August, 2016: modest Frank fan that I was, I somehow still let myself be drawn into his subreddit–an anxious, electric clubhouse filled with the kind of jittery pre-concert crowd murmurs that turn into screams and then hush when the lights finally go down. Frank was off building a staircase in a nondescript warehouse, and people were posting all sorts of crazy stuff, burrowing into nothing, just to stick their fingers into the haze and do something other than twiddle their thumbs. This is still kind of how it is to be a fan of Frank Ocean.
Poolside convo about your summer last night
Blonde, for me, has stood as a benevolent guardian on the border between youth and adulthood. A reminder of what to take with me. What to let slip away. This is why, I think, Blonde exists at the end of summer, right as people are asking how it was and you have to decide, right as those narratives are strung out to dry and wave in the cool autumn winds. In the summer (moreso in childhood, but to a lesser extent, always) the structures are looser. You can go swimming and lie down for a while. You might indulge in the pleasures of staying up later. But now, responsibilities creep back in, and things slow down and begin to contract inwards.
We didn't give a fuck back then/I ain't a kid no more/We'll never be those kids again
This annual pattern is also represented at a much grander scale: that of one’s entire life–blinking once and then going out. Youthful abandon gets reined in to adult sobriety. Summer turns to fall, either gradually or all at once, for everyone.
As this is happening for me, I still return over and over again to an album that reminds me how to look straight at the entirety of my life in awe. How to never let go of that feeling. Of romance. Of deep, deep gratitude for where I am and how I’ve gotten here. The pleasure-scented mist of “Nikes;” the inflated confidence, the deflated loneliness of “Solo;” the full-throated, intimate pleas of “Self-Control”–that whole front half feels like my heart in its default state: blown wide open. It feels like a string of elegies so gorgeous that they won’t let their subjects actually die.
Then we launch through the gateway of “Nights” (that grating guitar shred that gives out and drops into the cushioned second half of the song at exactly half an hour into an hour-long album), emerging into a colder, harsher world. The twin ballads of “White Ferrari” and “Seigfried” have always felt particularly groundless to me, like they’re constructed in outer space. No drums, barely any backing instruments, mostly just Frank’s voice. A voice that he uses to shoot out calculated, tiny bursts of compressed air, just enough to keep his little spacecraft on track and not tumble out into the abyss. Honestly, I’ve had to find my footing with these songs over many years.
Mind over matter is magic/I do magic
Growing up, you start to come into contact with a lot of systems that seem structurally sound, a lot of ground that seems solid, but then maybe you wrestle through imposter syndrome enough times and you realize that nobody has any idea what the fuck they’re doing. That what seemed solid is actually something of a movie set, and “if you push in, something will pop out the other side.” When Frank casts this lens on the reality of a portrait of conventional success in “Siegfried,” it becomes “two kids and a swimming pool.” A naked haiku. It’s beautiful, but really just as beautiful as anything else. It loses any specific power. And I guess I’ve started to feel that the bravest thing I can always do–the scariest and most magical thing–is to drop the script and build from the void.
A Buddhist might nod in understanding and say that form is emptiness. An IFS psychotherapist might speak of listening to an exiled inner child who has always known this to be true. Whatever words you put to it, it requires remembering.
Be yourself and know that that’s good enough
I’ve always loved how the mother in “Be Yourself” belabors a stern anti-drug warning and then immediately after, in the first line of “Solo,” Frank is dropping acid. I never skip “Be Yourself” when I’m listening to the album. I want both. The rule and the breaking of it. The form and the emptiness. The maturity and the innocence. I want all the seasons of life.
Blonde isn’t nostalgia. You can’t make waves this big by navel-gazing. No, the word that keeps coming to mind for me is integration. It’s a concept I’ve come across from psychonauts and meditation retreat leaders. If memories of openness are siloed away because they’re too inconsistent with the rest of your life, because they go against your narrative of who you are, because they’re simply too painful, then they will always stand separate. You’ll have to step aside from your life in order to admire them. So the question of integration becomes: how do you hold that experience of absolute freedom and still live in society? Or, for our purposes: how do you move gracefully back into your daily routines come September, after allowing them to warp a little around the edges? How do you grow into an adult version of yourself while still letting the air in?
Frank Ocean sounds like he’s carrying the weight of his life around and is somehow lighter than ever. There’s a way to do it. There must be.
Thanks for reading!
