My Music: The Reclusive Frank Ocean
The R&B savant and innovator that only comes around once in a blue moon never fails to bring his mythic aura whenever he steps back into the spotlight.
Frank Ocean’s personal life, and backstory for that matter is, by Franks own doing, shrouded in mystery. Even when he does reveal a juicy tidbit about his life he only seems to give his fans the face value of the feeling rather than dwelling on the backstory.
Here’s what I do know, he was born in Long Beach, California but grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. Frank has gotten into the subject of his New Orleans upbringing in his music but the stories do remain relatively foggy. If his music is meant to be taken at face value rather than a story about someone else, we can assume that Frank got into drugs and the drug trade at a tragically young age. He was also sexually active at a relatively young age as well.
He remained a good student, however, and enrolled in the University of New Orleans in 2005. Those with an intuitive eye will see where this is going.
When Hurricane Katrina hit in the same year, Frank was forced to transfer to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
It is allegedly around this time that he had is first sexual encounter with a man. Franks ambiguous bisexuality is a subject that often reoccurs in his discography.
From here, Frank decides to move to LA in order to further pursue his long-time love of making music.
He started as a ghost writer for a lot of insanely popular artists including, but not limited to John Legend, Justin Bieber and Beyonce. While Frank enjoyed the anonymity of ghostwriting, when he met Tyler, the Creator in 2009 and was offered a role as the sole vocalist for hip-hop collective Odd Future, he didn’t pass up the opportunity.
Odd Future was such an anomaly in the hip hop community at the time, stemming from their knack of being offensive, while somehow also being able to completely embrace every kind of lifestyle and throw away the ideologies. This was a pocket that Frank had the opportunity to flourish in, within the notoriously homophobic world of hip hop.
While Frank did seem to enjoy his stint with Odd Future, his talent was just bounds above his Odd Future contemporaries. Frank released his first solo commercial record Channel Orange in 2013 to high critical acclaim. It was, thematic, conceptual, fresh, creative but mostly just overwhelmingly beautiful. As most people do, I love the emotional, longing lyrics of Thinkin Bout You. I also love the self awareness and self depreciation of tracks like Super Rich Kids. Frank Ocean was taken from the counter culture, angsty teen collective that was Odd Future, and was thrust into the mainstream where he was taken in with open arms.
However, the love that the pop culture had for Frank did not go both ways as Frank presented his fans with virtually 3 years of silence. It really speaks to the cult-like fandom of an artist if he can disappear from the world for 3 years and still have millions of loyal fans patiently waiting for him to release an album that he delayed 6 times.
Franks album, formerly named Boys Don’t Cry and changed to Blonde, was released in 2016 to more critical acclaim and joy from his fans. Blonde is minimalistic yet emotionally extravagant. There is maybe 2 songs on this album that has more than 3 instruments, yet I cry almost every time I listen to it, usually at different songs too. He has this amazing writing style were you can tell his songs are deeply personal but they also strike a chord within your own emotions, whether this is out of empathy for Frank, or the feeling that this song also applies to something that you yourself are going through, however, I do not know.
We are still waiting for his latest album, we’ve been promised a sort of new age, R&B and Reggae vibe, but above all we’ve been promised a great album, I’m confident he won’t disappoint.
