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The title was stylized in accompanying art as the masculine blond - a grammatical tweak that gave the LP, intriguingly, two genders at once.
Blonde frank ocean album full#
A day later, pop-up stores opened across the country, stocked with copies of Ocean’s Boys Don’t Cry, a glossy zine full of poems, photos of hot cars and hot boys and, affixed to one of its pages, a CD containing an album called Blonde. The link between music and visuals was impressionistic at best, but the subtext was clear: Ocean is a craftsman, and craftsmanship requires patience. That feed gave way to Endless, a short film posted online in which dreamlike half-songs soundtracked footage cut together from the workshop sessions. It began in earnest in early August, after a string of blown deadlines and teasingly cryptic Tumblr posts: Ocean’s site crackled to life with a bare-bones video stream capturing him in a workshop, wordlessly and methodically constructing what gradually revealed itself as a staircase. So it’s only fitting that the roll-out for his new album, upon us at last, unfolded as a series of riddles, unpredictable detours and winks. He made his name, after all, by dodging tidy categorization, confounding expectation and disobeying prevailing rules of genre and sexuality. Even before Frank Ocean fell quiet for the better part of four years, leaving a legion of fans to wonder when - if? - he’d ever muster a follow-up to his stunning 2012 debut, Channel Orange, the New Orleans-born pop savant was one of music’s most elusive figures.