It may be a metaphor for how exposed he feels by releasing such a deeply personal album, and how he feels the weight of gender roles.īalancing them and becoming who he truly is took a lot of work. In this photo, Frank Ocean is attempting to hide his tears, both with his hand and in the water drops of the shower. Like, Im missing the artistic meaning behind it level 2 Original Poster 43 points 3 years ago The title of the album was originally supposed to be Boys Dont Cry. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts Log in sign up User account menu 605 Hi-res Blond cover. When, moments later, he murmurs, Id do anything for you to the object of his longing, the feeling is peaceful, infusing heartache with mindfulness.Spending 40 on this rather than hundreds on the official copy was well worth it. One reason his music captures so many peoples imaginations now is that its supremely ruminative, dedicated to exploring how memories drift, dissolve, reassemble themselves to form the narratives that inwardly define us, and how desire arises within a story each person tells herself as she reaches toward another.ĭreaming a thought that could dream about a thought that could think of the dreamer in the thought, Ocean rhymes in Seigfried, imagining God at the end of that particular road, but not the lover for whom he longs.Ī guitar loop forms a membrane around the image, expanding it infinitely. Introversion defines Oceans stance throughout Blonde, even when hes reaching out to a lover those lovers are often merely shadows on the passenger seat anyway. The lyrics only half-tell them, though, and only in deep dialogue with music that carries the listener deeper into reflection. The stories he tells within these prismatic songs, many explicitly erotic, gain their power from the musics tonal shifts and hard to track reference points. Guitar and keyboard lines swell and brush against each other, rarely coalescing into hooks or stirring choruses. The idea expressed in that phrase is fundamental to Oceans musical approach, even more so now than in his earlier work that challenged received ideas of both RB and indie pop. The stillness is the move, goes the hook of a song by the Dirty Projectors, whose vocalist Amber Coffman is one of many guests from the cutting edges of various music scenes who appear on Blonde. It must have been a Pontiac.) But Nights places the sound of Blonde itself within that cocoon-like space, connecting it to a process of listening and absorbing hours of source material which, though it might be shared with one or two fellow riders, is ultimately private and introspective, the quiet side of taking the open road. In other songs, Ocean locates erotic pleasure within car interiors, and safety like an armored truck, and even rebirth, when he finds the feathers of a mythical phoenix on his dashboard. Its easy to imagine that CD changer containing the music that drifts and melds within the hard-to-define sound Ocean cultivates on Blonde: Stevie Wonder next to The Beatles next to Crescent City rappers and his moms Hammond organ-driven gospel favorites. Kept at least six discs in the changer, he recalls, rhyming in a sing-song cadence over a woozy keyboard line.
In Nights, one of the 17 circuitous, absorbing tracks on the digital version of Blonde, the New Orleans-born Ocean remembers cruising in his familys Honda before Katrina forced him out of the city. This feeling of freedom within containment, of traveling at a high speed on a course that is smooth and open and of being comfortable with motion even in your most vulnerable, childlike moods was the one that best fed the creativity he needed to complete an album as highly anticipated as any to come out this year, even though, since he relocated from California to the clogged streets of London, Ocean doesnt even drive much any more. Ocean imagined himself wriggling against the seatbelt, he wrote, playing with its tension until it no longer constrained him. I put myself in her seat then I played it all out in my head. Her eyes seemed clear and calm but not blank, the road behind her seemed the same.
Two years ago I found an image of a kid with her hands covering her face, the artist wrote in an essay posted on his Tumblr the day this weekend the album, four years in the making, finally became available.Ī seatbelt reached across her torso, riding up her neck and a mop of blonde hair stayed swept, for the moment, behind her ears.