Frank Ocean Full Album
Ariano Waiker
With listeners everywhere processing Ocean's latest creation in real time, we asked our NPR Music's Jason King and Ann Powers to share their first impressions. Jason fired the first volley: Hear his chat with All Things Considered at the audio link, and read on for his discussion with Ann.
Endless is billed as a visual album, meaning there are 18 tracks you listen to as you watch a 45-minute video (directed, executive produced and creatively directed by Ocean himself) in which the singer engages in some sort of unexplained power-tools construction project. If I were feeling especially generous I'd say the black-and-white video is wonderfully Warhol-esque in its pursuit of anti-narrative, but I can't help think that it's really painfully slow, visually inert and much less stimulating than Beyonc's highly considered Lemonade. Far more compelling is Frank Ocean's new music itself, featuring buzzy-hip collaborators like Jazmine Sullivan, Sampha and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead. The music and sonics of Endless are hydra-like, featuring a surfeit of creative ideas: The whole affair can be dark, moody, drifty, ambient, textured, druggy, somnambulant, melancholic, Eno-ghostly, synthy and depressive. It can be melodically rich, even if its lethargic sameness can sometimes be snoozy.
But the ADD way that Endless' songs and interludes change, move, shift and blend and bleed into each other, as Frank himself moves between languorous singing and draggy rapping, makes the hyperactive scrawl aesthetic Dev Hynes / Blood Orange recently explored on this year's Freetown Sound album seem comparatively straight ahead and conventional. Standout lyrics like "How come the ecstasy always depresses me?" on Arca-assisted interlude "Mine" and Ocean's ranty, freestyle-type delivery on "U-N-I-T-Y" are among the album's most artistically impressive moments.
Last night, when Frank Ocean's livestream workshop came back to life after sitting dormant for two weeks and it became clear he was building a stairway to sudden-release heaven, I sat listening to the muffled music coming from his speakers in the background and started to think about other staircases: ones that lead nowhere, like those in the Winchester Mystery House, a famous haunted California manse where carpenters worked around the clock to stave off the demons of its mistress. That house has doors that open to walls, weird turrets and twisted hallways, and a Sance Room that only those who understand its mazes can reach. Endless is the sonic equivalent of that structure. Even after several listens to the actual album, I feel like this music is still being constructed. Ocean welds these tracks together in spiral patterns; the video asks us to observe this process of creation, to slow down and ponder how this carpenter builds along the lines of his story pole. As someone with a 2016-appropriate short attention span, I have always found such process-oriented music somewhat difficult to absorb. But I welcome Ocean's challenge that we do so.
Endless does fit in with the year's other "discombobulated" releases, especially Rihanna's, which has a similarly labyrinthine structure and depressive ambiance. The associations it immediately brings to mind, however, come from the art world. Ocean made his aspirations toward gallery life explicit by enlisting sculptor Tom Sachs as a collaborator, recreating his Jamaican-style sound system simulacrum and getting his advice on those stairs. Making his fans live with that off-and-on live stream, where he only tinkered for so long, did both challenge the norms of corporate product and make gentle fun of Apple's own irritating roll-out delays (come on, I really need a new Macbook Pro). But it also was part of the longstanding tradition of endurance-oriented performance art, which stretches back at least to the days when The Velvet Underground performed as part of Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
From this sawdust-covered pile of reference points, Ocean constructs his own meanings, grounded in an artistic identity that probably couldn't have sustained itself in earlier pop moments. His frankness about erotically fluid desire harkens back to the urban night wanderings of Lou Reed and the poetic challenges of Essex Hemphill. Has Ocean read Hemphill's profanely gorgeous "American Wedding," or spent time with Reed's odes to abjection on Berlin? I don't know, but those sources that never mingled in the past all seem to run through him. Ocean does strike me as an artist who absorbs source material eagerly, always adding more to the process he so openly shares. (And yes, I think of Kurt Cobain, too, of the hidden Nevermind track "Endless, Nameless," which announced the Seattle rock savior's refusal to conform to anyone's commercial hopes.) If Endless is merely the precursor to the larger reveal of Ocean's intentions and realizations that Boys Don't Cry will offer, it's still a work with plenty of currents that draw me in. I'll see you at the top of that never-ending staircase.
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