Frank Oceans 2012 debut album Channel Orange, which was sort-of launched by a tumblr.
What I mean to say is no matter who you are - old lady who only listens to Count Basie, infant child who only listens to Raffi cassette tapes (What? There are no more of those are there? That was just me, 22 years ago? Alright.), the last disgruntled milk man, the most sober and stern secret service agent (“Lost” will resonate with you particularly) - there is at least one (if not many) song on Channel: ORANGE that you will love, if you listen.įrank Ocean is our generation’s Frank Sinatra. Frank Ocean issued his debut mixtape Nostalgia, Ultra in 2011 to. There is a song for everybody on Channel: ORANGE. Frank Oceans sophomore studio album has received massive acclaim from far and wide. From his droll, bored-sounding rap (complimented perfectly by Earl Sweat’s sludgy assonant flow) on “Super Rich Kids,” to his lofty desperate cries on “Bad Religion,” to the trippy harmonies that scold a childish grown woman on “Pilot Jones” - there is no emotion Frank Ocean’s voice can’t express. The singer-songwriter said: Like I said, its the more interesting part about making music for me, or making albums and songs and stuff. “Thinking About You” was a godsend in this respect. Frank Ocean’s writing has done so much for revitalizing the super-clean, over-produced, modern R&B sound that infects pop radio today. The album covers such a wide range of emotions, genres, and styles. It’s a street symphony, which is beautiful, but life in these streets is chaotic, not symphonic. It feels too rational, too well-ordered at times for the chaotic subject matter it claims to know. It seems at times as if all the rappers are studying this gangster as if he were a specimen in a petri dish, or a better metaphor: as if they were enlightened beings looking down from heaven sympathetically, at the doomed mortals below.
The album has this feeling of cold scientific distance. Frank Ocean was born on October 28, 1987, in Long Beach, California and is an American singer, songwriter, record producer, and photographer. It was during this polishing though, that I fear a bit of the pretense and didacticism typical of concept albums managed to creep in. The band workshopped every verse for the album multiple times, and threw out hundreds of drafts in order to create potent and well-balanced lyrical content. The verses ask big existential questions: “What’s beyond time?” and “When you return to the essence/ What is it back to the essence of?” concepts that are usually too big to fit into a 16-bar rhyming pattern. Though the 28-year-old has popped up on a few features here and there over the years, many fans wondered aloud at times if he would ever drop another album. The album has a somber, contemplative vibe.