed his name from Lonny Breaux to Christopher Francis Ocean, drawing on Frank Sinatra and the original Ocean’s 11 film for inspiration. And yet he admits that the failed relationship he mentioned on Tumblr sent him spinning out of control, rocking him even as it improved his musicality, transforming him from a man with skills to a skillful man with something he suddenly was burning to say. What was going through his mind this summer, he tells me, was something like this: “If I’m going to say this, I’m going to be better than all you pieces of shit. What you going to say now? You can’t say, ‘Oh, they’re only listening to him because he said this.’ No, they’re listening to me because I’m gifted, and this project is brilliant.”

You were born in Long Beach, California, but moved to New Orleans at age 5. When is the first time you realized you wanted to write and perform music? I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio. I would listen to whatever my mom played in the car—the big divas: Whitney, Mariah, Celine, Anita Baker. Then I got exposed to Prince. I think it was “The Beautiful Ones.” He was screaming at the end. And this lady who was playing it was saying, “Ain’t no man scream like Prince.” And I was like, “That’s fucking awesome.”

Your dad had left when you were 6, so your mom raised you on her own. I haven’t seen him since. And for a while, you know, we were not middle-class. We were poor. But my mom never accepted that. She worked hard to become a residential contractor—got her master’s with honors at the University of New Orleans. I used to go to every class with her. Her father was my paternal figure. He’d had a really troubled life with crack, heroin, and alcohol and had kids he wasn’t an ideal parent to. I was his second chance, and he gave it his best shot. My grandfather was smart and had a whole lot of pride. He didn’t speak a terrible amount, but you could tell there was a ton on his mind— like a quiet acceptance of how life had turned out. He was a mentor at AA and NA, and I would go with him to meetings.

When did you start recording? I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know. And writing Langston Hughes replica poems became me wanting to write like Stevie Wonder. My dad had been a singer and keyboardist. So my mom was like, “You’re going to follow that bum? Maybe you should just go to law school.”

You stayed in New Orleans until after Katrina, then drove cross-country with just $1,100 in your pocket. Transmitting the Waves // Channel Orange, Meeting...

What made you move to Los Angeles? I had been putting together these demos that I was going to properly record in a real studio in L.A. So I saved up money doing Sheetrocking, and I drove out with my girlfriend at the time. I was only supposed to be there for six weeks. I don’t feel like I ever made a conscious decision to stay six years. You just kind of roll. The first four and a half years was me in the studio every day, writing songs for other people. I had jobs, too—eleven jobs. I worked at Kinko’s, Fatburger, Subway—I was a sandwich artist—and I was a claims processor at Allstate Insurance. I saved up money doing Sheetrocking, and I drove out with my girlfriend at the time. I was only supposed to be there for six weeks. I don’t feel like I ever made a conscious decision to stay six years. You just kind of roll. The first four and a half years was me in the studio every day, writing songs for other people. I had jobs, too—eleven jobs. I worked at Kinko’s, Fatburger, Subway—I was a sandwich artist—and I was a claims processor at Allstate Insurance.

So how did you go from Fatburger to writing songs for Brandy and Justin Bieber and John Legend? We’re talking about hundreds of things that happened. One night, I went to a listening party just to pick up my backpack from a friend. Next thing I know, I’m in this studio, and everybody’s putting their laptops on the pool table, playing songs through these big-ass speakers. It was crazy. And they wanted me to play, so I plugged in, and they were like, “Oh shit.” There were producers there, and they said, “You should come up to the studio and write.” So I did. I’d sit in those rooms for hours. But I wouldn’t write any line that was as good as the lines being written in the rooms next to me. It was just like: I had to elevate. I was looking at it like an athlete then—like I just wanted to be better than everybody else. I hadn’t gone through anything emotionally yet. I had never been in love. I had never been heartbroken. When that happened, that’s really what changed everything. That turned me into a real artist. It made the difference between somebody hearing something of mine and being like, “Wow, this is a fresh approach,” and somebody hearing something and crying, you know?

You’re talking about the relationship you wrote about on your Tumblr page—the one that you likened to “being thrown from a cliff” when you were 19. How did that change your songwriting?

IT BECAME EFFORTLESS. LIKE BREATHING. BECAUSE NOW I HAVE SOMETHING I REALLY NEED TO SAY. IT WAS MINDFUCK. NET. IT WAS A FLOODGATE. IT OPENED UP THE WORKS. Def Jam reportedly signed you as a recording artist in 2009 but didn’t open up its checkbook at that point to help you record. The next year, you met Tyler, the Creator, and the other members of Odd Future. How important was that? I was at a real dark time in my life when I met them. I was looking for just a reprieve. At 20 or 21, I had, I think, a couple hundred thousand dollars [from producing and songwriting], a nice car, a Beverly Hills apartment—and I was miserable. Because of the relationship in part and the heartbreak in part, and also just miserable because of like just carting that around. And here was this group of like-minded individuals whose irreverence made me revere. The do-it-yourself mentality of OF really rubbed off on me.

They inspired you to record your first album, Nostalgia, Ultra, on your own dime and release it for free, right? Def Jam had signed Lonny Breaux, then this Frank Ocean guy puts out an Internet sensation that makes a lot of best-albums lists. When they tried to sign you again, was it satisfying to say, ”Oh, you already have”? Yeah, I just told them, “Give me $1 million if you want the next album.” Transmitting the Waves // Channel Orange, Meeting...

It’s still sprinkling a bit when we dive back into the hired Lexus and head across the East River to the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. I’ve suggested it because I know Ocean’s love of movies is so engulfing that they’ve become a part of his vocabulary. On his first album, he sampled some of the dialogue in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and he tells me he got the inspiration for his hit song “Super Rich Kids” from Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic. He has said that he sees writing a song as making a photograph out of materials that aren’t visible. So it’s no surprise when Ocean whips out his phone and starts taking pictures—of the Men in Black 3 monster exhibit, of the weird installation with beanbag chairs, even of the angular stairways. But the highlight is when we come upon a collection of vintage arcade games. Anyone who saw Ocean’s performance on SNL has an inkling of his love of games. (He finished his set that night by retreating to play Galaga as John Mayer riffed on guitar.) Now, as he spots the original Pong, Super Breakout, Asteroids, Galaxian, Donkey Kong, and Frogger games, all in a row, he steps more quickly, as if greeting old friends. This, I realize, is a sort of Frank Ocean version of heaven. Because these aren’t just decommissioned museum pieces. You can buy tokens and actually play. I buy four, and he chooses Battle Zone, in which you try to sink things that appear on the horizon. His first game he scores 7,000 points, and the machine prompts him to type his initials in the winner’s circle: CFO, in seventh place. His fourth game, he racks up 12,000 points—second place. But when I congratulate him, he points to the number one score: it’s 12,000, too. “I’m the same as first place,” says the man who must be better than all those other pieces of shit. And then we get back in the car.

Is it true that you wrote the songs for Channel Orange in three weeks? Yeah, then I worked on them for nine months—a typical gestation period.

You’re something of a perfectionist, I gather. John Mayer and I were talking in rehearsal before SNL, and he was like, “You love to take the hardest way. You don’t always have to.” But I don’t know about that. It’s like Billy Joel says in that song “Vienna.” When the truth is told / That you can get what you want or you can just get old. We all know we have a finite period of time. I just feel if I’m going to be alive, I want to be challenged—to be as immortal as possible. The path to that isn’t an easy way, but it’s a rewarding way. I never think about myself as an artist working in this time. I think about it in macro. I feel like Elton John just made “Tiny Dancer.” He just made that shit like last night. Jimi Hendrix just burned his fucking guitar onstage. Right? Freddie Mercury just had the half mike stand in his hand in the fucking stadium. Prince was just on the mountain in “Under the Cherry Moon.” And I was there. That’s how I look at it. Like this shit just went down. You see the mastery that I’m surrounded by? How on earth am I going to take the easiest way? A friend of mine jokes that I have a painstaking royalty complex. Like maybe I was a duke in a past life. But all you have is 100 percent. Period.

Let’s talk about your open letter on Tumblr. Posting that must’ve felt like the hardest way. Yes, absolutely.

So why did you do it? Were some people raising questions about the male pronouns in a few of the songs? I had Skyped into a listening session that Def Jam was hosting for Channel Orange, and one of the journalists, very harmlessly—quotation gestures in the air, “very harmlessly”—wrote a piece and mentioned that. I was just like, “Fuck it. Talk about it, don’t talk about it—talk about this.” No more mystery. Through with that.

You’d written the letter back in December, for inclusion in the liner notes. Were you afraid of the aftermath Transmitting the Waves // Channel Orange, Meeting...

when you finally posted it in July? The night I posted it, I cried like a fucking baby. It was like all the frequency just clicked to a change in my head. All the receptors were now receiving a different signal, and I was happy. I hadn’t been happy in so long. I’ve been sad again since, but it’s a totally different take on sad. There’s just some magic in truth and honesty and openness.

Exactly how did your perspective change? Whatever I said in that letter, before I posted it, seemed so huge. But when you come out the other side, now your brain— instead of receiving fear—sees “Oh, shit happened and nothing happened.” Brain says, “Self, I’m fine.” I look around, and I’m touching my fucking limbs, and I’m good. Before anybody called me and said congratulations or anything nice, it had already changed. It wasn’t from outside. It was completely in here, in my head.

Did you worry it would derail your career? I had those fears. In black music, we’ve got so many leaps and bounds to make with acceptance and tolerance in regard to that issue. It reflects something just ingrained, you know. When I was growing up, there was nobody in my family—not even my mother—who I could look to and be like, “I know you’ve never said anything homophobic.” So, you know, you worry about people in the business who you’ve heard talk that way. Some of my heroes coming up talk recklessly like that. It’s tempting to give those views and words—that ignorance— more attention than they deserve. Very tempting. Some people said, “He’s saying he fell in love with a guy for hype.” As if that’s the best hype you can get in hip-hop or black music. So I knew that if I was going to say what I said, it had to be in concert with one of the most brilliant pieces of art that has come out in my generation. And that’s what I did. Why can I say that? Why I don’t have to affect all this humility and shit is because I worked my ass off. I worked my face off. And the part that you love the most is the easiest part for me. So I’ll do it again.

I’m sure if you’d wanted an excuse not to reveal the relationship, you could have found ten people in the industry who would have said, “Wait.” The pitch is, “You’ll encounter less resistance in life if you say, ‘No, I’m going to just keep dating girls.’ “ But then you’re minimizing the resistance that you’re feeling from yourself on the inside. There’s so much upkeep on that shit. So much upkeep on a lie. But at least everybody else is cool with how you carry on with your life. That’s what they say.

KNOW WHAT FEAR DOES TO YOUR STRENGTH. YOU DON’T EVEN FEEL SMART OR CAPABLE. YOU JUST FEEL BROKEN— AND NOT JUST YOUR HEART. JUST A BROKEN PERSON// So do you consider yourself bisexual? You can move to the next question. I’ll respectfully say that life is dynamic and comes along with dynamic experiences, and the same sentiment that I have towards genres of music, I have towards a lot of labels and bos and shit. I’m in this business to be creative—I’ll even diminish it and say to be a content provider. One of the pieces of content that I’m for fuck sure not giving is porn videos. I’m not a centerfold. I’m not trying to sell you sex. People should pay attention to that in the letter: I didn’t need to label it for it to have impact. Because people realize everything that I say is so relatable, because when you’re talking about romantic love, both sides in all scenarios feel the same shit. As a writer, as a creator, I’m giving you my experiences. But just take what I give you. You ain’t got to pry beyond that. I’m giving you what I feel like you can feel. The other shit, you can’t feel. You can’t feel a box. You can’t feel a label. Don’t get caught up in that shit. There’s so much something in life. Don’t get caught up in the nothing. That shit is nothing, you know? It’s nothing. Vanish the fear.

Transmitting the Waves // Channel Orange, Meeting...

As we make our way back from Astoria, Ocean tells me that he’s got at least five projects in the works, among them a song he wrote for Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained; songs he’s working on for Alicia Keys and Beyoncé; songs for his own third album; and a European tour, which he says he wants to model on Pink Floyd’s The Wall tour. He’s even thinking about maybe opening his own arcade (though later he’ll post on Tumblr that this idea is “morphing”). He is considering buying a place in New York City. He needs a break from L.A.’s relentless sunshine, he says, and right now Manhattan is giving him exactly that: The rain is coming down in sheets. We pull up to his SoHo hotel, and he asks if we can idle while he runs in to get “studio-ready.” A few minutes later, he emerges, laptop in hand. He’s switched his contacts out for glasses and changed into what looks like board shorts and another Supreme hoodie, this one maroon. It’s 9 p.m. on a Friday as we head back to Jungle City. Pharrell is out in Brooklyn, waiting for Jay-Z to take the stage. But not Ocean. He has a song to write. BY AMY WALLACE 2012

grey grey ma ma

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CREAT H S OW GRAV Transmitting the Waves // Creating His Own Gravity

AT NG OWN V TY Los Angeles

On a recent Saturday morning here Frank Ocean was up early, well rested and ready to walk Everest, his Bernese mountain dog, through the up-and-down streets near the modest and modern home heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been renting near the foot of the Hollywood Hills.

For five and a half years he’s lived in this city, since he drove west from New Orleans with $1,200 in his pocket, spending $400 on the way for gas. In that time he’s become an in-demand songwriter and now a rising star in his own right. With that success has come a roller coaster of love and letdown, and that is why, he said, it’s now time to go. Maybe to New York, or more likely to Toronto, which is more car friendly — outside the house were parked two BMWs, one red and newish and one silver and oldish — and which Mr. Ocean has fallen for based on Google searches, even though he’s never been there. “When I think about the term ‘running away,’ probably it’s not the right one,” Mr. Ocean said as Everest was sniffing at some greenery. “It’s more I decided to do something different, so that I might have a different outlook.” He added, “When they’re emotional things you can’t run away from them anyway.” It’s certainly tougher to do so when they’ve been etched into song. “Channel Orange” (Island Def Jam), his beautiful first full-length studio album, will be released this month, and it’s rife with the sting of unrequited love, both on the receiving and inflicting ends. Mr. Ocean, 24, is an extremely unflashy songwriter, avoiding big proclamations and broad brush strokes, instead leaning on conversational gambits and the power of detail. He makes warm, cloudy soul with echoes of Stevie Wonder, Prince and Pharrell Williams that’s almost never about seduction. In Mr. Ocean’s universe, pretty much everyone is broken beyond repair. While clearly part of a robust historical lineage Mr. Ocean is also at the forefront of a larger push-back against the stasis in contemporary R&B, something in evidence in his organic vamps but also in the Weeknd’s narcotized lust and even mainstream dance music hybrids. And Mr. Ocean’s dissents are starting to have wider effect. He’s written for Beyoncé and has collaborated with Jay-Z and Kanye West. Back in the house he slid into the bench behind the huge slab of wood that serves as the dining room table, while

Transmitting the Waves // Creating His Own Gravity

Everest lolled outside in the patio area. His “gloriously painful love life,” as he described it, has left its mark on his songwriting, particularly as he’s made the shift from writing for others to writing for himself. Two particular relationships haunt this album: one in which he was in control, one in which he wasn’t. “I’m getting away from both,” he said, using his hands to gesture at two imagined people in front of him, explaining his circumstance to the one he’s disappointed:

“YOU’LL SAY ANYTHING TO KEEP ME AROUND. I’LL SAY ANYTHING TO KEEP THIS ONE AROUND.” Finding a way to detach, he admitted, is part self-preservation, part strategy, but he knows it’s better for him to make a clean break. He’s tried going cold turkey before. A few months ago on his Tumblr he started a countdown: “Day 1,” “Day 2.” At “Day 7,” he added “It gets easier.” “Zero contact — that’s what that was,” he said. After “Day 8” the trail went dry. “I’ve given three and a half years of my life to that situation and situations like it,” he said. On Tuesday night, Mr. Ocean took to his Tumblr to tell the story of his first love, which was with a man. “I don’t have any secrets I need kept any more,” he wrote. (That was too late to include in the print version of this article, which will appear in the Arts & Leisure section on Sunday.) “I’ve written some great things,” he added. “That’s a gift, but there’s consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.”

I’ll watch you fix your hair Then put your panties on In the mirror Cleopatra Then your lipstick Cleopatra Then your six-inch heels Cleopatra She’s headed to the Pyramid She’s working at the Pyramid tonight

That’s absolutely clear from “Channel Orange,” which is filled with lovers who tantalize but remain at arm’s length. On “Pyramids,” a long, astral trip of shimmery funk, he laments a woman who gets dressed up for her job at a strip club while the protagonist agonizes at home, unemployed. On both “Sweet Life” and “Super Rich Kids” the well-off are presented as both alluring and dangerous. On “Pilot Jones” it’s drugs that create an impregnable wall:

“TONIGHT YOU CAME STUMBLING ACROSS MY LAWN AGAIN?// I JUST DON’T KNOW WHY //I KEEP ON TRYING TO KEEP A GROWN WOMAN SOBER.” When he was young, Mr. Ocean, born Christopher Breaux, would accompany his grandfather to 12-step meetings, where, he said, his grandfather, who had struggled with alcohol, heroin and crack, served as a mentor for other addicts. “It totally ingrained this fear of addiction and of anything that could cause me to be addicted,” he said — love included. Mr. Ocean comes from a big family; his mother still lives in New Orleans, and his grandfather took on the role of father figure after Mr. Ocean’s own father disappeared when he was 6. He took to singing and songwriting at a young age, paying for his first studio sessions with money he earned washing cars. His mother wasn’t thrilled, at least in part because his father was “a keyboardist and vocalist that never popped off,” he recalled.

That began a theme. Plenty of times things come out in songs that he hasn’t been able to articulate to the people in his life, he said. “I wouldn’t do it all if there wasn’t that catharsis,” he said of songwriting. “It’s definitely an extension of my talk therapy.” Mr. Ocean isn’t quite a stoic, but he moves with a reserve that keeps people at a distance until he feels comfortable, at which point his arms open wide.

“I’M EXTREMELY COMPASSION ATE, LOVING, ALL OF THOSE WARM FUZZY THINGS, BUT THE OUTER SHELL DOESN’T PROJECT THAT ALL THE TIME.” In Odd Future, the Los Angeles hip-hop collective, he plays the role of big brother. “He’s what I imagine Rick Rubin’s like, all-wise,” said Earl Sweatshirt, who, after returning from Samoa earlier this year, became close with Mr. Ocean. “He’s the voice of reason.” As a young songwriter Mr. Ocean was profligate, writing for and with a variety of artists, hoping to establish himself. Songs he wrote were recorded by Brandy and Justin Bieber, among others. “I had to change my circumstance,” he said of the urgency that gripped that part of his life. “The artist in me hates to say that now, but it was about money, it was about access, it was about nice things.” Songs from this era were collected in “The Lonny Breaux Collection,” an easy-to-find samizdat zip file put together by fans online, the existence of which still makes Mr. Ocean wince a bit. (Many of the songs are reference vocals Mr. Ocean wrote for other singers, and most are unfinished.) Last year, after languishing on Def Jam, to which he had

Transmitting the Waves // Creating His Own Gravity

been signed for some time, he released “Nostalgia, Ultra,” a sumptuous mixtape full of left-field soul, interpolations of notable rock songs and deeply mature songwriting. Aided by his affiliation with Odd Future, it arrived with impact; “Novacane,” a song from that album, even landed in the Billboard Hot 100. Soon Mr. Ocean was wanted on his own terms. He contributed two hooks to “Watch the Throne”(Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam/ Roc Nation), last year’s collaborative album by Jay-Z and Kanye West, and was invited to work with Beyoncé in the studio for a week, resulting in “I Miss You,” which appeared on her latest album, “4” (Columbia). “She came in and heard the song, and she shed a tear and recorded it,” he recalled, “and I wanted to shed a tear.” There was also a collaboration with Nas, “No Such Thing as White Jesus,” that was unfortunately lost to a technological mishap. Mr. Ocean expressed regret that album deadlines prevented him from recreating the song from scratch, and he broke into song to capture what was lost:

Whatever you do, young king, don’t wind up dead Young queen, cross your legs, Put a crown on your head and remove the chains ’Cause even diamond chains are for slaves, Don’t set foot in no penitentiary And don’t taste the poison Don’t you bail on your families

It’s signature Frank Ocean: dignified, quasi-political, cerebral without being disdainful, fleetingly hopeful. If that bears little resemblance to the center of what’s happening on the radio — the same can certainly be said for the bulk of “Channel Orange” — so be it: Mr. Ocean appears to be creating his own gravity. “When I did have some success, it further emboldens you to be like, ‘No, I’m just going to write what I feel I should write,’ ” he said. “Channel Orange” is full of such gestures, buffered with warm guitars and keyboards, often with urgent drums clamoring for attention underneath. Large parts of the album were recorded at Eastwest Studio here, in rooms where the Beach Boys and Frank Sinatra recorded, and where some of the equipment remains unchanged. That furthers the intimacy of this album, as does the spare and judicious use of guests: Earl Sweatshirt, dissolute and tart on “Super Rich Kids”; John Mayer, who briefly adds flair to “White Heat”; and André 3000, whose verses on “Pink Matter” are dryly boastful, and whose offhand splays of guitar outshine Mr. Mayer’s. There’s also a series of interludes, inspired by television, that stitch the album into a unified whole that, again, Mr. Ocean hopes speaks loudly enough that he can disappear behind it. “The work is the work,” he said. “The work is not me. I like the anonymity that directors can have about their films. Even though it’s my voice, I’m a storyteller.” Accordingly, his name’s not on the album cover. It appears in the television ads, but he had to be talked into it. “As a lifestyle you always being the focal point is innately unhealthy,” Mr. Ocean said. Everest is credited as the album’s executive producer. “Super Rich Kids”; John Mayer, who briefly adds flair to “White Heat”; and André 3000, whose verses on “Pink Matter” are dryly boastful, and whose offhand splays of guitar outshine Mr. Mayer’s. Transmitting the Waves // Creating His Own Gravity

There’s also a series of interludes, inspired by television, that stitch the album into a unified whole that, again, Mr. Ocean hopes speaks loudly enough that he can disappear behind it. “The work is the work,” he said. “The work is not me. I like the anonymity that directors can have about their films. Even though it’s my voice, I’m a storyteller.” Accordingly, his name’s not on the album cover. It appears in the television ads, but he had to be talked into it. BY JON CARAMANICA JULY 4, 2012

“AS A LIFESTYLE YOU ALWAYS BE ING THE FOCAL POINT IS INNATE LY UNHEALTHY,” MR. OCEAN SAID//

i can nev him love never ma love me / love me / Frank implies that he needs this taxi ride more for the opportunity to talk to somebody than to get somewhere.

Un-returned affection can often build to fanatical devotion, especially if you internalize it like Frank did.

Taxi driver Be my shrink for the hour Leave the meter running It’s rush hour So take the streets if you wanna Just outrun the demons, could you

He said “Allahu akbar” I told him, “Don’t curse me” “Bo Bo, you need prayer” I guess it couldn’t hurt me If it brings me to my knees It’s a bad religion This unrequited love To me it’s nothing but a one-man cult And cyanide in my styrofoam cup I can never make him love me Never make him love me Love me Love me Love me Love me Love me Love me Love me Love me Love me Love

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ver make me // ake him // //

Frank is also having a hard time balancing all of these lives he’s leading—his personal life with those close to him, his private life and his secret (at the time) sexuality, and his public life as a performer.

Taxi driver I swear I’ve got three lives Balanced on my head like steak knives I can’t tell you the truth about my disguise I can’t trust no one And you say “Allahu akbar” I told him, “Don’t curse me” “Bo Bo, you need prayer” I guess it couldn’t hurt me If it brings me to my knees It’s a bad religion Unrequited love To me it’s nothing but a one-man cult And cyanide in my styrofoam cup I can never make him love me Never make him love me Love Love

It’s a, it’s a bad religion To be in love with someone Who could never love you Only bad, only bad religion Could have me feeling the way I do

Unrequited love can be just as self-destructive as joining a cult—you lose sight of reality and the bigger picture because you’re obsessed over one person or idea.

The “bad religion” is his “unrequited love”— the entire song functions as an exorcism of Frank Ocean’s grief, bitterness, and disappointment at the failure of his first love.

Bad Religion (Channel Orange, 2012) Annotation by Genius Lyrics

Transmitting the Waves

FRANK OCEAN IS MYSTERY INTACT

Transmitting the Waves // Frank Ocean is Finally Free

FINALLY FREE, //

Mr. Ocean is restless and more than happy to drape himself in shadows. Here, he talks about being elusive, making music and regaining control of his career. LOS ANGELES — “Porsche or Tesla?” The valet asks the question hastily, humbly, eyes not quite meeting those of the contemplative man standing before him. Frank Ocean has been staying at this secluded hotel here for a while now, long enough that when the valet spies him coming down the front path, he knows the routine. On this night, it’s the Tesla, the Model X S.U.V. with the gullwing rear doors. Inside, the dash looks like the helm of a spaceship, with a center console map display bigger than an iPad that, once on the road, Mr. Ocean never consults. It’s been more than a year since he’s had a steady home — most of his beloved cars are in storage. He moves from city to city, hotel to hotel. In a couple of days, he’ll be in New York, looking for an apartment. A day after that, he’ll turn 29. Four years ago, he released

“Channel Orange,” a clever, sinuous, supremely confident deconstruction of contemporary soul, and announced that his first love had been with a man. In the subsequent months, he was nominated for six Grammys, performed at the ceremony and toured the world. And then, he was gone — not quite a full disappearance, but something like it. What had appeared to be the beginning of a stunning ascent instead curled into a question mark. Finally, this past August, Mr. Ocean returned, and with a bounty — a visual album streaming online, “Endless,” followed by another digital album, “Blonde,” complemented by a glossy magazine, Boys Don’t Cry, distributed at pop-up shops in four cities. But apart from a lighthearted note and a couple of photos posted on his Tumblr, Mr. Ocean

Transmitting the Waves // Frank Ocean is Finally Free

didn’t speak publicly. Having emerged from the ether with fanfare, Mr. Ocean returned to it quietly, his mystery intact. Not that you would be able to sense the swirl of curiosity that surrounds him by his demeanor. During conversations over two days last month — edited excerpts are below — he was preternaturally calm, consistently forthright, reflexively self-aware, and wryly funny. This has been the case for years. It made him something of an outlier when he emerged as part of the rabblerousing Odd Future collective, and an outlier still when he catapulted into pop’s top ranks, a group of people not much given to pensive remove. Over the past three years, his absence from the pop troposphere — a void interrupted only by the occasional collaboration, Tumblr post or paparazzi shot — has felt like a position statement against celebrity culture, while simultaneously guaranteeing that Mr. Ocean’s fame, turboboosted by fervent curiosity, would grow even wider. His exile began in earnest in 2013. He was living here, in a glass-walled apartment high over Sunset and Vine, with a panoramic view of South Los Angeles. But the city was chok-

ing him: People had stolen money from him; there were “physical sorts of things going on in the streets”; and he grew concerned about the management of his affairs. “It started to weigh on me that I was responsible for the moves that had made me successful, but I wasn’t reaping the lion’s share of the profits, and that was problematic for me.”

“I HAD, IN THE MIDST OF ALL OF THIS, THIS FEELING OF ISOLATION.” “Within my circle, there was a lot of places I thought I could turn that I felt like I couldn’t turn to anymore.” So he left, hopping a plane to London, a city where he barely knew anyone, with only a duffel bag full of clothes and a backpack carrying the precious hard drives holding all of his music.

There’s a fine line between a sane escape and running away. Did you feel you were on one side or the other of that?

I never thought about it like that. I always thought about it like, if your house is on fire, you need to get out of the house.

Did you feel that certain things in your career also hadn’t gone the way you would have liked? Certain moments were drawbacks for sure. Now I look at things differently, but at the time, yeah. Audiences in excess of five million people [on national TV]. I was always reluctant to do those things except in cases where they had this nostalgic significance to me. Like performing at the V.M.A.s, being tapped to perform at the Grammys — me saying yes to those things had a lot to do with how those things made me feel before I was actually in the business. And just wanting to be rubbing shoulders with those people and being seen at those places. I still was reluctant and sort of skeptical of those things because I questioned whether or not I was prepared.

I feel like the public knock on you is that you want to be anonymous, or you want to be in some kind of retreat from the spotlight. Sometimes I’m fascinated with how famous my work could be while I’m not so famous. Super-envious of the fact that Daft Punk can wear robot helmets and be one of the most famous bands in the world, while also understanding that will never be my situation. It’s too late. It’s hard to articulate how I think about myself as a public figure. I’ve gotten used to being Frank Ocean. A lot of people stopped me on the street when I hadn’t put music out in a while, literally would yell out of an Uber, “Frank, where the album?”

Has dating been difficult for you in this period of increased celebrity? I think normal would be the word, whatever that word means, which is usually nothing. I’m in a very different place than I was four or five years ago with all that stuff. Different in my relationship with myself, which means everything. There’s no, like, shame or self-loathing. There’s no, you know, crisis. Transmitting the Waves // Frank Ocean is Finally Free

Have you been in love since then, since 2012? Not the lasting kind.

PARING TO THE ESSENCE// Control is often at the forefront of Mr. Ocean’s mind. When he was on tour, his concerts would be recorded each night, and he would watch the tape, type up notes and email them to his team to prepare for a morning meeting. When “Blonde” and “Endless” were being recorded, he carried the hard drives with his music in his backpack, and the backups, too:

“I’D RATHER THE PLANE GOES DOWN IN FLAMES AND THE DRIVES GO DOWN WITH ME THAN SOMEBODY PUT OUT A WEIRD POSTHUMOUS RELEASE. When he answers questions, he takes meaningful pauses, mulling over premises, before answering in expansive stories paired with precise bursts of logic.

After bouncing around hotels in London, he moved into a furnished apartment that he eventually stripped bare of all but the essentials: “I just wanted to be able to walk around and not run into an end table or some useless piece of furniture.” He rode electric bikes around the city, made new friends — “which is not as difficult as celebrities make it sound” — went on dates. He recorded in a handful of studios, including Abbey Road, where he asked for the studio, too, to be decluttered, removing furniture and bringing in flower arrangements. Piece by piece, the music that would become “Blonde” and “Endless” was coming together, though up until then, it had been slow going. He’d begun recording at Electric Lady in New York, but after he took a pause away from the studio, the rhythm of writing was gone. “I had writer’s block for almost a year,” he said. During that time, he would go to the studio, “stare at the monitors and come up with nothing, or nothing that I liked.” That dry spell broke only after he reconnected with a childhood friend from New Orleans who was going through difficult times. That conversation, he said, “made me feel as though I should talk about the way I grew up more.” He decided that he wanted “Blonde” and “Endless” to be more autobiographical than his earlier releases. “I wrote ‘Channel Orange’ in two weeks,” he said. “The end product wasn’t always that gritty, real-life depiction of the real struggle that happened.” So he turned inward, and backward, telling stories about his childhood, family life, and romantic relationships — some frivolous, like on “Nikes” (“He don’t care for me/but he cares for me/and that’s good enough”); some meaningful, like on “Self Control” (“Wish we’d grown up on the same advice”): “That was written about someone who I was actually in a relationship with, who wasn’t an unrequited situation,” he said. “It was mutual, it was just we couldn’t really relate. We weren’t really on the same wavelength.”

Transmitting the Waves // Frank Ocean is Finally Free

In places, like on “Ivy,” he manipulated his voice to sound younger, to better capture the time he was evoking. Many of the new songs have two or three competing narratives — different points of view participating in the same story. “That was my version of collage or bricolage,” he said.

“HOW WE EXPERIENCE MEMORY SOMETIMES, IT’S NOT LINEAR. WE’RE NOT TELLING THE STORIES TO OURSELVES, WE KNOW THE STORY, WE’RE JUST SEEING IT IN FLASHES OVERLAID.” On “Blonde,” especially, you used a lot of different voices. Sometimes I felt like you weren’t hearing enough versions of me within a song, ’cause there was a lot of hyperactive thinking. Even though the pace of the album’s not frenetic, the pace of ideas being thrown out is.

Are they always multiple points of view, or are they multiple Franks interrupting each other to be heard? It’s the same thing — to me — because my point of view from one emotional state to another is a different point of view. Sometimes I want to talk on a song and be angry, because I am angry. Then there’s always a part of me that remembers that this record lives past my being angry, and so do I really want to be angry about that? Is that feeling going to have longevity?

Were you working toward a fixed idea on these albums? Or was it mutating and evolving as you went?

When I was making the record, there was 50 versions of “White Ferrari.” I have a 15-year-old little brother, and he heard one of the versions, and he’s like, “You gotta put that one out, that’s the one.” And I was like, “Naw, that’s not the version,” because it didn’t give me peace yet.

You were reaching for something ineffable? They’re just chords, just melodies. I don’t know what combination of those objects is gonna make me feel how I need to feel. But I know precisely the feeling that needs to happen.

REGAINING CONTROL OF BUSINESS// At the same time he was chasing a perfect-feeling sound, he was trying to regain control of his business relationships. He replaced his team — new management, new lawyer, new publicist. And he began negotiations to free himself from his contract with Def Jam, the label that had signed him in 2009 and effectively shelved him until his self-released debut mixtape “Nostalgia, Ultra” caused a stir online in 2011. “A seven-year chess game” is how he described the process of buying himself out of his contract and purchasing back all of his master recordings — using his own money, he said. As a condition of the arrangement, he said, Def Jam took on distribution of his next project, “Endless,” which is available only as a streaming video album on Apple Music. Then, less than two days later, came a big surprise: “Blonde,” released independently by Mr. Ocean. (Apple Music paid to host the premiere of “Blonde,” but Mr. Ocean said there was no ongoing relationship with Apple.) This was Mr. Ocean’s checkmate, an album wholly his own that took center stage: “Blonde” debuted atop the Billboard album chart with the third-biggest opening week of the year, behind only Drake and Beyoncé. When releasing “Endless” and “Blonde,” he took his time: “I know that once it’s out, it’s out forever, so I’m not really trip-

Transmitting the Waves // Frank Ocean is Finally Free

ping on how long it’s taking.” He described his mood after the release of “Blonde” as “postpartum.” Rather than going on a promotional tour, playing radio festivals and making the usual rounds, he spent about a month traveling: “China, Japan, Oceania, France, just around. Casual.”

You solved some rather intractable business issues. You recalibrated the cast of professionals who work on your career. Were those your main goals?

WITH THIS RECORD IN PARTICULAR, I WANTED TO FEEL LIKE I WON BEFORE THE RECORD CAME OUT, AND I DID and so it took a lot pressure off of me about how the record even would perform after the fact. Once the goal is met, everything else is lagniappe. It’s not essential for me to have a big debut week, it’s not essential for me to have big radio records.

alents from streaming, which territories are playing my music more than others, because it helps me in conversations about where we’re gonna be playing shows, or where I might open a retail location, like a pop-up store or something.

Do you feel like the numbers are commensurate with what you thought they would or should be? Well, we doubled “Channel Orange” first week. I’m always gonna be like, “We could have done a little bit better.” I guess there’s a satisfaction that comes with looking at numbers like that, and I’m making, like, No Limit-type of equity, Master P-type of equity on my record.

‘HALF-A-SONG FORMAT’// And there have been accolades, too. In 2013, Mr. Ocean won two Grammys, and he has been nominated since, but come February, he will not win any, because he chose not to submit his music for consideration. “That institution certainly has nostalgic importance,” he said. “It just doesn’t seem to be representing very well for people who come from where I come from, and hold down what I hold down.” He noted that since he was born, just a few black artists have won album of the year, including Quincy Jones, Herbie Hancock and Ray Charles. Though Mr. Ocean said the Grammys reached out to his representatives, he never spoke with them directly before making his decision. “I think the infrastructure of the awarding system and the nomination system and screening system is dated,” he said. “I’d rather this be my Colin Kaepernick moment for the Grammys than sit there in the audience.” This willingness to remove himself from a situation not designed for him to thrive in is perhaps Mr. Ocean’s greatest gift. His backbone is firm. Though he still publishes emotional decrees on Tumblr from time to time — his note on the death of Prince was heart-rending — he largely avoids

Transmitting the Waves // Frank Ocean is Finally Free

social media. His Twitter is gone. Usually a handful of trusted colleagues, friends or family members make him aware of things he might need or want to know. (It was his agent who told him about Kanye West’s recent Grammy-related speech on his behalf.) He is as much refusenik as artist — what he does may be less important than what he chooses not to do. And moving forward, what he may choose not to do is release an album without a visual component, or even release something album length at all. “Because I’m not in a record deal, I don’t have to operate in an album format,” he said. “I can operate in half-a-song format.” Or he might devote less time to music.

“I BELIEVE THAT I’M ONE OF THE BEST IN THE WORLD AT WHAT I DO, AND THAT’S ALL I’VE EVER WANTED TO BE.” “It’s more interesting for me to figure out how to be superior in areas where I’m naïve, where I’m a novice.” A few weeks ago, he was flying back from Washington with his mother after a White House state dinner, where he had been one of President Obama’s guests. Mr. Ocean told her how he’d been poking around the visual arts degree offerings at the New School, thinking about what it would take to begin to learn and refine a new craft. “Oh, you don’t have time to do that,” she told him. And he replied, “Mom, I’m rich!” He’s laughing now. After a long drive, the Tesla is parked behind an anonymous recording studio, where he’s about

go work on new music. “I wasn’t trying to flex up on my mom,” he said. Rather, it was “a personal service announce ment to me, to just be like ‘Wait, look at your position, you have the luxury of choice.’”

Now he’s finished laughing, back in control // BY JON CARAMANICA 2016

Transmitting the Waves // Frank Ocean is Finally Free

“THIS HAS ALWAYS BEEN MY LIFE AND NO ONE ELSE’S, AND THAT’S HOW IT’S ALWAYS BEEN SINCE THE DAY I CAME IN IT.” 57

Transmitting the Waves

Many college students have gone to college and gotten hooked on drugs, marijuana, and alcohol. Listen, stop trying to be somebody else. Don’t try to be someone else. Be yourself and know that that’s good enough. Don’t try to be someone else. Don’t try to be like someone else, don’t try to act like someone else, be yourself. Be secure with yourself. Rely and trust upon your own decisions. On your own beliefs. You understand the things that I’ve taught you. Not to drink alcohol, not to use drugs. Don’t use that cocaine or marijuana because that stuff is highly addictive. When people become weed-heads they become sluggish, lazy, stupid and unconcerned. Sluggish, lazy, stupid and unconcerned. That’s all marijuana does to you, okay? This is mom. Unless you’re taking it under doctor’s umm- control. Then it’s regulated. Do not smoke marijuana, do not consume alcohol, do not get in the car with someone who is inebriated. This is mom, call me, bye.

Be Yourself (Blonde, 2016)

Round the clock Everybody needs y No you can’t make

ese bitches want Nikes ey looking for a check Although you got l em it ain’t likely d she need a ring like Carmelo You don’t even got side convo about your summeryou last night, oh yeah st be on thatPool white like Othello About your summer last night you want is Ain’t Nikes Breath till I evapor give you no play, mm Could I make shine last night? t the real ones just likeit you My whole body see Could I make it shine, on it last night? st like me Could we make it in? Do we have time? Transportation, ha

And I know it bette

I’ll be the boyfriend in your wet dreams tonight on’t play, I don’t make time Noses on a rare, little virgin wears the white I don’t trust them a t if you needYou dick got you and I yam the cut Iyour hair but you used to livefrom a blinded life You can’t break Wish I was there, wish we had grown up on the same advice the e And our time was right Get some pussy ha ur up for A$AP Shooters killing lef Keep a place for me, for me P Pimp C I’ll sleep between y’all, it’s nothing Working through y P Trayvon, that nigga it’s look just like me It’s nothing, nothing If I get my money Keep a place for me, for me oo, fuckin’ buzzin’, woo! You know I won’t n You at my little cousin, he got a little trade Now and then you miss it, sounds make you cry girl keep the scales, a little Some nights you dancemermaid with tears inAnd your eyes I tell you, (bit I came to visit cause you see me like a UFO e out by the pool, some little mermaids I hope the sack is f That’s like never cause I made you use your self control and them gel And you made me lose my self control, self controlno I’m I’mmyfuckin’, e twigs with them bangs Spend it when I ge Keep a place for me, for me w that’s a real mermaid I’ll sleep between y’all, it’s nothing I ain’t trying to kee Keepyour a place for me u been holding breath Can’t keep up a co It’s nothing, it’s nothing eighted downIt’s nothing, it’s nothing Can’t nobody reac nk madre, punk papa Why your eyes we I, I, I don’t care for me Know you gotta leave, leave, leave Did you call me fro t he cares forTake medown some summer time Give up, just tonight, night, night You are from a pas d that’s good enough I, I, I Hope you’re doing e don’t talk much or got nothin’ Know you someone comin’ You’re spitting oh you got it I been out here he t when we talkin’ aboutgame, something I, I, I e have good discussion Know you gotta leave, leave, leave Always like the hea Take down some summer time they’re et his friends last week, feels like up coming to Signal in a Give up, just tonight, night, night mething Hope you’re doing I, I, I Know you got someone comin’ at’s good forthe usWaves // Blonde First-Listen ReviewEverybody needs y Transmitting

e’ll let you

You’re spitting game, oh you got it (Nobody else, nobody else) guys I, I, I prophesy

Everybody needs y

you e everybody equal

I thought that I was dreaming you love me The start of nothing rated I had no chance to prepare e through I couldn’t see you coming andmade The start of nothing er than most people anyways I could hate you now e law with them It’s quite alright to hate me no ave a calm night ft and right When we both know that deep down your worst night right The feeling still deep down is need you good tch)

beaucoup family when you t nobody being honest withsaid

full up I will be honest, I wasn’t devastated But you mythrough hand through this, b bab fucked up Ifcould’ve I couldheld see walls, I ab I didn’t need et that In my mind, could see you’re faking ep you Warned your ex I run my hands through what’s left onversation If you could see my thoughts But we’re getting older, baby you would see our faces ch you How much longer baby? ell up Safe in my rental like an armor Why am I preaching? om a seance To thistruck choir, to the saved kids back then st life Just like mine versions of these belong to you didn’t give a fuck back the g well bruh After aWe while Blonde First-Listen Review ead first They’reI keeping you ain’t ame kidclose no to more ‘An Album That Will ad first We’ll never be those kids again and out Be Worth Living With’ We’d drive to Syd’s, had the X g well bruh back then you you Back then

// 61

Frank Ocean’s second release in three days isn’t the pop album some had predicted. But beneath the subtlety lie indelible hooks Frank Ocean seems to like to look chaotic, even slapdash. This long-teased album’s eventual release as an Apple Music stream was announced on his Tumblr with a post that read: “FUCK, SORRY.. I TOOK A NAP, BUT IT’S PLAYING ON APPLE RADIO RN.” It’s titled Blonde online and in his Boys Don’t Cry magazine, which accompanies the release, but Blond on the album CD artwork – which also manages to misspell “Elliot [sic] Smith” (Ocean borrows the entire chorus of Smith’s Fond Farewell for his track Siegfried). Sonically, there’s no dramatic shift from Endless, the “visual album” that appeared just two days ago: indeed it could be a continuation of that album. It’s a very subdued record: the melodies meander, more often than not without drums, and snatches of dialogue and weird electronic glitches interrupt conventional-seeming parts. Seven of the 17 tracks are under the three-minute mark. There’s a rap verse in Japanese at the end of Nikes. One might be tempted on first hearing to think that the tangled and

overlong creative process has got the better of Ocean, and that he’s just released a hodgepodge of more or less finished ideas. It only takes a couple of plays to put paid to that suspicion. Another of Ocean’s Tumblr posts reads,

“THANK YOU ALL. ESPECIALLY THOSE OF YOU WHO NEVER LET ME FORGET I HAD TO FINISH. WHICH IS BASICALLY EVERY ONE OF YA’LL.” Once you’re immersed in it, it becomes abundantly clear he’s taken this seriously, and this very much is a finished album. It’s a carefully structured album to boot: the segue from Be Yourself, constructed from a concerned phone message from Ocean’s mother, into Solo, an

Transmitting the Waves // Blonde First-Listen Review

blonde 01 // Nikes 02 // Ivy 03 // Pink + White 04 // Be Yourself 05 // Solo 06 // Skyline To 07 // Self Control 08 // Good Guy 09 // Nights 10 // Solo (Reprise) 11 // Pretty Sweet 12 // Facebook Story 13 // Close to You 14 // White Ferrari 15 // Seigfried 16 // Godspeed 17 // Futura Free

intensely affecting song about drugged paralysis, is just the most obvious example. Elsewhere it flows in subtle ways but from one track to the next, an inexorable sense of a narrative being spun out but never spelled out. It’s a complicated, indulgent, moody record, though, one that deals in textures and impressions more than in pop hooks and instant thrills. Its superstar guest spots are woven into the textures, not signposted: Beyoncé, for example, just adds wordless harmonising to the adolescent memories of Pink + White, and Kendrick Lamar’s contribution to Skyline To is as a writer and producer, with his voice only appearing as a few cryptic, barked ad-libs. Guitars ripple throughout, some of which are certainly Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood; any that are not are certainly beholden to him. James Blake appears on the credits, where he is on the record it’s impossible to tell, though his influence is everywhere. The only person who really leaps out is Outkast’s André 3000, verbally somersaulting over a minute of bleeps and jazz piano on Solo (Reprise), but even he doesn’t break the mood. It’s precisely that consistency

of mood that brings together all the seeming weirdness into something extraordinarily listenable as a complete piece. When detuned guitar arpeggios suddenly take over the track then collapse into electronic glitch, in the episodic Nights, or when robot voices intrude on the otherwise Bill Withers-like guitar-andvocal ballad Self Control, they’re not gimmicks or attempts to be modern: once you’re in Frank Ocean world, they seem completely natural. We’re seeing the maturation of a few trends of the last few years. The indiefication of hip-hop culture, which had its most mainstream expression with the bromance between Jay-Z and Chris Martin, and saw every other mainstream rap/R&B tune have a moaning white guy chorus for a while, is here expressed in infinitely more musically and emotionally sophisticated form. Likewise the weird electronic side of “alt-R&B” – the dialogue between black American culture and British bedroom experimentalists like Blake and the xx – is subsumed elegantly into Ocean’s writing and recording process. Under all the subtlety and still surfaces, there are actually hooks here – just not the needy, salesmanlike kind that wave at you, shouting; “Here I am, re

Transmitting the Waves // Blonde First-Listen Review

member this song!” The melodies– not only on the swaying soul waltz of ‘Pink + White’, or the tick-tock melody of the conventional R&B sections of Night, in the outer-space balladry of Siegfried and the future gospel crawl of the heartbreaking Godspeed – lodge very quickly in the memory and stay there. And there are single moments like the way Ocean hollers, “I’m not brave!” in Siegfried that can stop you in your tracks. Once these musical elements are in your subconscious, a complicated set

of ideas starts to unfold. Among all the immediate autobiographical and introspective themes of weed, cars, women, men, consumerism, growing up and responsibility, are all kinds of complex wordplay, and references to Shakespeare and Teutonic myth, but as with everything these are subtly done. They don’t clang into the songs as signals of bourgeois erudition, but slide in, signposting more and deeper themes which will only become apparent as we live with the album.

AND YES, IT’S TRUE: THIS IS GOING TO BE AN ALBUM WORTH LIVING WITH// BY Joe Muggs 2016

Frank Ocean on Forever 21 Storefront Using Font:

“Uhh” “#cease&desist”

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Last night, Frank Ocean posted a photo on his Tumblr. It shows a storefront where the words “pop-up shop” are spelled out in fonts similar to those used on the cover of his album Blonde and his magazine Boys Don’t Cry. While the name of the store is cropped out, an uncropped version of the photo shared on Twitter (below) reveals that it’s apparently a Forever 21 window display. The day Blonde was released last year, the album and magazine were distributed at a series of pop-up shops around the country. Ocean captioned the photo: “ uhh.” His post is tagged “#cease&desist.” (The caption has since been edited to only feature the emoji) Pitchfork has reached out to Ocean and Forever 21’s representatives for comment. BY EVAN MINSKER 2017

Frank Ocean’s Best Songs: Critic’s Picks With ‘Channel Orange’ turning five on July 10, we pick the 10 best Frank Ocean songs, including ‘Thinking Bout You,’ ‘Slide,’ ‘Chanel,’ and ‘Pink + White.’ In five years, Frank Ocean has gone from releasing his proper debut album to proving the flimsy absurdity of the words “proper debut album.” Just last year, his profound insight into music consumption finessed him from an unhappy record deal into prosperous free agency. But four years before Blonde intensified his cultural and critical dominance (as well as his bank account), Frank was just an up-and-comer. Channel Orange was released five years ago Monday (July 10) and before its arrival, a mixtape and handful of features to Ocean’s name. It’s crazy to think there was once a time he was saddled with descriptors like “Odd Future crooner Frank Ocean.” In the years since, he’s welcomed

us into one of music’s most sensitive psyches and delivered on the promise of an artist whose early-career feature bested both Beyoncé’s and…um…Otis Redding’s on Kanye West and JAY-Z’s collaborative mega-flex, Watch the Throne. In the end, we decided “No Church in the Wild” isn’t enough Frank’s song to crack this early career canon, though certainly not out of failing to go hard enough. Parsing through less than a decade of material to come up with the top 10 Frank Ocean songs was no easy task.

10// “Nature Feels” (from Nostalgia, Ultra, 2011) Following the note on “No

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Church,” there’s no doubt Frank owes a heavy debt here, too, building this mixtape track largely from “Electric Feel”s’ slithering disco bass. But MGMT have scarcely sounded this good since 2007’s Oracular Spectacular, and they absolutely never sounded this provocative. Lyrically, Ocean cuts to the core, managing to sexualize photosynthesis (“I’ve been meaning to f--- you in the garden / Been breathing so hard we both could use the oxygen”) and link it to mankind’s most primal (also garden-related) instincts (“Feeling like Adam when he first found out this existed.”)

Ocean’s coming out as bisexual on the eve of the album’s release, and a thematic link to another sparse confessional on the double album’s opening side (more on that later). A lovelorn Ocean confides in his taxi driver and, upon receiving only religious platitudes, realizes begging kinda sucks, whether it’s to God or a would-be partner: “If it brings me to my knees, it’s a bad religion.” After careening between falsetto and plain-sung pleas for most of the song, the Prince-like scream he squeezes into the denouement is one of Channel Orange’s signature moments.

9// “Ivy” (from Blonde, 2016)

7// “Nikes” (from Blonde, 2016)

Frank f---s with some indie rock. From Nostalgia, Ultra’s “What’s a Radiohead?” mini-sketch to naming his label Boys Don’t Cry, he’s got an appreciation for heady guitar work, which he employs on Blonde’s second track. The chiming, palm-muted guitar line -- written by former Vampire Weekend member Rostam Batmanglij -- nestles a glistening, percussion-free environment for Ocean to come clean over lost love, this time as the heartbreaker.

Ocean released Blonde a day after the enigmatic visual album Endless, which fulfilled his Def Jam contract and allowed him to truly operate as he wished. Likewise, his lead single as a free agent was about as far from a capitalistic commercial push as he could get -- a deeply layered, sentimental dirge made beautiful through its subject matter. Frank knows how to appreciate simple pleasures, but on “Nikes,” he brushes aside the vices of stardom for one of his most poignant moments: “Pour up for ASAP [Yams]/RIP Pimp C/RIP Trayvon, that n---- look just like me.”

8// “Bad Religion” (from Channel Orange, 2013) This Channel Orange side D gem is closely intertwined with

“THESE BITCHES WANT NIKEEEEEEEES”

6// “Chanel” (single, 2017) Much was made of Ocean’s casual coming out, a couple years after many were introduced to him through a song that found him getting horny over “a stripper booty and a rack like wowwwwwww.” Of course, these two sides aren’t mutually exclusive, something that’s wound together brilliantly on this entrancing ode to bisexuality. It’s full of slick lines that deserve to be immortalized in their own custom Tumblr graphics, but alas, “I see both sides like Chanel” -- Frank’s shrewd link between his romantic desires and the brand’s dualgazing logo -- is the prize of the collection.

5// “Pink + White” (from Blonde, 2016) “Pink + White” was co-written and co-produced by Pharrell Williams and features one Beyoncé Knowles-Carter on backing vocals, but those are hardly the most notable things about this utterly beautiful Frank Ocean song. Heck, Blonde’s liner notes are loaded with flashy names (something that ruins some albums) but that’s not what made it one of last year’s most blissful slabs of music. This song combines heavenly melodies, keystrokes and bass plucks -- a near-aural equivalent to the pink and white sky Ocean sings about -- in conveying the bliss of youth amongst the pain of losing a childhood

friend. In the end, he realizes what he can achieve by keeping the good memories alive: “This is life, life is immortality.”

4// “Pyramids” (from Channel Orange, 2013) This 10-minute wonder towers over the middle of Channel Orange and for good reason: it’s like a whole album within an album, thematically and musically. It opens as a banger, then shifts from clubby grandeur to druggy and downtempo, soundtracking Ocean’s cross-millennia Black narrative. His Cleopatra character is all-powerful in ancient Egypt, then, once the song shifts to present, becomes a stripper just as crestfallen as her client. On a lighter side, we’ll always have Ocean’s “Pyramids” SNL performance; after wrapping up his singing duties, he shuffles cross-stage to play some video games while his pal (and album collaborator) John Mayer continues to shred.

3// “Slide” (from Calvin Harris’ Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1, 2017) Sure, Ocean isn’t the lead artist, but does anyone really think of “Slide” as a Calvin Harris song? The DJ-producer’s sun-kissed disco grooves give our hero the closest thing he’s had to a summer jam, and at that, his biggest

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Top 40 hit to date (it peaked at No. 9 on Billboard’s Pop Songs chart). There’s also uncanny chemistry between collaborators. Ocean muses emptying his bank account to buy a Picasso in the intro; he doesn’t mention the painter, but Offset drops the name in his guest verse.

2// “Thinkin Bout You” (from Channel Orange, 2013) Anyone still mulling over Ocean’s awkward Grammys performance needs to go back and watch his real defining TV moment, the uncanny “Thinkin Bout You” rendition, a video clinic on how to pivot your voice from painspoken to falsetto on a dime. In this popular demoturned single, moments like this are a true emotional gut-punch -- what you get when a song about heartbreak uses empty sonic space so profoundly. Minimal and tender, Ocean used it to open up to the world about a particular unrequited love, which upon releasing Channel Orange, he revealed was with with a man.

1// “Novacane” (from Nostalgia, Ultra, 2011) Ocean’s evolved as a lyricist, but it’s no diss to name a debut mixtape track his best-to-date because, well, he’s always been fire. He attended Coachella 2010 not as an artist, but as a

fan -- sort of just like us! -- and captured the bougie malaise of millennial festival-goers with this woozy, wobbly, instantly-quotable smash. The devolution from chatting up a gorgeous woman about JAY-Z and Z-Trip to a cocaine-fueled fervor with dirty dishes in the sink is absolutely off-putting, but Ocean’s never been here to humor us. A few years later, the Weeknd would sing about not being able to feel his face in a far more popular song, but if there’s a track to make us bolt the VIP section and go enjoy a natural high, it’s Ocean’s. BY CHRIS PAYNE 2017

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I BLAME IT ON THE MODEL BROAD WITH A HOLLYWOOD SMILE...

OW.

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“IN LOVING MEMORY OF FRANK OCEAN. HE AIN’T DEAD / I JUST LOVE REMEMBERING HIM.”

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A COMPILATION OF ESSAYS ON FRANK OCEAN CONCEPT AND DESIGN BY AUTUMN BEANE BODY TEXT: GOTHAM FAMILY TEXT SIZE: 9PT LEADING: 12PT

All content found in these pages is the original property of its creators and owners. Articles, interviews, photographs, and other texts were collected and organized for the compilation of this book, which was created as a student design project. Some texts have been condensed, reformated, and edited to increase readability. Photographs have been edited to optimize their printed appearance.

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