Waves of Complication
It’s impossible to think of Frank Ocean’s Blonde (2016) without thinking of the year of its release. The world seemed to be on the cusp of momentous change for the better, and it was laughable to seriously consider any alternative. Our president and his beautiful family were professional smilers and high road takers who defined respectability politics for a new millennium. Obama’s corny dad jeans and easy smile made his Blackness comfortable for a blue-voting white America. His graceful cohesion was intoxicating. Here was not an angry Black man; here was a noble cheek-turner who affirmed our best selves, and of course, you can make an excellent argument in which that was exactly who Obama needed to be in order to be trusted by white folks with the highest office of the land. After eight years of an Obama presidency, whatever came next seemed like it would be a natural extension of the path toward the left. In August of 2016, the world seemed like a cohesive and logical place with norms. For example, if you advocated for grabbing a woman by her genitals, there is no way you could become the president of the United States. We didn’t know then that logic is its own intellectual narcotic that kept us from feeling the ground fall away from under our feet, and not even the darkest think-piece in The Atlantic could have predicted what happened next.
In 2016, Frank Ocean was an intersectional darling about to release a new album. His first album, channel ORANGE (2012), was a voyeuristic critique of materialism that sat comfortably alongside delight in the proximity of such plentitude. From start to finish, ORANGE sounded like being drunk on champagne poolside in the noonday sun. It was beautifully familiar in theme and composition and it played like a long, smooth ribbon with beautifully positioned twists.
Blonde (2016) took a different strategy towards exploring the disconnection between the self and the other. In fact, what Ocean presented in Blonde were waves of complication and it demanded you spend time with it. Blonde is a chain of associations created by a person who no longer needs to convince you that he knows how to play the game, rather, they are private missives transmitted back to earth from a future we hadn’t yet seen. The scope of Ocean’s narrative changed in Blonde, and it was a sonic bricolage of memory and half-formed thoughts. Cohesion was not a goal, yet, somehow, the nagging, tinny guitar with the pulsing reverberation on “Nights” and the discordant, sped up orchestral overture on “Pretty Sweet” form a singular body of complicated, dimensional landscapes. You can get lost easily. In Blonde, there are no legible signifiers that place Ocean in one camp or another. You could call it R&B, but you’d be missing the nuance and nimbleness that is the essence of Ocean’s catalogue. You could call it avant garde, but what does that mean anyway? The only thing you’re sure of is the fleeting, impressionistic familiarity that Ocean offers, which is doled out in teaspoons. For example, the underwater guitar chords in “Ivy” conjure memories of a childhood spent in pools (a favorite Ocean motif) watching sunlight filter through water. You’ve been here too, and somehow, Ocean was with you.
Though it’s positioned on the last half of the album, “Siegfried” is the culmination of Blonde. Here, Ocean presents a catalogue of interiority that by design asks us to witness his dimension and complexity. While my mind wants to create a comparison to Walt Whitman and his notion of containing multitudes, my gut says that it’s incorrect. Ocean is seeking to transcend the body he lives in, while Whitman revels in it. In Blonde, he is designing for a new version of Blackness and a new version of the masculine that strips away tired, toxic cliches of both identities. He sings, "Been living in an idea...Living in an idea from another man’s mind” in order to name the tension between a desire to be legible and be oneself.
And yet, this idea—who and what Ocean is—was limited by what we had to compare him to in 2016. Ocean is not Obama, nor is he his Odd Future compatriots. He sends us these songs from a place that has abandoned language in favor of overlapping texture and repetition. From there, Ocean’s identities -- which have been the object of much interest by critics and fans -- have evolved into something brand new that does not belong to us. His Blackness is personal, his sexuality is personal, and it’s beyond our easy comprehension. Somehow, his illegibility sounds like freedom.
Blonde is a map of fragmentation and darkness, bisected at intervals by deep joy and unfathomable longing. It’s a place where the sky is always washed in memory, and where the weather changes every five minutes. Frank Ocean offers up his topography, not to be understood, but to be witnessed, and in the process, he makes no promises. It’s up to us to find our way. We just have to start walking.
