But angst is never an issue with Frank Ocean. That’s understandable: Without careful handling, alienation turns into angst, and angst is never interesting once the initial rush of it burns off. You’ve heard that story before and it may have bored you. In that sense, Frank Ocean is a story about alienation, about people not realizing the power of the moment until it’s over. Beauty and hope visit the characters of the songs on channel ORANGE through the side door in ways that feel almost accidental. Imagine Jimmy Stewart coming to the end of It’s A Wonderful Life, but instead of having a soul-trembling realization about the gift of existence, he just stood there, shaking his head and wiping his nose. The people in them often start out feeling confused and emotionally impotent, and end up feeling more or less the same. The stories he tells - which, in turn, are part of his story - are clever, witty, and very, very sad. E! Online, which previously had not covered his music in any substantial way, included him in their weekly wrap-up under this headline: “Freddy Ocean revealed a big secret.” Freddy, Frank, Chris - some singer out there was gay, and nobody wanted to miss an opportunity to be publicly supportive of him.īut there’s text and there’s context, and none of Frank Ocean’s biography would matter unless his music was any good. This made Frank Ocean a story about personal freedom.
Most recently, Ocean wrote on his Tumblr blog that his first love was a man - a brave, beautiful gesture that quickly turned into an opportunity for media outlets to congratulate him on his bravery and beauty. This made him a story about artistic independence beating out a business too slow and dumb to recognize talent that it had already paid for. Suddenly, Def Jam was very curious to find out who this Frank Ocean person was.
After years of feeling stifled and ignored, he released a free album called Nostalgia, Ultra under the name Frank Ocean, as a member of Odd Future. Once in L.A., he was signed to Def Jam as a solo artist under his birth name, Chris Breaux. When he migrated from New Orleans to Los Angeles shortly after Hurricane Katrina, he became a story about triumphing over circumstances. If you are one of the thousands of Americans wondering why the R&B singer Frank Ocean is becoming “famous,” here’s a partial answer: Frank Ocean is a story we want to tell ourselves.
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