Later, for the bridge and final verse, Ocean’s organic voice can finally be heard, as if to portray his escape from the throes of conformity to reach his true purpose at last. In the song’s official video that was released alongside the album, Ocean slouches against a lonely nightscape of exquisite race cars, disaffected, perhaps to communicate that he has been given the lavish life that society hails as its pinnacle, yet remains unfulfilled. In this song, Nikes are not a trophy like in the lyrics of Ocean’s contemporaries, but rather a symbol of today’s meaningless material culture. This is presumably part of the Yeezus-esque technique of intentionally contorting a piece of aesthetic perfection in favor of thought-provoking experimentation, like sonic cubism. Frank Ocean’s voice is disguised in an unsettling high-pitch effect that taunts the fans’ thirst to hear his trademark croon even further. Let’s also remember that with a debut as beloved as his, and an Internet hater culture that makes a sophomore slump nearly inevitable, Ocean faced the immeasurable pressure of millions of fans all wondering the same thing: Would the music and message of Blonde be everything we’d come to expect this time around? But after years of excruciating suspense, our only hope was to press play, and what we heard was the exact emotional, esoteric masterpiece we’d been yearning to hear since Channel Orange. On Blonde, Frank Ocean fearlessly balances avant-garde themes and aesthetics with cathartic pop bliss, the way any classic artist would hope to.Īnd so it begins with “Nikes,” a song title that baits as a sell-out pop radio single, and delivers the polar opposite. Kendrick’s concept album pitched a silent war with the status quo of meaningless materialism in popular music, leaving Ocean on thin ice as we gazed at the final track list with an opening song called “Nikes” and another named “White Ferrari” further down. A lot has happened in the realm of black culture since Ocean’s four-year disappearance, from the dawn of the Black Lives Matter movement to Kendrick Lamar’s paradigm-shattering racial commentary on To Pimp A Butterfly. On Blonde, Frank Ocean fearlessly balances avant-garde themes and aesthetics with cathartic pop blissįor a minute there, we thought the day might never come, but on that sunny Saturday afternoon, the second studio album by Frank Ocean was finally out.
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