Both are streams of poignant images that don’t bother explaining how to feel about what we’re seeing. “Lens” leans a little more abstract in production as well as lyrics, opening as a quiet piano ballad describing a party scene before blowing up into a moody, dubby tearjerker about how our connections to friends and family linger even after they’re gone. coast enjoying the clear-headed rush of forward motion and wondering how long Frank can outrun outside expectations for him to settle down as he nears 30. But the verses are only concerned with men, specifically non-straight men who flout societal standards for both masculinity and homosexuality, the guy who’s “pretty like a girl and he’s got fight stories to tell” and the “one who’s straight-acting.” Perhaps that is what he sees both sides of?) (Anxious listeners immediately read this lyric as Frank proudly declaring his bisexuality, since the Chanel logo is literally two C’s facing opposite directions.
“Chanel” is a song almost exclusively about anal sex and extravagant spending that lays out its conquests like a series of snapshots, with the lone chorus line “I see both sides like Chanel” tying them together. But the storytelling is art-damaged and different.
On the surface, “Chanel”’s balance of braggadocio and sex-positivity wouldn’t look out of place on a Jeremih or Ty Dolla $ign record. New cuts “Chanel,” “Biking,” and “Lens” have been characterized as Frank Ocean’s return to making pop for radio, which is true insofar as each one plays around with upbeat melodies, limber flows, and actual drum tracks, where Blonde seemed too heavy and languid to bother. The trickle of new songs premiered on the last few episodes of “Blonded” present yet another new direction. “Mine” and “Sideways” felt less written than blurted out, like Lil B’s zen, free-associative-based style. Endless showcased looser writing: “Comme De Garcons” and “Slide on Me” seemed flighty by design. It was sometimes hard to discern a plot for months we thought “Self Control” (“I’ll be the boyfriend in your wet dreams tonight”) was about playing second fiddle to a crush who’s seeing someone else, only to find out in a rare New York Times interview that the song was actually about a disconnect in a monogamous relationship. Across gems like “Ivy” and “Self Control,” it picked at memories like a miner might dig for ore: Details like names, times, and places were shucked to get to the pure, crystalline emotion underneath. Frank’s distribution plan quietly changed, and so has the music.īlonde might be the most abstract event record of its time. Like Drake’s “OVO Sound Radio,” Ocean uses “Blonded” to float new music directly into the ears of his audience, and the new material is where the cool, aloof Frank Ocean of the last few years has begun to warm. The show’s value exceeds great playlisting. It’s the kind of place where cutting-edge rap and R&B rub elbows with music from well outside the sphere, where a hip-hop fan might accidentally get introduced to the seminal New York electropunk band Suicide. “Blonded” flexes the keen eye for curation hinted at in the singer’s limited-edition Boys Don’t Cry magazine. After rolling out one episode apiece in February and March, he has released three in April alone, sneaking episode five out first thing in the morning the day after the fourth. The bimonthly scheduling of Beats 1’s artist-run shows forces Frank into appointment listening, meaning his fandom, whose superhuman faith in his return throughout a lengthy sabbatical was once a defining characteristic, gets to enjoy something resembling regular communion with him. He was more like Princess Leia piping out of R2-D2 in ghostly blue at the beginning of A New Hope: translucent, projected, miles away.Īll of this makes Ocean’s Beats 1 show, “Blonded Radio,” a novel concept for his fans.
There were no late-night television performances or in-depth radio and podcast interviews. Frank was finally present, but not in the overbearing way we get when pop stars crop dust media to push new product. Promotion was faint the shock of the music existing at all was its main selling point. Endless is a genius fake out that freed Frank from his Def Jam contract and still exists only as an Apple Music video nearly a year later (unless you tracked down ripped audio), while Blonde, from its proggy song structures and stripped instrumentation, to the guerrilla one-day sale of hard copies, landed as precariously and perfectly as a BMX trick. Photo: Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesĮverything that made Frank Ocean’s Blonde and Endless exciting last year also seemed to frame the two releases as an orchestrated act of conscientious objection to music’s major-label machine.