Frank Ocean: <em>Blonde
8.9
GENRE: R&B/Pop
YEAR OF RELEASE: 2016Even as a member of a hip-hop group, Frank Ocean had a distinctive charm: that mysterious aura of a cool older brother whose thoughts are secretive and unreachable, that je ne sais quoi that makes an artist shine brighter than the 10 or more other artists by his side. Such poise transpired from his songwriting and production as well: his first EP, Nostalgia, Ultra, was a proper demonstration that his appeal was based on real skills and not a sales-y constructed image; it had clever use of samples from Radiohead and the Eagles. His debut full-length, Channel Orange, shut down doubts of his capacity to create soulful, moving music—if there was still any.
On his official second studio album, Blonde, released two days after an audiovisual album titled Endless, Ocean went full-on experimental, throwing away all the templates that he once used to create music and causing a watershed in R&B and music in general. As he did on his previous projects, Oceans continues to embellish his story arcs with crops of background sounds and conversations captured and used in synchrony with the tracks, mixing an experimental atmosphere to his voice at times rapping, at times singing in falsettos.
Up until Channel Orange, Ocean’s songwriting style had been consistently filled with storytelling mechanisms. From the story he tells in “Novacane” to the poetic and cinematic lyrics of “Bad Religion,” Ocean mastered telling his truth in the most compelling ways, impressing listeners with his turns of phrases and eloquence. On Blonde, he’s in no rush to be understood; his mind is looser than his vocals, and the instrumentals have an organicity never before seen. You never know where either the lyrics or the melodies are going—most of the songs on the album have no traditional hooks or stirring choruses. Though the lyrical content of the album is contemplative, there is no stillness. Ocean is always moving from a rapping verse to crooning to a falsetto to spoken verses, shifting his tone every once in a while. The melodies are sluggish, mostly made up of guitars and keyboard, with a seldom presence of drums.
Starting with the different spellings on the album cover and official title, Blonde sees Ocean facing real struggles with his masculinity, emotionalism, and queerness, and as such, the album is supposed to be complicated from the go. “These bitches want Nikes/They looking for a check,” he sings on the opener “Nikes,” his high-pitched voice intentionally sounding as if altered by helium gas, buttered up by autotune. The song is a spiraling woozy statement against materialism and a gloomy search for hope. “We gon’ see the future first,” he sings with his normal voice while glowing keyboards move forward and backward. The switch in beat, vocal, tempo, and melody in “Nikes” predicts what’s to come in the rest of Blonde: the utter absence of linear productions and structures, highly emotional meditations over melancholic melodies, and a ton of introspection.
This asymmetry progresses effortlessly like wind on the record. On “Ivy,” Ocean reflects on his faulty actions in a past relationship: “It’s quite alright to hate me now,” he assumes over glooming, dreamy guitars, switching from croons to yelling falsettos. On “Pink + White,” he offers imagery layered over soul arrangements, helped by verses from Tyler, the Creator and vocalizations by Beyoncé. At first, Blonde sounds economical, even stingy in comparison with Ocean’s previous music. But every introspective song, created mostly on the basis of guitars and keyboards, offers a level of intimacy into the mind of a recluse artist, a pass into his world that outside of music seems so calm, but lyrics reveal it to be chaotic and eventful even when he’s alone and “dancing solo.”
On Blonde, Ocean creates something entirely his own by dismantling the very foundations of contemporary R&B. The dreamy guitars, sparse drums, and keyboard-driven arrangements serve as the perfect canvas for his most vulnerable confessions yet. His experimental approach to structure and melody, combined with deeply personal lyrics that read like private thoughts never meant to be shared, makes Blonde a watershed moment not just in Ocean's career, but in modern music—proof that breaking every rule in the songbook can lead to something revolutionary. It’s an album that demands patience but rewards it abundantly, revealing new layers of meaning with each listen through its intentionally complicated maze of emotions and sound. And while fans claim the mysterious crooner for new material, there’s still much to come back to in this record. And he knows that.
Listen to Blonde:
