The handling of such downbeat emotions produces R&B that’s like a carbon copy of the genre’s usual form, with songs that are introverted where they might be gregarious, depressive where they might be cheerful, insistently focused on the downsides of love and fame. He uses this divide between the expected and the actual, the tradeoff from dreaming of fame to bemoaning departed innocence, to call up a baroque style that’s redolent of Drake, with the Canadian rapper’s self-pity and simmering rage swapped for a frosty numbness. Still somber, Ocean is now caught between vanished innocence and incipient fame, a conflict revealed by lines like “Too many bottles of wine we can’t pronounce/Too many bowls of green, no Lucky Charms” from “Super Rich Kids.” This clash existed on Nostalgia, Ultra, through the literal vehicle of repurposed backing tracks, and it’s been updated on Channel Orange.
It operates at a certain divisional boundary, caught between modern and classic, with funky organic bass and electric piano butting up against drum-machine beats and opaque electronic textures. This fetishization of nostalgic ephemera-conveyed through audio clips and bits of faux-diegetic sound bleeding in at the edges of songs-might seem melodramatic were Ocean’s music not so elegantly stunning. As Channel Orange begins, the swell of nostalgia that will likely accompany that PlayStation sound for a certain generational subset is followed by a rhyming emotional counterpoint, the swell of strings signaling the segue into the tender “Thinking Bout You.” He treats these bits of debris with real gravitas, as totemic icons swaddled in densely romantic production, typifying the overall sense of bittersweet sadness in which the album is cloaked. On his great mixtape, he sprinkled them around like seasoning, employed as transitions and bumpers, a theme that gets continued here, contrasting cassette-tape clunkiness with luxurious Clams Casino-inspired reverb traps. It’s comforting, then, to sink into Channel Orange and witness Ocean’s modest version of an upgrade: The intro sound effects on Nostalgia, Ultra were titled “Street Fighter,” and the ones featured here on opener “Start” are similar but a little more upscale, the recognizable tinkle that accompanied booting up a Sony PlayStation.Īs he proved on Nostalgia, Ultra, Ocean is tremendously adept at handling these little scraps of pop-culture detritus, understanding the weird power they possess. Now he’s guesting on Jay-Z tracks, writing songs for Beyoncé, and releasing his own expensive-sounding debut, the first material he’s recorded with professional producers. Frank Ocean, signed by Def Jam but ignored by the label, saw his career languish until 2011, when he made the smart decision to release his own mixtape, a choice that, paired with his fringe membership in the ascending Odd Future crew, has placed him on the brink of superstardom.
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