Sometimes I want to talk on a song and be angry, because I am angry. Even though the pace of the album’s not frenetic, the pace of ideas being thrown out is…my point of view from one emotional state to another is a different point of view. Sometimes I felt like you weren’t hearing enough versions of me within a song, ’cause there was a lot of hyperactive thinking. In an interview with The New York Times, Ocean explained why he used different voices throughout the album: Her “clear and calm” eyes echo the album’s theme of youthful carelessness. In a Tumblr post, Frank wrote that he drew inspiration from a picture of a blonde-haired child in the back of a car. The second interpretation is the symbolism of blonde hair blondes are stereotypically thoughtless and carefree. Blonde vies with The Life of Pablo for being the most 2016 album of 2016, and Frank Ocean makes retro popstars seem more creatively sluggish than ever.Frank Ocean claimed he drew inspiration for the album from this picture.
Blonde frank ocean album vinyl full#
His lyrics, full of missed connections, perfectly conjure the Tinder era, where people talk constantly about their feelings without understanding a single one of them. The flipside, of course, is that this generation has more to distract it than ever before, and Ocean reflects that too with his impetuous gear changes, often in the middle of songs. This is a generation with a forensic cultural awareness, scoping out the whole history of art through the internet – Ocean reflects that with his pan-racial, era-straddling guest list. Perhaps Blonde’s biggest achievement is expressing, in its very form, the psychic reality of 21 st-century youth culture. As brilliant as Channel Orange was, Blonde is more adventurous, more vividly authored.
But to regard a more difficult record as a less successful one would be a shame. For some fans, who found their hardbodied ennui so prettily articulated by Ocean’s previous album Channel Orange, it might have been a step too far. There’s the body high on Pink + White, languid afternoon laziness on Self Control, late-night astral wonderment on White Ferrari, and itchy paranoia on Seigfried.īut this wasn’t hotbox background music you needed to invest energy in Blonde. At one point, Ocean’s friend’s mum warns him, via answerphone on Be Yourself, that “when people become weed heads, they become sluggish, lazy, stupid and unconcerned”, but like some sci-fi chemist, he makes a synthetic cannabinoid from sound Blonde is perhaps the ultimate stoner record, actually replicating weed’s various effects. Nights is the masterpiece, using dream logic to channel Drake-style dolorous arrogance into a multi-act drama, cohering as an impressionist whole.īlonde is an extremely druggy record – its mood suggests dissociatives and rich-kid prescription pills, but mostly weed. The wandering top line of the Beatles’ Here, There and Everywhere was interpolated on White Ferrari, and Paul McCartney’s bright, asexual melancholy was also channelled on Ivy and Solo the jazzy spoken word on Skyline To was worthy of Sarah Vaughn or Ella Fitzgerald. He lassooed rogue elements – a redlining Andre 3000, field recordings, his own heavily treated voice – so that they didn’t drag the record downwards, but still kept them bucking.īlonde was high-stakes stuff, and it was Ocean’s innate melodic brilliance that stopped it being a lofty failure. Four years in the making, 17 tracks long, with an accompanying visual album and magazine, and tens of contributors either live or sampled (including Gang of Four, Kendrick Lamar, Todd Rundgren and Beyoncé), it was a pink kush cloud of music exhaled by a man with loose but absolute authority.