In 2009, he was signed by Def Jam as a recording artist. Raised in New Orleans, Frank Ocean lost his studio to Hurricane Katrina and moved to Los Angeles. had changed, that soft sounds no longer signalled soft situations, and that the dreamy and the weird were safe places to talk about ambivalent feelings. His hit album, “Take Care,” from 2011, was a signal that the language of R. Hovering over these figures is Drake, who filled the commercial hole that traditional m.c.s and singers had left open.
Other acts that once would have been called indie are making similar music, such as Chicago’s How to Dress Well and England’s Kindness, the stage name of Adam Bainbridge, who turned the Replacements’ “Swingin Party” into a feathery slow jam. His songs have a commonality with Ocean’s work: they present a menu of sex, drugs, and disillusionment, in a heavy-lidded style. In Toronto, the Weeknd-mostly the efforts of a musician named Abel Tesfaye-released three full-length albums on the Web in 2011 that drove people almost uniformly crazy.
& B.’s last stars, Usher, released an album called “Looking 4 Myself,” which suffers from stylistic anxiety, as if it needed to please everyone in the room.īut, under the mainstream, there’s another cohort gaining popularity. The-Dream, a brilliant songwriter and singer from Atlanta, has seen his sales decline, as has Ne-Yo, another performer who splits his time between writing for others and for himself. album this year called “Write Me Back,” which barely anyone noticed. Chris Brown and Rihanna, pop’s unbearable Burton and Taylor, are more than happy to do crass club tracks. has gone through a crisis, scared silent by the thump of club music, which now seems to be required in all pop music.
(a term Ocean dislikes, because he says it carries racial connotations) is a series of surprises and small failures. What has happened in the past two years to mainstream R. He used the track as is, and simply changed the lyrics. It’s not surprising, then, that he covered the Eagles’ “Hotel California” on his first, self-released album, “nostalgia, ULTRA,” in 2011. The scenarios in Ocean’s songs display a combination of decadence and spiritual ache similar to Prince’s: the singer is surrounded by everything that popularly represents pleasure, and none of it has any effect on him. There are more remote musical precedents for Ocean’s music, most obviously D’Angelo’s quiet and vague masterpiece from 2000, “Voodoo” Marvin Gaye’s simmering, brutal 1978 album, “Here, My Dear” and Prince’s first seven albums. was once the main mode of dissembling attractively and seducing openly, it is now America’s confessional booth. is now less about dancing and more about emotional clarity-a trend that owes more to Ocean than to anyone.
have been ample preparation for Ocean’s revision of the form. Photograph by Jason NocitoĪmid the gentleness of Frank Ocean’s major-label début, “channel ORANGE,” there are moments of intensity and grim wisdom that could make a writer reach for a cliché like “Nothing can prepare you for. In his songs, Ocean is surrounded by everything that popularly represents pleasure, to little effect.