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For me, Ocean’s music doesn’t change how I already feel or overwhelm my setting, but rather intensifies the experience of being in those emotional and physical environments. I’m more interested in the “space to think” part.
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To the contrary, Ocean is an artist with whom a great many people have invested heavy emotions.
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On one hand, it hardly seems accurate to say that Ocean’s music “induces calm,” at least not judging from the ecstatic responses to Blonde and its companion “visual album” Endless expressed on social media the past several days. But Eno’s mission statement helps me to understand my feelings about Blonde and Ocean’s overall body of work, and why I tend to find his albums so fascinating and moving as well as frustrating and somewhat disappointing. In the liner notes for 1978’s Music for Airports, the first of his four pioneering “Ambient Music” albums, Brian Eno writes that while “extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncrasies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these.” Eno’s intent with his ambient albums, he adds, was to “induce calm and a space to think.” Now, perhaps this is on my mind because Eno is listed among Blonde‘s long roll call of contributors. Instead of expecting pop music from Ocean, perhaps he should be regarded as an Eno-esque ambient artist. I wonder if all this time I’ve been approaching Ocean incorrectly. Then again, maybe the problem was strictly related to setting: My environment for Blonde was now a drab living-room couch rather than a romantically desolate freeway. He makes incomplete records that feel like classics from a distance. It’s only when you go back for another viewing that you notice that those scenes sometimes don’t cohere into a fully formed movie. Harmony Korine once said that great films are usually defined by just a handful of scenes that stand out in the audience’s memory. In my head, Channel Orange was like a mid-’80s Prince record, a grand amalgam of eccentric psychedelia and bracing intimacy when I put it on, however, Channel Orange presented a lot of very compelling pieces that didn’t quite fit together. I had a similar issue with 2012’s Channel Orange, which I enjoyed talking and thinking about more than actually hearing it, because that’s when it stopped seeming like a masterpiece. Ocean had some great parts, but they weren’t coalescing into great, complete songs. But now, Blonde seemed flatter, even half-baked. I went back to the parts of Blonde that wowed me: the snaky piano on “Pink + White” the string section and weird muffled vocal in the back half of “Self Control” the Beatles quote in “White Ferrari” and all of “Seigfried,” which recalls OutKast’s “Prototype” and the quietest, most stoned sections of ’70s prog-rock records like Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. The second time I listened to Blonde, it was Sunday afternoon and I was at home.
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Alone in my car, and held captive by the road, the music sounded luminous and knowing. But Blonde softened these feelings into a kind of sweet melancholy, where you welcome solitude and introspection as pleasurable states of being. Sunday, and I felt exhausted and weary, as one does at the start of a long, early-morning drive. The first time I listened to Frank Ocean’s Blonde, I was just starting a six-hour drive from Chicago to Minneapolis.
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