Bad luck to talk on these rides
What Frank Ocean’s cryptic and beautiful ‘Blonde’ means one year later
I spent the summer of 2016 in my 1998 Volvo S70. Between 24 hours of commuting a week and day trips during the weekends, I felt like my entire life was in that car. After graduating college, I felt my thoughts and memories racing by, but my life and traffic kept me at a standstill. Around late August, Frank Ocean’s Blonde was released, and I still can’t get it out of my head. Sometimes an album just clicks and immediately rewires your brain. Every note feels right, and every chord progression brings the hair on your skin to attention. The first time I listened to the whole album, I let it wash over me, completely absorbing me like a great wave into the driver’s seat.
To me the most remarkable thing about the album is that it bends song structure to Ocean’s will and serves to aid him in parsing complicated feelings. To Ocean, songs are manifestations of desire: complicated, beautiful, and sometimes contradictory.
Most pop songs rely on repetition, a simple desire to get back to the catchy bit. But Ocean’s refrains, when they do appear, are an attempt to obsessively pore over a memory and work through the ways in which our lives shift and morph.
In “Solo” when Ocean sings, “I got that act right in the Windy City that night/ No trees to blow through/ But blow me and I owe you two grams when the sunrise,” we’re forced to consider the chorus’ apocalyptic words as a warning and of internal conflict to come.
Later when Ocean sings, “I wanted that act right in Colorado that night/ I brought trees to blow through/ But it’s just me and no you/ Stayed up ’til my phone died,” before the second chorus, we’re forced to reconsider the meaning of the chorus. It’s not a look forward at pain to come, but a look at pain that has existed.
“Self-Control” continues an exploration into the difficulty of self-reflection, and working through your desires when your life suddenly loses forward momentum, and the inertia throws you back. When I first listened to it, the part that stood out to me was when the song builds to catharsis, and Ocean repeats, “I know you gotta leave.” But in the days after, I kept going back to the break:
“Keep a place for me, for me/ I’ll sleep between y’all, it’s no thing/ Keep a place for me/ It’s nothing, it’s no thing.”
The delivery on this is monotone and almost robotic, as if it’s a reflex to communicate the desire. Even when Ocean is talking about connection, it’s all that he knows. There is a sense of unchanging emotion, frozen into place that I placed myself into. I felt more and more that everything I had done, or would do was automated.
Musically, the album places memories into a haze. Ocean’s introspective lyrics are placed into an impressionistic fog of keyboards and dreamy guitars with few drums. “White Ferrari,” itself an ode to the contemplative power of hours spent on the road, has a driving drumbeat way down in the mix, like a half-remembered song playing on the radio. When I think back to any single memory from last summer, I think about that drumbeat like a sore spot. The presence of something imperfect in the otherwise serene is at its heart the issue with nostalgia. Something nagging at the core is what helps us understand the pain and sadness of our lives in the past, and prevents us from glossing over it to sculpt perfect narratives.
When I think back to any single memory from last summer, I think about that drumbeat like a sore spot.
In the end, Blonde helped me make sense of a summer that passed in mugginess and sweat. Looking back, I can feel nostalgia creeping in. But the album taught me that it’s okay to feel fondly about times that have passed, while questioning if those feelings are true or good. The best albums don’t just remind us of a time in our lives, they occupy a physical space long after the sound waves have died down. Blonde is engrained into the sticky, patent leather of my dashboard like a movietone soundtrack. But as Ocean explores over and over in his lyrics, maybe these memories are a brand.
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