Frank ocean channel orange meaning
Not Just Money – Another quick interlude that once again ties together the two songs flanking it on the album. “Why see the world, when you got the beach?” he asks rhetorically.Ħ. Ocean places his sunglasses on and becomes the captain of a sumptuous soul cruise, prodding the privileged to reach for more by unraveling their lavish realities.
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A meditation on sex, pregnancy and childhood dreams that begs for repeated listens in order to crack its elliptical code. Sierra Leone – The percussion stays buried as Ocean sounds like he’s debating with his own spoken-word statements. On its own, it’s a lost pop doodle, but in context, the track makes weird sense.Ĥ. Fertilizer – An AM radio jingle about bullshit, “Fertilizer” is a bridge between Tracks 2 and 4 that underlines the importance of listening to “Orange” in order.
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Still, the woozy heaven of “Thinkin Bout You’s” backing track and Ocean’s clawing falsetto still ring true, and bestow “Channel Orange” with a unique backbone.ģ. It’s as if Frank is giving his listeners 46 seconds to strap in.Ī bold choice to lead off his major label debut with a song that’s floated around the Internet for a year. Start – Patches of silence and flickers of noise get “Channel Orange” underway. Which songs on “Channel Orange” are the best of the bunch? Check out this track-by-track review of the R&B singer’s major label debut.ġ. Either way, it’s one of the best albums of the year, and Ocean, hopefully, will keep making more like it, without a hint of reservation. “Channel Orange” may make Frank Ocean a household name, or it might not. Yet Ocean’s irrepressible spirit carries all 55 minutes of this opus, shining light on subjects that are not discussed often enough and spinning new webs of ideas around familiar R&B tropes. “Channel Orange” does not contain any bad songs, although there are times when Ocean’s themes could be a bit tighter. The production never smothers the singer’s sumptuous vocals, which spill over into pockets of air that the listener didn’t know could be filled.
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Whether turning inward or outward, Ocean continues to explore.But no matter what Ocean’s mood is on the album, the songs sound fantastic. In the few years following Blonde, Ocean shared a string of singles through his Apple Music show, blonded RADIO, each one its own miniature event. If Channel ORANGE had sounded like Ocean opening up, Blonde marked a contraction, exploring meditations and internal monologue with a sound that often felt more like ambient music than R&B. After a four-year period during which news of his next move flitted around in the internet ether like myth, Ocean released two projects in a week, in August 2016: the visual album Endless and the more conventionally framed Blonde. The writing got sharper, too-at once more pitiless (“Crack Rock”), more expressive (“Bad Religion”), and more surreal (“Pyramids”), weaving storytelling and social commentary with an offhand brilliance that has become Ocean’s trademark sleight of hand. In 2012, he released Channel ORANGE, which veered from Stevie Wonder-style soul to string-led gospel and psychedelia, framing R&B as a kind of rarified art music. He was soulful, funny, understated, and poetic, the kind of writer who made fragments of the real world-a girl doing porn to cover tuition (“Novacane”), a dip in the ocean (“Swim Good”)-crackle with mystical significance.įrom Kanye, Jay-Z, and Beyoncé on down, he gained a cult of followers. Ocean was raised mostly in New Orleans, and moved to Los Angeles in the mid-2000s by 2009, he’d landed a contract with Def Jam, but couldn’t square the relationship with his ambitions and ended up releasing his first mixtape, 2011’s Nostalgia, Ultra, on his own. Even in his early days as the quiet one in the LA hip-hop collective Odd Future, Ocean seemed possessed by a stoicism and emotional intelligence that was uncommon, luminous-the kind of guy who sees more than he says and doesn’t waste a word when he opens his mouth. It’s that Frank Ocean is one of those songwriters who manages to touch new and distant places in his audience’s imagination, a cartographer of intimacy and confession so intrepid and sensitive that listening to him can feel like eavesdropping on something private, maybe even inexpressible. It’s not even his style (which seems invincible), or the fact that he’s one of the few pop artists publicly navigating the frontiers of queer identity. "It’s not just that he’s an enigma or that he follows his own clock.