Weighty and aggressive at points, it also had moments of intimate quiet like on Boredom and Sometimes. His 2017, Ocean-featuring record Flower Boy was his most personal to date. It’s hard to imagine that Tyler hasn’t been influenced by Ocean’s approach to music by merely being in his presence. Similarly, Ocean’s Odd Future peer Tyler, The Creator has pivoted to softer hip-hop in recent years. From Something About Him ’s pitch-altered vocals to San Marco’ s emotional guitar work, BROCKHAMPTON, perhaps unintentionally, displayed the influence. Iridescence, the group’s fourth album, is particularly indebted to Ocean. Like Ocean, BROCKHAMPTON have found a way to make tender music and still operate in the rap world. “I’m nothing without Frank Ocean,” he tweeted in 2018. They’re a vocal bunch and BROCKHAMPTON’s Kevin Abstract is part of that group. Interestingly, the best way to see how Ocean inspired SZA is to listen to him covering album highlight The Weekend. The album arrived the year after Blonde to instantaneous praise and was a clear sign that the R&B climate had changed. Her mum also appears throughout the album, providing voice note lessons in a similar fashion to Ocean’s mum. She was able to piece together modern rap and R&B, featuring Travis Scott and Kendrick Lamar, while also delivering straight-up declarations of love over one singular guitar. Like Ocean, SZA is an intimate, fearless songwriter. In the same chat, she proclaimed, “Frank Ocean is king.” It’s difficult to listen to CTRL and not see tinges of Blonde in it. "I like simplicity as much as I like complexity,” SZA said in an interview with i-D after the release of her debut album CTRL. And yet, three years later its fingerprints are everywhere.
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Meanwhile, Chance The Rapper, Kanye West and Beyoncé released chaotic projects full of different sounds and voices. Jeremih, Tory Lanez, Bryson Tiller, Majid Jordan, Kehlani, Tinashe and more were setting the tone. The genre was glossy and being infiltrated by trap beats. It took time for the mind to piece the album together but once it did, it was magnificent.Īt the time, it may have been hard to see how it fit into a modern R&B landscape. It wasn’t a black-and-white depiction of love, something that is so often over-simplified in music. It was a patchy stream of consciousness that found clarity in noise. “We’re not telling the stories to ourselves, we know the story, we’re just seeing it in flashes overlaid.” “How we experience memory sometimes, it’s not linear,” Ocean told The New York Times in one of his few interviews about the album. At its clearest points, he was howling over an organ ( Godspeed ) and at its stormiest it felt as if he was yelling from far away ( White Ferrari ). Ocean’s thoughts fired fast over gritty, misty soundscapes.
They were hazy and they required multiple narratives. These weren’t straight forward situations. Ocean had the melodies but they needed more depth.
Casual Frank fans tuned out but those who stuck with it were rewarded raw, complicated record full of fragile, sincere love songs.īlonde was as complicated as it needed to be. The Wonder influences were still there were also tinges of The Beatles and The Beach Boys. Many of the full-length songs were devoid of a beat, introducing guitar into Frank’s repertoire more than ever before. Some songs were just over a minute long while there were also voice notes from his Mum and a bizarre narration by SebastiAn. The record felt like a sketchbook of ideas. At first listen, Blonde sounded unfinished. The hooks were pop radio-ready and his voice was present, often sitting on top of the mix. It was groundbreaking but it was also immediately accessible. He fused gentle, beat-driven love songs alongside autobiographical cuts with nods to Stevie Wonder. On Channel ORANGE, Frank had presented himself as R&B’s new wave. While there was mystery surrounding its release, the true confusion lay in the sound of the album. Then, a 17-track album dropped out of nowhere, preceded only by the woozy Nikes. We had watched him do woodwork for almost two weeks and attempted to decode a visual album. When Frank Ocean’s Blonde arrived two days after visual album Endless, there was some confusion.
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