"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 family's Honda before Katrina forced him out of the city. He populates his artistic world with references to Ferraris and Bugattis, the way many rappers do, but also to Acuras and Camrys, conduits to solitude, pleasure and escape for more average folk. When he lived in Los Angeles, he owned three BMWs and was rebuilding a fourth. The Record A Critical Conversation About Frank Ocean's 'Endless' Video Album 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 doesn't even drive much any more. I put myself in her seat then I played it all out in my head." Ocean imagined himself wriggling against the seatbelt, he wrote, playing with its tension until it no longer constrained him. 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." A seatbelt reached across her torso, riding up her neck and a mop of blonde hair stayed swept, for the moment, behind her ears. cover art spelling situation, we're calling it Blonde throughout.)Īnn Powers: When he began to put himself into the mind-frame that would inspire his new album Blonde, Frank Ocean imagined himself in a moving car. And without clarity regarding the whole listing vs.
(Ann Powers and Jason King write about both the physical and digital versions of the album interchangeably. We find it impossible and personally limiting to consider this album outside of its context, so the below is as much a state of affairs as it is a straight-ahead review. They did so across many time zones and man hours what emerged is a conversation that stays fair-minded and grounded and ends in questioning both the artist and his audience. Over the weekend we asked Ann Powers and Jason King to wrestle with Frank Ocean's long-awaited follow-up to 2012's Channel Orange. Frank Ocean's raw, bleeding, diaristic storytelling guides Blonde.
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