Ocean has always remained relatively above the fray last year, his excellent breakout mixtape, Nostalgia, Ultra earned him universal acclaim. 24-year-old Frank Ocean, as some of you may know, is the velvet-voiced, "prog-R&B" portion of the young and fiercely talented Odd Future collective, who stirred up lots of Internet buzz and controversy last year through a series of explicit, musically challenging mixtapes and their dynamite-and-occasionally-offensive off-wax personalities (mainly: 20-year-old Tyler, the Creator, Odd Future's head founder). There’s nothing mysterious about “Forrest Gump” either, the song just about writes the final chapter on the no-homo era.Now that Throwback Tuesday is out of the way, let's segue to this week's review. By the time “Pink Matter” finally hits your eardrums, you can start to see the whole picture here. Then “Pilot Jones” comes at you and more profound feelings start to creep up. Earl Sweatshirt offers some backbone on the “Benny & The Jets”-interpolated “Super Rich Kids” but the tone of the first eight tracks is lounge-like. “Thinkin’ Bout You” channels both Prince and D’Angelo but as the album presses on (throw in Maxwell and John Legend comparisons as well), the listener is lulled into some abstract territory between nouveau and idle rich. While Ocean’s lyrical content often gets hung up on “rubies in my damn chain” cliché, the predominant feeling here is spiritual pain it seeps through the speakers from the first listen to the next. The housing and banking collapses and of course–one tragedy close to the NOLA-bred singer’s heart–Hurricane Katrina. Listening, we can only think of all the mind-boggling events that have transpired in the 21 st century alone. It has both the mystical elements of the blues tradition as well as the pop-inflected refinement of a Stevie Wonder, Prince and Michael Jackson.
Ocean’s music speaks to something no one can quite put their finger on. “No Church In The Wild” and Channel Orange’s first leak “Pyramids” foreshadowed this whole larger-than-life business. Nostalgia.ultra was a nice little piece of work.
Ocean a publicity-savvy genius or was he so overcome by the impending release of his first full-length he just had to come clean? Only that man knows that answer. But now the whole ambiguous sexuality thing has been thrown into the mix. So is Mr. All we wanted to do was listen to this highly-anticipated record and make up our own minds about it. While dream hampton and Russell Simmons’ slightly overwrought responses to Ocean’s lovelorn Tumblr screed were of course significant, we’re forced to wonder about the timing of his weighty announcement. Yet levity is needed to diffuse all the hullaballoo surrounding one Mr. Would it be so wrong to just give this record two snaps up in a circle and be done with it? Of course it would.
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