Ten years ago, during the same week that Frank Ocean released his mixed-media tableau — the short film/album Endless, the rarefied Boys Don’t Cry zine, and his seminal album Blonde — Werner Herzog’s film Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World arrived. In the film, the German documentary filmmaker considers the heady question of what the internet might be doing to us humans. He makes contact with a community whose members swear they’re allergic to Wi-Fi. The film ominously warns of an inevitable solar flare on the scale of the 1859 Carrington Event, one that, once unleashed, would reduce all communications networks, the foundations of so much of our modern world then and even more now, to dust.
And so, on “Seigfried,” Frank explains: “A moment one solar flare would consume, so why not/Spin this flammable paper on the film that’s my life?”
In the decade since its release, Blonde, like Herzog’s documentary, has come to feel like the final stamp on a discrete moment in history. Released less than three months before Trump’s first election, the album now lives as an artifact of a prehistoric world; yet emotionally, Blonde feels more expansive than any frame of time can contain. That has always, of course, been Ocean’s skill as a writer: his ability to occupy emotion untethered from time or place, instincts and sensations jumbling into one another with chaotic, maybe even euphoric, abandon. On 2012’s Channel Orange, he arranged that gift into scenes populated by taxi drivers, rich kids, dealers, and doomed lovers. Blonde loosens the plot, leaning into the unreliability of memory and the false truths that occupy the gaps between love and certainty.
It’s the way that last “Good!” pierces the second half of “Ivy,” landing closer to the punk instincts that flash elsewhere on the album, in sonic conflict with the song’s shimmering opening turn. Or how, on “Nikes,” Frank trapezes between sonic registers and perspectives, painting a kaleidoscopic view on his own sexuality, all under the banner of the most iconic brand in the world.
Across Blonde, what feel like dispatches from another dimension arrive like warnings from the past and future about the very romance the narrator finds himself sliding into. In one of the handful of interviews he’s given, Ocean described the album’s competing narratives as a “collage or bricolage,” saying that memory has a way of arriving as overlapping images. Each song, too, has its own overlapping instincts. The deceptively mellow “Self Control” manages to mourn a lost love with existential clarity. It features vocals from Slow Hollows’ Austin Feinstein, who sings the devastating “Keep a place for me” refrain before Frank takes us into the stratosphere on a swell of strings arranged by Jon Brion, repeating, “I know you gotta leave,” until his voice splits into a choir.
Even bite-size moments like “Good Guy” contain universes of their own. The interruptions imitate the way an old relationship returns to you with a flash of potent sensation. That construction has kept Blonde from aging in place. The person who heard “Self Control” at 19 and the person returning to it at 29 are effectively hearing two different songs. At first, its plea to remain somewhere in an old lover’s life can feel like the whole tragedy. Later, the more devastating recognition may be how much time has passed since asking.
“Why am I preachin’ to this choir/To this atheist?” he sings on “Close to You,” acknowledging the futility of trying to convince someone who knows the story but no longer believes in it. Like with Channel Orange, Frank is narrating life from 10,000 feet up, able to communicate pain and lust and longing with a kind of precision that, if nothing else, should prove how singular the human spirit truly is. An AI could never create Blonde precisely because of how deeply human an album it is. “This is not my life, it’s just a fond farewell to a friend,” Frank sings on “Seigfried,” before the song effortlessly widens from one failed romance to contain the meaning of existence itself. It’s something that no machine can ever understand.
Josh Martin for Rolling Stone
