100 Best Albums
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- 20 AUG 2016
- 17 Songs
- Blonde · 2016
- channel ORANGE · 2012
- Blonde · 2016
- channel ORANGE · 2012
- Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1 · 2017
- Blonde · 2016
- Novacane - Single · 2011
- Blonde · 2016
- channel ORANGE · 2012
- channel ORANGE · 2012
Essential Albums
- 100 Best Albums In the four years between Frank Ocean’s debut album channel ORANGE and his second, Blonde, he had revealed some of his private life—he published a post on social media about having been in love with a man—but still remained as mysterious and sceptical towards fame as ever, teasing new music sporadically and then disappearing like a wisp on the wind. Behind great innovation, however, is a massive amount of work, and so when Blonde was released one day after a 24-hour streaming performance art piece (Endless) and alongside a limited-edition magazine entitled Boys Don’t Cry, his slipperiness felt more like part of a carefully considered mystique. Even the apparent indecision over the album title’s official spelling can be seen in hindsight as being characteristically mischievous. Endless featured the mundane beauty of Ocean woodworking in a studio, soundtracked by abstract and meandering ambient music. Blonde built on those ideas and imbued them with more form, taking a left-field, often minimalist approach to his breezy harmonies and ever-present narrative lyricism. His confidence was crucial to the risk of creating a big multimedia project for a sophomore album, but it also extended to his songwriting—his voice surer of itself (“Solo”), his willingness to excavate his weird impulses more prominent (“Good Guy” and “Pretty Sweet”, among others). Though Blonde packs 17 tracks into one quick hour, it’s a sprawling palette of ideas, a testament to the intelligence of flying one’s own artistic freak flag and trusting that audiences will meet you where you’re at. They did. And Ocean established himself as a generational artist uniquely suited to the complexities and convulsive changes of the second decade of the 21st century.
- The lead-up to Frank Ocean’s culture-shifting debut album, which included the seemingly out-of-nowhere 2011 mixtape Nostalgia, Ultra, was mired in mystery: Who was this elusive, vintage-car-obsessed crooner, and why was he a member of the rambunctious, uncouth youth movement known as Odd Future? Why wasn’t he signed to a record label—or was he? And how had we never heard of the inventive songwriter behind singles for Brandy, Bieber and Beyoncé? By the summer of 2012, all had been revealed: through the popularity of Nostalgia, Ultra, Ocean had forced his songwriting deal with Def Jam into a solo career, and channel ORANGE was full of laconic, literary tracks about the underbelly of Southern California life with a Didion-esque intensity and detail. “The best song wasn’t the single, but you weren’t either,” he sings iconically on “Sweet Life”, an acerbic mission statement for an album that defined a new era of laid-back—and disillusioned—R&B which positioned that B-sides are where the richest text resides. Ocean’s secret weapon was his lack of fealty to format; he disliked being categorised as an R&B singer because of its racialised history in the music industry, and also because he was so nimble across genres, experimenting with songs that could as easily be played on a Thursday night at a piano bar (“Super Rich Kids”) as during a coronation dance for prom royalty (“Forrest Gump”). His sweeping sense of song structure came to fruition on the 10-minute-long “Pyramids”, a psychedelic journey through hard techno, ambient and guitar-riffing synth pop. And the album’s guest stars—Earl Sweatshirt, John Mayer, André 3000—were emblematic of how well his artistry was regarded leading up to his first official album. Though it may sound compact in relation to the work he’d go on to release, Ocean’s ambitious songwriting set his place as a massive influence on music across genres—pop, hip-hop and, yes, R&B too.
Albums
Artist Playlists
- His post-R&B radicalism and masterful vignettes established him as a visionary.
- Tracing the enigmatic R&B star's songwriting career.
- 2019
Radio Shows
- Great vocals and a studio trick made this song soar.
- The musical diary that makes the most of creative freedom.
- An office soundtrack feat. Westside Ty the Beeper King
- An office soundtrack feat. DJ_Dave
- An office soundtrack feat. CRYSTALLMESS.
- An office soundtrack feat. rRoxymore
- An office soundtrack feat. livwutang
About Frank Ocean
It’s not just that he’s an enigma or that he follows his own clock. It’s not even his style (which seems invincible), or the fact that he’s one of the few pop artists publicly navigating the frontiers of queer identity. It’s that Frank Ocean is one of those songwriters who manages to touch new and distant places in his audience’s imagination, a cartographer of intimacy and confession so intrepid and sensitive that listening to him can feel like eavesdropping on something private, maybe even inexpressible. Yet here he is, expressing it. Even in his early days as the quiet one in the LA hip-hop collective Odd Future, Ocean seemed possessed by a stoicism and emotional intelligence that was uncommon, luminous—the kind of guy who sees more than he says and doesn’t waste a word when he opens his mouth. Ocean was raised mostly in New Orleans, and moved to Los Angeles in the mid-2000s; by 2009, he’d landed a contract with Def Jam, but couldn’t square the relationship with his ambitions and ended up releasing his first mixtape, 2011’s Nostalgia, Ultra, on his own. He was soulful, funny, understated and poetic, the kind of writer who made fragments of the real world—a girl doing porn to cover tuition (“Novacane”), a dip in the ocean (“Swim Good”)—crackle with mystical significance. From Kanye, Jay-Z and Beyoncé on down, he gained a cult of followers. In 2012, he released Channel ORANGE, which veered from Stevie Wonder-style soul to string-led gospel and psychedelia, framing R&B as a kind of rarified art music. The writing got sharper, too—at once more pitiless (“Crack Rock”), more expressive (“Bad Religion”) and more surreal (“Pyramids”), weaving storytelling and social commentary with an offhand brilliance that has become Ocean’s trademark sleight of hand. After a four-year period during which news of his next move flitted around in the internet ether like myth, Ocean released two projects in a week, in August 2016: the visual album Endless and the more conventionally framed Blonde. If Channel ORANGE had sounded like Ocean opening up, Blonde marked a contraction, exploring meditations and internal monologue with a sound that often felt more like ambient music than R&B. In the few years following Blonde, Ocean shared a string of singles through his Apple Music show, blonded RADIO, each one its own miniature event. Whether turning inward or outward, Ocean continues to explore.
- HOMETOWN
- Long Beach, CA, United States
- BORN
- 28 October 1987
- GENRE
- Pop