Ten Years Later, Frank Ocean Still Knows Something We Don’t — Rolling Stone

RESOLVING THE LEDGER

Ten years ago, during the same week that Frank Ocean released his mixed-media tableau — the short film/album Endless , the rarefied Boys Don't Cry zine, and his seminal album Blonde — Werner Herzog's film Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World arrived. In the film, the German documentary filmmaker considers the heady question of what the internet might be doing to us humans. He makes contact with a community whose members swear they're allergic to Wi-Fi. The film ominously warns of an inevitable solar flare on the scale of the 1859 Carrington Event, one that, once unleashed, would reduce all communications networks, the foundations of so much of our modern world then and even more now, to dust.

And so, on "Seigfried," Ocean explains: "A moment one solar flare would consume, so why not/Spin this flammable paper on the film that's my life?"

In the decade since its release, Blonde , like Herzog's documentary, has come to feel like the final stamp on a discrete moment in history. Released less than three months before Trump's first election, the album now lives as an artifact of a prehistoric world; yet emotionally, Blonde feels more expansive than any frame of time can contain. That has always, of course, been Ocean's skill as a writer: his ability to occupy emotion untethered from time or place, instincts and sensations jumbling into one another with chaotic, maybe even euphoric, abandon. On 2012's Channel Orange , he arranged that gift into scenes populated by taxi drivers, rich kids, dealers, and doomed lovers. Blonde loosens the plot, leaning into the unreliability of memory and the false truths that occupy the gaps between love and certainty.

It's the way that last "Good!" pierces the second half of "Ivy," landing closer to the punk instincts that flash elsewhere on the album, in sonic conflict with the song's shimmering opening turn. Or how, on "Nikes," Ocean trapezes between sonic registers and perspectives, painting a kaleidoscopic view on his own sexuality, all under the banner of the most iconic brand in the world. Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

Ten Years Later, Frank Ocean Still Knows Something We Don’t — Rolling Stone | AIPROPX