Sounds Make You Cry: The Frank Ocean Retrospective

Every once in a while, an artist comes along who is revolutionary, game changing, whose influence transcends their music. Madonna, David Bowie, Prince, Lady Gaga. All of these artists have a certain quality that propels them above everyone else in the industry. They have all experimented with sound, style, gender, sexuality, but perhaps most importantly, they were unapologetically and unequivocally, themselves.

The elusive artist went from four years of silence since his releasing debut studio album, Channel Orange, to delighting fans with three artistic products to consume in the space of 48 overwhelming hours. Over the 19th and 20th August 2016, alongside a free 360-page magazine called Boys Don’t Cry and a visual album called Endless, Ocean unleashed his boldest, queerest, most intimate project yet, Blonde.

Hungry fans and critics consumed Blonde ravenously — in its first week alone, Blonde sold over 276,000 copies worldwide, knocking Drake’s Views off of the top of the Billboard 200. It was streamed 65.4 million times and earned Ocean a cool $1 million in a week. By the end of the year, numerous publications, including Pitchfork, Vulture, Time and Rolling Stone had all placed Blonde in their top five albums of the year. The Guardian’s five-star review even said it was one of the most “baffling, contrary and intriguing records put out by a major pop star — not just this year, but any year”.

From this point on, it was clear that Blonde, as well as Frank himself, had created something bigger than just an album, but amongst the hysteria of 2016’s triple release, it was something couldn’t really be digested, couldn’t be fully understood.

Throughout his previous projects, particularly in Channel Orange, Ocean created a style that was uniquely his own, and it is this same style that he fed into both Endless and Blonde, it is this same style that gifts us with the addictive and hazy melodies that elevate Ocean’s impressive vocal talents.

Whilst there may be other talented artists in his genre, Ocean’s sound has not, and perhaps cannot, be replicated. He mirrors the stories he’s portraying using controlled arrangements and sometimes, that leads to a surprising, and refreshing, change. He doesn’t hesitate to flip the sound of the album in a heartbeat, he doesn’t hesitate to bring forward a vocal, or secondary melody, that had been obscured for three-quarters of the song. It is this production technique that is at the core of Blonde’s sonic magic.

Generally, the melodies across Blonde are soft and unobtrusive. But when Frank starts to sing, the smooth harmonies quickly transform into something mesmerizing that actually compliment Ocean’s delicate lyricism and really bring the song to a new level.

It is this intricate relationship between melody and lyric, created purely by Ocean’s knowledge and talent as a musician and as a producer, that allows for a real cohesion throughout the whole album, something that only plays into cultivating Ocean’s unique style.

And if this is not enough, the coherent style and sound of Blonde become a staggering achievement when you consider the sheer number of guest artists on this album. To include so many chart-topping artists on one record and still maintain complete artistic control and coherency over the project is downright impressive. In fact, I actually think that’s the sign of an outstanding artist.

In some ways, it also demonstrates how much trust and admiration the featured artists in Blonde, like Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, and Andre 3000, have towards Frank to allow themselves to play secondary, background roles with very little public recognition. Trusting Frank with their own brilliant voices and reputations shows that they see him as one of their own, on their level, they acknowledge and celebrate his talent, his promise, and want to be part of it. And if Blonde is good enough for them, then it’s certainly good enough for us.

However, we must not forget that there is more to Frank Ocean, to Blonde, than simply attractive melodies. There is, of course, the poetics of his lyricism, his ability to articulate intimate moments of nostalgia, regret, love and loss. It takes a good storyteller to do this — but Ocean is not a good storyteller, he is a great one — and it takes a great storyteller to not only articulate these feelings in such a way but also be able to captivate the minds of a really diverse group of fans as well, each with their own experiences and interpretations of his music.

That said, since Channel Orange, Ocean has evolved from being a great storyteller, to actually becoming the story himself. Whilst he may contract a little in his debut album, in Blonde, he seems to be a lot more free, more open with himself, with us, and the album really benefits from that. We’re listening to him work through some deeply personal moments, and even if we don’t always know what or who the referents are, we can certainly appreciate the raw sense of emotion in these stories. It feels remarkably insular, like the inner musings of a man reflecting upon himself and his relationships. His talent for telling his own stories allows the whole album to unfurl track by track and that’s really part of its beauty.

Moreover, whilst this emotional transparency is significant, the true beauty of the lyricism in Blonde actually lies in Ocean’s rare capacity to locate the essence of a situation, to expose its bones, to discover it for what it truly, and often heartbreakingly, is. In that moment, Ocean reveals the honest realities of heartbreak, melancholy and solitude.

With these realities in mind, whilst Blonde is an ambitiously intimate piece of personal artistry, it still portrays universal experiences and these will always be accessible to a number of people. Even two years after its release, the stories told in Blonde still touch a nerve for many people.

As a record, Blonde is very strong, both melodically and narratively, and it is often difficult to choose a specific favourite. For me, there is a another significance to the album that extends into wider culture and society that I think is exceptional. Both Ocean as a person, and the themes he explores in his work, help create a conversation about a number of underrepresented societal issues.

Since the release of Channel Orange, Ocean has always publically approached his romantic and sexual relationships with a certain fluidity and dynamism. But through the pure capacity of Ocean’s lyricism, he offers an alternative view of sexuality and gender as something elliptical and boundless. Notably, whilst he may write openly about same-sex relationships, he does so only when narratively justified, as an expression of introspection, lust or memory. He seeks love, beauty and pleasure, in various forms, and is unashamed of that. He has never been afraid to explicitly explore a labeless and casual sexual identity. He has never been afraid to be nonconforming, to be boundless, to be queer. And in my opinion, that’s where his magic lies.

Just days before the release of his first studio album, Channel Orange, Ocean posted an open letter to his Tumblr page in which he recounted falling for a male companion when he was 19. “It was my first love, it changed my life,” he wrote, detailing how he attempted to come to grips with this revelation through his songwriting. Happily, at the end of the letter came catharsis: “I feel like a free man, and if I listen closely … I can feel the sky falling too.”

Whilst Frank is not the first artist to address his sexuality, the fact that he proudly wrote about his same-sex relationships caused shockwaves in the heteronormative worlds of hip-hop and R&B. Never had an artist working in this scenes spoken so bravely and openly about their own queer experiences on a public platform. More accurately, never had an artist working in R&B and hip-hop spoken so bravely and openly about their own queer experiences to such acclaim, to such celebration and to such love.

By choosing to address his sexuality publicly, and gaining so much respect and admiration for doing so, he gifted an entire community with the opportunity to do the same, acting as proof that there can be acceptance, celebration and love on the other side. The stories he tells as a young queer African American man are crucial to help a community that was, and still is, critically underrepresented. Both Blonde and Channel Orange offer a valuable opportunity to inform, educate and cultivate opinions about the LGBT community, particularly in hip-hop and R&B scenes, where homophobic and anti-LGBT rhetorics are unfortunately still prevalent. By listening to Ocean recount sexual or romantic acts with a lover of an unknown gender, it forces us to question our personal beliefs, to break down inherent social prejudices or stereotypes. And that’s something that we shouldn’t forget.

After four long years of expectation and anticipation, Endless and Blonde were released one after another, which only increased the hype around Ocean as a musician and as a star. Soon, many began to call Blonde Ocean’s greatest work and these calls still ring true 2 years later. Blonde is still highly-esteemed, it’s still regarded as a piece of art, a piece of culture, an event in music history. And there aren’t many musicians who can do that. Ultimately, Ocean’s enigmatic persona, as well as the sheer quality of his discography, managed to turn Blonde into the cultural phenomenon that people were longing for, rather than just merely an album they could consume and then forget.

Moreover, even in the streaming music era, in which increasingly fewer listeners have any real need to listen to whole albums as intended by the artist, Ocean remains a rare musician who excels as an album artist. He is more than capable of making a catchy pop single, but that’s just not his game. He’s a storyteller, an artist — and one that flourishes in longform, where a cohesive story can unfurl itself, track after track. And that’s why Blonde, as an entity, is so strong. This is what Ocean offers that listeners crave — an antidote to the fast-paced, shallow, and throwaway content that dominates so much of modern music and popular culture. An antidote that truthfully explores universal and timeless narrative themes of love, loss and solitude.

Over the course of his six-year solo career, Frank Ocean has initiated compelling conversations around integrity, sexuality and identity — and with an ever progressive society with less fixed sexual and gender identities, Ocean has become a figurehead for our fluid modern ideals.

Within his songs, he uses his own personal relationships and musings to question societal norms, to reject dated classifications of gender and sexuality, and to create a conversation for many people that will serve to dismantle their existing beliefs. More specifically, within his own genres of R&B and Hip-hop, he has exploded age-old rhetoric, rejected heteronormative prejudices and deconstructed harmful stereotypes, solely by proudly being himself.

The work that Ocean diffuses into the world serves more purpose than others in his genre, it serves more purpose than simply existing as a piece of music, it serves to record, recount, and educate. It is one of the best representations of our culture, our society at a particular time — and because of this, it can be, and will be, studied as one of the truly great albums of modern times. It is the type of album that never really dies. It is ever-transforming, taking on new life and new meaning with every listen.

In many respects, Frank Ocean is a visionary, an icon, an artist following no one but himself, lost within his own mind, defining love, sexuality and identity on his own terms, through his own ways. His confidence in the things that make him vulnerable is infectious and his ability to articulate this in his songs is humbling. And through these, he can teach a lot of people how to be themselves, how to re-confirm who they are. And that’s truly the sign of a groundbreaking album, of a trailblazing artist.