But Frank’s not just fixating on tragedy he’s studying missteps the same way “Solo (Reprise)” guest star André 3000, of Outkast, did in remaining defiantly sober as he came up, while famously declaring that all of his heroes did dope.Īndré’s appearance here is fitting. Doomed musical forebears hang around like cautionary tales: Elliott Smith is quoted in “Seigfried,” and Kurt Cobain, 2pac, and others creep into lyrics elsewhere. Blonde’s constant is a reflexive sense of the burgeoning freedom of self-discovery and also the dangers of chiseling out one’s ideal self mistake by mistake.
#Cover of frank ocean blonde album free
“Solo” finds him single and enamored of acid and free love, all the while imagining the bad trips, medical and psychological, that befall the careless. Ocean can never be again: In “Nights,” he’s a homeless boyfriend hanging around a significant other in Texas after being displaced from Louisiana by Hurricane Katrina. The new album Blonde is a rogues’ gallery of all the bygone Franks that Mr. Frank Ocean lives haunted by the possibilities. The trip from adolescence into adulthood is the forest of these fears, of forked roads to possible futures that dissolve the instant you set about a specific path. On record, Ocean is constantly questioning whether or not his best life lies in his rearview, fretful that some burnt bridge or wrong turn has quietly and imperceptibly wrecked everything.
#Cover of frank ocean blonde album zip
That's the best I can do at understanding it! Clearly the Black Friday release adds new layers on blackness, consumerism and maybe the retrospective feel of the album (particularly interesting that he inverted the color of the frame to black), but I'm not so sure about that one.Are you happy? Would you give up life as you know it to zip back to some idyllic teen summer and laze on the arm of a sorely missed first love? These questions salt the bedrock of Frank Ocean’s work, from the Coachella romance of “Novacane,” breakthrough single from a mixtape literally titled Nostalgia, Ultra, to Channel Orange, an album of brokenhearted reminiscences set in motion by a PlayStation firing up a game of Street Fighter. I'm mostly reminded of the lyric "Poolside convo about your summer last night." That is just the picture (which Wolfgang exhibited on its own at the Tate Museum this summer), but (I guess) Frank also added the very big white frame surrounding it with one of the titles of the album "Blond / Blonde." I guess this is play on "framing" someone as a straight man or as a homosexual, when the double title alludes to a more fluid sexuality, something Frank has been clear about outside of his music (although the aggregate of its songs, songs about men, songs about women, songs about physically fighting with his partner and songs about feeling pretty, also shows this fluidity). These two possible explanations blend with a lot of topics dealt on the album, mostly intimacy and personal / fun experiences. But Frank is also very wet and probably at sunset, another reason why he could be covering his face. I agree with the openness vs closedness interpretation, we have a half naked Frank covering his face, which usually would be an inversion from what a public persona tries to selectively show.
Wolfgang's photographs vary from still life to portraits and a lot of his pictures deal with variety, death and, probably most important for Frank, sexuality.
The picture on the cover was taken by Wolfgang Tillmans, a very famous contemporary photographer (who lately has also been releasing music, like Device Control, the song Frank uses at the beginning and ending of Endless).
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