This feeling of freedom within containment, of traveling at a high speed on a course that is smooth and open - and of being comfortable with motion even in your most vulnerable, childlike moods - was the one that best fed the creativity he needed to complete an album as highly anticipated as any to come out this year, even though, since he relocated from California to the clogged streets of London, Ocean doesn't even drive much any more. I put myself in her seat then I played it all out in my head." Ocean imagined himself wriggling against the seatbelt, he wrote, playing with its tension until it no longer constrained him. Her eyes seemed clear and calm but not blank, the road behind her seemed the same.
"Two years ago I found an image of a kid with her hands covering her face," the artist wrote in an essay posted on his Tumblr the day this weekend the album, four years in the making, finally became available." A seatbelt reached across her torso, riding up her neck and a mop of blonde hair stayed swept, for the moment, behind her ears. cover art spelling situation, we're calling it Blonde throughout.)Īnn Powers: When he began to put himself into the mind-frame that would inspire his new album Blonde, Frank Ocean imagined himself in a moving car.
And without clarity regarding the whole listing vs. (Ann Powers and Jason King write about both the physical and digital versions of the album interchangeably. We find it impossible and personally limiting to consider this album outside of its context, so the below is as much a state of affairs as it is a straight-ahead review. They did so across many time zones and man hours what emerged is a conversation that stays fair-minded and grounded and ends in questioning both the artist and his audience. Over the weekend we asked Ann Powers and Jason King to wrestle with Frank Ocean's long-awaited follow-up to 2012's Channel Orange. Other notable albums include Beyoncé's self-titled at #3, Robyn's Body Talk at #8, and Charli XCX's Pop 2 at #40 on the list.Ĭheck out Pitchfork's best of the decade lists here.Frank Ocean's raw, bleeding, diaristic storytelling guides Blonde. Frank Ocean's debut album channel ORANGE sits at #10 on the list. That wasn't the only nod to the rule-breaker. 'Inhale, in hell, there’s heaven,' Ocean sings on 'Solo,' capturing the whiplash experience of being young in this country in one line. We wanted the blurred, the softened, the existential.
But our mood was languorous jingoism was the problem in the first place. Big choruses, hooks as wide as highway signs, regular percussion that could gird us from chaos. People theorized that we needed anthems to get us through the dark night. "The year 2016 crystallized the political disaster right under the surface. "Frank Ocean is the hinge artist of our time, the true voice of a generation because he takes long silences," writes Pitchfork. A day later, he surprise-dropped Blonde indepently, and a worldwide hush seemed to settle as we all sat down and listened. He followed that critical success up in 2016 with Endless, an exclusive visual album available to Apple Music subscribers, thereby fulfiling his contract to his record label. It went viral, and changed the face of hip-hop and R&B forever. The experimental R&B musician exploded onto the scene back in 2012 with his debut album channel ORANGE and lead single "Thinkin' Bout You." Just before the album's release the singer wrote a letter on Tumblr, detailing a romance with a man. 2019 is coming to a close, so you might be asking, "What are the best albums of the decade?Īccording to Pitchfork's ranking of this decade's best LPs, Frank Ocean released the best album of our time with Blonde.
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