It’s been four years since Frank Ocean exploded onto the scene with the critically acclaimed channel ORANGE. Four years! In this day and age’s music cycle, that would be a death sentence for most other artists. Especially artists with as small a catalog as Frank. But the fact that his fan base has remained this rabid for any sort of new music is a testament to just how special he is as an artist. Frank’s just different; his music goes to unexpected places, his storytelling is unique, and in a day and age full of bravado, his music is comparably understated, yet stands out from the noise. So of course his sophomore rollout would be anything but conventional. First he gave us Endless, a visual album.
Now, I’m sure there’s some sort of deeper meaning to it all but I really think he’s really just trolling at this point.
With Endless I’m just gonna come right out and say I don’t know what the f**k was going on with that. Supposedly, it was some sort of visual album but all I saw was a bunch of Frank Oceans spend a hour building a wooden staircase(?) to nowhere. Now, I’m sure there’s some sort of deeper meaning to it all but I really think he’s really just trolling at this point. Trolling the general audience or his former record label I don’t know. But I do know he just got a whole lot of people to watch a whole lot of nothing for a whole hour. I’m all for being artistic, but that was too much for me and I don’t think being artistic just for the sake of being artistic rarely turns out good.
The level of sophistication in his music is just far and above almost everybody else out there doing it.
Now musically, Endless is phenomenal. His vocals sound as good as they ever have and the production sounded like a natural evolution of what we heard on channel ORANGE. The level of sophistication in his music is just far and above almost everybody else out there doing it. It almost made watching that dry as dirt video worth it, almost. It’s just a shame Endless didn’t get a proper album release so we could really dig into the individual tracks. I’m sure however, that there are some enterprising individuals out there that have already pieced together a downloadable full length by now (wink wink).
Did you watch Endless? Do you think Frank Ocean is just trolling or is there some deeper meaning hidden in there? What did you think about the actual music? Was it worth the wait? Let me know in the comments below and leave a rating for the visual album.
