I Hope Frank Ocean is Okay
A core memory for the rest of my life is going to be the absolute silence leaving the final performance of an otherwise incredible and upbeat music festival — the stunned disbelief of thousands and thousands of Frank Ocean fans leaving weekend 1 of Coachella 2023.
The anticipation for Frank Ocean’s Coachella performance cannot be overstated. Since being announced as a headliner in 2020 (which fell through because of that whole pandemic thing), people had been speculating about new music (his last contributions to culture being 2016’s Blonde and a feature on The Life of Pablo) and what his stage show might bring. Many people also forget that while we were all at home isolated with (or without) loved ones, Frank was grieving the very sudden loss of his 18 year old younger brother Ryan who died in a car accident in August of the same year.
So now, three years later, Frankchella is back on (potentially only because of contractual obligation), and everyone seemed to be excited about it, except Frank. I’ve gotten a torrent of questions about what the performance was really like from friends who watched a livestream of a livestream from the only person on the ground at the fest who had wi-fi’s shaky hand. Don’t believe the articles that are telling you it was inherently an “anti-Beyonce, minimal and experimental set.” It wasn’t that. It felt much more akin to a cry for help. Lemme explain:
To understand Frank’s performance you have to have the context of the rest of the weekend’s big acts. BLACKPINK had wristbands for the audience and lighting cues for towers throughout the grounds for a fully immersive experience. Those ladies and Björk had expensive drone shows choreographed to their songs. To headline the official Coachella stage means to have all the resources at your fingertips to put on a good show. At Frank’s hour-late set, the lights never really dimmed. If you looked too far right or left, there was a blinding blue-white high beam almost like a safety tower or lighthouse.
When the show started, it didn’t really start. Random single notes would play from an instrument every few minutes. A group of hooded figures we assumed would be dancers milled about in a circle for 8 minutes in silence on the jumbo screens. The music didn’t come in with a bang, it just kind of started, like when you’re early to a barbecue and things are still being set up.
We’ve all been reading about this ice-skating rink that was allegedly supposed to be there and was scrapped last minute, but if we zoom out for half a second and really consider this: if you didn’t want to do a desert music festival or resented the opportunity — perhaps because of grief, wouldn’t you ask for something absolutely ridiculous for your stage show in 100° degree weather, like an ice skating rink that has to stay frozen over a full weekend? Wouldn’t you decline to have any merch whatsoever to commemorate the performance??
If you were asked to headline with Calvin Harris — who, while obviously a world-class composer, basically gets paid the same as you to play his old hits off the radio — wouldn’t you play a couple of your own songs off your phone and lip sync to the camera instead of singing them live?
If you resented the pressure of having to do something so big while still in a dark place, wouldn’t you make dancers who are trained to put on a show walk in a circle? Or have five minutes of silence between songs?
We stood off to the side in a crowded VIP section watching all the celebs and their entourages push to the front. But we had friends in the midst of the fray who described the in-front-of-the-stage scene as “hellish” to the point where water was being passed out to stop fans from fainting. No matter how close you made it to the stage you basically could not see Frank Ocean at all save for the screens. Wouldn’t you avoid showing your face if you were being forced to headline when you weren’t ready?
There’s been tons of reporting about him wearing slides on stage because his ankle was injured earlier in the week, but as someone with a legit ankle and toe injury who was up working the whole weekend, I can’t imagine that that injury would stop me from even just sitting down and singing my hits to my fans if I was in a good headspace.
Several of the performers throughout the weekend started late, but Frank going on nearly a full-hour late was by far the latest and every artist was aware of curfew rules. Coachella is a well-oiled machine by now, so this was extreme.
Back to self-sabotage thoughts: If you were going to be viewed by millions of people worldwide for your return to music, wouldn’t the best way to sabotage that to be day-of choosing not to have a livestream for YouTube?
The idea that this was just an experiment comes from people who want to see music as a product, and musicians as a product — not as artists, or people, who might be signaling that something deeper is going on.
There was a dj set in the middle of his performance by a woman he didn’t ever name. A security guard twerked for what felt like eternity. Mid-song he told us that he had hit curfew and that the show was over. No one heard his more recognizable hits Pyramids or Ivy that night. It was just “you get what you get and you don’t pitch a fit.”
So back to that stunned silence: As a millennial (which was definitely a slightly older demo than the majority in attendance) I viscerally remember the way TV memed Amy Winehouse’s struggles. They tore everything about her apart. And in the searing documentary Amy, the scene where she just sits down in front of the drums at a live performance, being booed by the crowd, so exhausted and done with everything just days before her death, what’s made clear is that audiences don’t always see the person struggling, they see a bad performance, or a waste of money and time. People flew in from all over the world for the most diverse lineup in Coachella history. Each night I’d tell my friends Vlad and Aaliyah to notice how the crowd was changing. It went from generally tanned white bodies to darker complexions and curls for Bad Bunny. It went from the same white bodies to an absolute array of colorful haired smiling Koreans and other Asians for BLACKPINK. And all day Sunday, Black people filled every part of the fairgrounds for Frank Ocean. To be the closing act for a weekend so amazing meant everyone was watching. Everyone was there. Almost certainly some vendors only agreed to be on site so they could catch a glimpse. And that was the show we were all given.
The online reaction has been mixed, with die-hards claiming it’s just the shitty Coachella crowd being too hard on their fave while forgetting that it was die-hards who waited in the heat of the desert all weekend, and the drought of his music for the past 7 years to see him live on Sunday. The reaction from the crowd was not hater behavior — it was stunned disbelief. The kind of stunned disbelief that’s familiar to anyone with family members or friends who’ve struggled with addiction. The tragic, heart-sinking feeling of anyone who has suffered from depression, or known someone who has lost the battle with it. It wasn’t just a yass queen “experimental show” and to spin it that way feels disrespectful to everyone who witnessed it and to Frank Ocean himself. He’s not Andy Kaufman, he’s Frank Ocean. And he’s almost certainly not headlining the second weekend of Coachella this year.
All of this to say I don’t know this man personally, I cannot confirm any of my suspicions about his moods or what really caused such a painful performance, but I would hope we, the people of the internet who always have to have a take, could show more compassion and pause to something pretty chilling. And I’m sure Frank will never see this musing, but I hope he is okay. I hope some artists he loves and respects can be there for him in a very real way as soon as possible. I hope he knows that in a world and time where staying relevant is a full-time job, we were and still are willing to wait for him.
