New Ideals for Living
Frank Ocean climbed through the ranks of the internet’s busiest equal-opportunity offenders (the sprawling L.A.-based hodgepodge crew Odd Future) over the course of only a few years, joining the collective around 2009 or 2010. While no one could have ever escaped controversy while inside the hivemind of OF, Ocean’s identity and savviness about his image gave him what some might call a teflon coating - he was able to come through it all essentially unscathed.
His curtain-raising 2012 debut channel ORANGE only served to solidify Ocean as a voice who had the ability to take up residence in the mainstream, but the LP had enough grime and tattoo-removal scars to show that it had been through some shit. Partly an unabashed embrace of his own identity, partly a set of parables that broke down life in the general terms that had been used in music since the 60’s, ORANGE was the right mix of heady and head-nodding that made it lightning in a bottle.
About four years later in what we would come to discover was the summer of America’s discontent, Ocean returned to the spotlight to lay even more wisdom at our indescribably lucky feet in the form of a sophomore project that outshined its predecessor in nearly every way. And this time, it was personal. So personal, in fact, that it needed a mother’s touch.
There is a meter and rhyme to a mother’s language. When heard, it is unmistakable, it’s the kind of thing that can make any son or daughter come down with a case of dry throat or a suddenly accelerated heartbeat. If we’re being honest, it doesn’t even matter if it comes from our own mother. The timbre can be exercised by any mother (or mother figure) that takes that role seriously, and it will be responded to with the respect it deserves even if the response is mostly un-/subconscious.
Many college students have gone to college
And gotten hooked on drugs, marijuana, and alcohol
Listen, stop trying to be somebody else
Don't try to be someone else
Be yourself and know that that's good enough
Without climbing a mountain of Freudian thought or spelunking the depths of uncomfortable Oedipal theory, what is it that makes a mother’s voice so powerful? The lines above exemplify something unique to them: tough love. Interspersed with horror stories of other people and encouragement to follow one’s own path, we have admonishments: “…stop trying” and “Don’t try…” You might call this a motherly version of “sandwich feedback” (https://www.wikihow.com/Give-a-Feedback-Sandwich): 1) the comparison to others’ mistakes that implicitly includes advice for avoiding those pitfalls, 2) clear directives, 3) the toothpick of encouragement that keeps the whole thing from sliding apart on the plate.
Don't try to be someone else
Don't try to be like someone else
Don't try to act like someone else
Be yourself, be secure with yourself
Rely and trust upon your own decisions
On your own beliefs
But we need to clear up something here. The voice we hear on Blonde’s phone call interlude, “Be Yourself”, identifies themselves as “Mom” and certainly sounds the part. The person is somewhat arch in the way that mothers can be when speaking to their offspring, pedagogic about life almost to a fault, and tender where it really counts in the ways that they know will go the furthest to achieve their goals. The voice definitely belongs to a mother…but it’s not Frank Ocean’s mother.
Instead of Katonya Breaux Riley, the voice we’re actually hearing belongs to Rosie Watson. Watson is the mother of a friend of Frank Ocean, and she reportedly refers to Ocean as a “nephew” (they share no relation). This is her second appearance in Ocean’s work after channel’s “Not Just Money” .
Is it important that Ocean showcases a mother’s advice on Blonde (indeed, on both albums)? If so, why? Rather than seeing this as a cynical way to “pass off” motherly advice and concern as a calculated ploy to give texture to the song cycle, there is a way to see it as an attempted corrective to the plight of all mothers. By using the voice of a mother who is not his, Ocean widens the net of his message. He recognizes that his mother is an important presence in his life and that she taught him things about the world he couldn’t have gotten from anyone else, but he also sees that most of us have a motherly presence in our lives who functions in the same crucial ways. Where he may have used this gargantuan platform to elevate his own mother’s voice (and may still do, at some point), he has instead chosen to give a megaphone here to someone else, a proud mother who probably doesn’t speak in the same ways but has the same goals, as every mother/mother figure does: explaining and simplifying the world and its stakes while giving their charges the best chances to conquer it with unending love and support. For the mothers of all POC in America, a coded message lay inside and underneath all this practical advice: Don’t be foolish. Don’t lose control. Don’t give those in power an excuse to hurt you, confine you, or worse.
You understand the things that I've taught you
Not to drink alcohol, not to use drugs
Don't use that cocaine or marijuana
Because that stuff is highly addictive
When people become weed-heads
They become sluggish, lazy, stupid and unconcerned
Sluggish, lazy, stupid and unconcerned
The summer of 2016 was, in retrospect, a time that blithely held a hazy, dreamy certainty. We knew that we were on a relatively progressive path as a country. We saw no reason for that to stop, let alone reverse. In the distance loomed the ogre of a timeline that we couldn’t comprehend and our lack of credence in it became a chain that would hold us back from our goals, hogtie our ambitions, and kill hundreds of thousands of us via errors of both hubris and omission. We didn’t have any idea what would follow in the years to come. Into this grey area, Blonde was birthed.
What is Blonde, at its core? Is it a prescriptive and ruminative fireside chat about how one avoids catastrophe and errs on the side of righteousness? Is it a document of what happens on the backslide, when friends have left and the odds are stacking up against you before your bloodshot eyes? Is it a testament to the power of human will and faith in justice in a time of darkness? Is it an album that delivers on silver-tongued melodicism, left-field beats, and ideas that can be chewed on long after the final note? The short answer? Yes.
Above all these things, though, Blonde is a thesis statement for a worldview that Frank Ocean has harnessed more deftly than almost any of his peers, especially those in the hip-hop/R&B spaces. The secret to this might be Ocean’s ability to fully distill his point of view into something that is eminently relatable. Consider: on “Nikes”, Blonde’s leadoff track, Ocean almost casually drops a line comparing himself to Trayvon Martin (“RIP Trayvon…[he] look just like me”). Where another artist doing this may have come off as insensitive, or even crass, Ocean is using the similarity between himself and a victim of senseless gun violence to make a larger point for his audience, one he had probably been told for years by his mother and one he’d seen play out in large and small scales his whole life: He could have been me, or any of us. On his sophomore LP Frank Ocean is telling us not only who he is but what he believes the world is, and that includes the unfairness and the callousness he sees as much as it includes the beauty and the hope.
That's all marijuana does to you, okay? This is mom*
Unless you're taking it under doctor's, um, control
Then it's regulated
Do not smoke marijuana, do not consume alcohol
Do not get in the car with someone who is inebriated
This is mom*, call me, bye
We see the world first through our parents’ eyes, or the eyes of whomever we have to play those roles for us. Those first blurry visions of light and dark form the basis for how our nurture-based learning will play out over time—do we become St. Mother Teresa or Jeffrey Dahmer…or do we land in the vastness somewhere in between? Thackeray opined long ago that “Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.” Do our mothers hone the blades of our intuition more than anyone else? Do they play a larger part in dictating our particular vision of how the world works?
Frank Ocean makes a compelling case in the affirmative for this on Blonde, and he does it subtly through a light-fingered weaving of ideas on a ghostly loom of earned conceits. Rosie’s voicemail is not a cornerstone of the work, but it points to an ideological cornerstone for the artist: his mother and her prevalence in his Weltanschauung.
Perhaps despite all we’re taught in American culture, father doesn’t know best.
*And here, the worldwide trademark of a mother’s voicemail: a mom signs off by clarifying that this is, in fact, Mom speaking.
