Media-for-media's-sake AM radio station WIAM (What It All Means) is broadcasting Frank Ocean's new album Blond around the clock. I bet now they wish they had gone stereo FM while there was still time, because the noise is ear-splitting. The worry is that Ocean – the out R&B artist sometimes known as a rapper; also, sometimes not – is really telling a long, complicated joke, and all the wrong people are laughing.
I am, with delight, and I've got to be high on the list of the wrong people: a seen-it-all, aging-not-at-all-gracefully classical-music critic moonlighting on the other music he likes (there's a lot). But if anything disqualifies my opinion, it's that I have not sampled the entire new Ocean package – the extended music video Endless, infamous for the aptness of its title; a small-run glossy magazine; even cars and houses, I hear – with which the 29-year-old songster has come roaring back after a four-year silence. In Music for the Masses Time, that's the equivalent of Bruennhilde's generational sleep. In any case, the presser for the drop of this Ocean was last-minute and haphazard, so no wonder the bloggers are growling.
The people who called it to my attention, hot on its release, are "ordinary listeners," people whose sensibilities I trust and who listen far outside the industry's echo chambers. I bought it on iTunes, which I might not have done had I known that that was the only way to get it. It's a weird kind of artistic independence joined at the hip to our era's Great Communicator, Apple. But as with so many things Apple-plectic (taxes, say) there's just some things you gotta eat, core and all.
It's not to detract from the singular power of Ocean's voice, artistic or bodily, on Blond to say that it's plaintive, inward-looking, and never far from hyper- on the sensitivity scale. He all but self-parodies in the "outro" (opposite of intro) of "Self-Control," when he begins each stanza with "I, I, I, I" before it turns confessional, self-abnegating and outright pleading, in that debased way that romantic love, however brief, has its way with us. Even when he shares vocals with other singers – white Swedish rappers, Beyonce ffs – no one's dominating, competing, or screaming. All the voices are individual and conspicuously lacking in "branding," which is at the heart of Ocean's endeavor, and the furor around this release.
The boldest thing he's done is to articulate the not-to-be-said in this time of vaulting change in the realm of other-sexual liberation, candor and defiance of the oppressor. Ocean gives voice, in words and music, to the taboo idea that no one can make a gay man hurt harder than another gay man can. His point is not that gay men are shits but that there are two sides to every freedom medallion. That's the way love is. I've been on a terrible Tristan tear, so I'm down with the idea that love hurts. Ocean speaks the hurt in an unmistakably gay way yet does it without self-pity. It's as brilliant an example of making the political personal as I've heard.
There's astonishing variety in Ocean's new songs. The sound is heavily layered throughout, but although anyone's noise needs will be met, the sound never clots in the ear. "Pretty Sweet" heads the nerve-janglers. At the opposite extreme, the irony of "Close to You," invoking the Bacharach-David hit in the Stevie Wonder cover, will be lost on no one, nor will the earnestness of Lennon-McCarthy's "Here There and Everywhere" in "White Ferrari." All the lyrics are available online; I'd suggest genius.com/Frank-ocean-nights-lyrics.
The closest Ocean comes to a rant is in the opening track, "Nike," a caustic anti-promotion of our demeaning material culture. It's not sugar-coated, but musically the message is lodged in the notion of how deeply we're all in this together. The album represents what little revolt is still possible against corporate avarice. The spoken-word riff by French producer SebastiAn on the depredations of Facebook friending is chillingly funny, and the perils of love in the drug-enhanced 24-hour city ("It's hell on Earth and the city's on fire") loom large.
But it's the really personal songs that cut close to the bone. "Self-control" is more emotionally shredding than "I'll be your boyfriend in your wet dreams tonight," the opening line of its chorus, lets on. The "Keep a place for me" refrain is where the real feeling lies. And for a sentiment anyone can get behind, there's "Summer's not as long as it used to be" ("Skyline to").
It's part of America's contract with its artists that, if they willingly leave our ever-dwindling attention spans for years at a time, when they return they had better be oracular. Blond is no ordinary drop in anyone's Ocean.