On channel ORANGE the thrill of the grandiose “Pyramids” was how the song connected past and present through shared names and symbols. “Pink + White” juxtaposes escaping from floodwaters with recovering from heartbreak, never firmly establishing which one is the metaphor. “Signal going in and out,” Ocean sings, unsure of where or when he is. “Nights” drunkenly stumbles from a choppy phone conversation with a former lover into a sullen midnight stroll and then a sober recollection of Ocean’s life after Hurricane Katrina. Throughout the album, Ocean flits in and out of memories and relationships, replacing the set pieces of channel ORANGE with slipstream vignettes. ![]() Blonde is just as evasive-Ocean obscures his face on the album cover-but it’s his most resonant work yet, constantly pushing past profound alienation to connect, however fleetingly, to something, someone. ![]() His absence from public life has been so absolute that it has spawned memes, conspiracy theories and fan fiction about him being seen IRL. Ocean has mostly existed in suspended animation in the interim between channel ORANGE and Blonde, leaving his fortress of solitude for the occasional feature or broadcasting his thoughts from within its dungeons via oblique tumblr dispatches. It was if he had built a bridge to an island entirely of his own design and all people talked about was the bridge’s suspension cables. It certainly wasn’t a PR disaster-the album eventually went platinum-but for Frank, it had to be maddening: somehow a tiny blog post, an aside, really, eclipsed the grand vision that the post was meant to enrich. The album itself was more concerned with rich dimensions of love, loss and longing than rote sexuality, but Ocean’s sexuality utterly dominated how people talked about the album. Prompted by a tumblr note published the week of the album release, that reaction had little to do with the music. Before it was recognized as a sprawling masterpiece, Frank Ocean’s debut album channel ORANGE was pigeonholed as an overhyped album about coming out of the closet.
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