Angering Fanbases: Frank Ocean’s Blonde

Mid-Week Update 9/26/24: September Series: Angering Fanbases

For the final installment of my September series, Angering Fanbases, today I’ll be sharing my thoughts on Frank Ocean’s Blonde (2016).

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Blonde is 17 tracks in an hour and one minute. I’d highly recommend you listen to it, its certainly a unique experience. I don’t love this album the way many people due, but that’s mostly down to personal taste, I can understand the praise it gets. Blonde has a critic’s score of 86 and a user score of 89 on Album of the Year, a 4.10/5 from 55k ratings on Rate Your Music (putting it at #46 best of all time), and was recently placed at #5 on Apple Music’s 100 Best Albums of all time list.

This has been called the album of a generation. It received basically instant critical acclaim, with most heralding it as the best RnB-related album of the past decade. For a lot of people, this album was up there for the best of the 2010s (on Rate Your Music, it is #7 out of that decade). While looking through reviews and critical analyses, I found many fans who had stories to tell about this album, how it changed or even saved their life.

Blonde came out in 2016, four years after Ocean’s debut studio album channel ORANGE. While that album could be melancholic and sentimental at times, it mostly stuck in a smooth, romantic RnB lane, even straying into a dancier vibe at times. By contrast, channel ORANGE’s much-anticipated followup was minimal and deeply emotional. The critical fervor around this album was stoked not only by its experimental, abstract approach to RnB, but by Frank Ocean’s notorious elusiveness. In-between the releases of channel ORANGE and Blonde, very little was heard from Ocean until, over the course of two days, he released Endless (an abstract music/video art piece), Boys Don’t Cry (a very limited edition magazine with contributions from people like Tyler the Creator, Kanye West, and James Blake) and finally, Blonde itself. The years of silence had obviously been in pursuit of something, and the result was certainly unique.

I understand what makes this album special, and why so many people connect to it. However, I don’t have the same love, and its mostly down to taste. I’ll get into my in-depths thoughts in just a bit, for now here’s my brief overview.

Blonde (2016), by Frank Ocean, Overview

Production Quality: 75/100. This is a very minimalist album, meaning that every production choice is important since there are so few things going on. For me, not every song works, unfortunately. Especially in combination with Frank’s meandering, stream-of-consciousness lyricism, many of these songs just feel a bit empty. The instrumentals on songs like “Siegfried” or “Skyline To” function as basically background music to a spoken word/singing performance. They’re never bad, per se, and some (like the noise section that begins “Pretty Sweet”) delve into interesting areas of ambient music, but overall, there are few standouts.

Vocal Performance: 85/100. Frank’s vocals are easily the best thing about his music other than his lyric, and here they remain consistently good. The only negatives for me are when he decides to dip into the chipmunk voice, which I almost never like. “Nikes” almost put me off ever listening to this album again the first time I played it, I still hate that that’s the first song. Otherwise, the weird vocals only show up a few times, like at the beginning of “Self-Control”.

Lyrical Quality: 80/100. I have a hard time deciphering Frank’s lyrics, he’s an excellent writer who spends a lot of time dabbling in vague emotional highs and lows, and that’s tough to relate to a lot of the time. I can recognize quality, but the lyrics don’t do a lot for me personally.

Favorite Song: “Ivy”. “Nights” is probably the best song on here, but the one I’ve listened to the most by far is “Ivy”. That’s really just the most normal, straight-up RnB song here, and while I love it, it is unfortunately not followed by anything similar other than maybe “Pink + White”.

Least Favorite Song: “Nikes”. There are several tracks on this album that are interludes or amount to something similar, which I also don’t really love, but this is definitely my least favorite full song. The fact that it starts with the chipmunk voice, the fact that its over 5 minutes long. I just can’t get into it.

Overall Rating out of 100: 70

Blonde is a good album, there’s no question about that. It’s also one of those rare albums that has a huge mainstream breakout and is very well-known, yet dips into experimental music in an approachable way. This is a fantastic introduction to ambient-influenced music and alternative RnB, as well as music that lyrically deals with out-of-the-box subject matter. Frank Ocean is a very thoughtful, intentional artist, and unfortunately that means he often creates things that are so specific you either like them or you don’t. For me, as a whole album experience, Blonde is not that great.

There are several songs I do genuinely love. “Ivy”, “Pink + White”, “Nights”, and “White Ferrari” get a lot of praise, and rightfully so. I think those are the best actual standout songs. The rest of the album feels like it was split into songs for no real reason. Let me get into what I mean by that, because I know that’s kind of a weird statement.

If the second half of this album were one long song, I think it would be significantly more interesting. These songs are so meandering and hazy, it feels weird to me whenever one just ends and another starts. The musical background to Frank’s vocals is so simple and ambient, why not have it naturally transition from one song to another? My ideal version of this album is one that cuts out the “normal” songs, like “Ivy” and “Pink + White” (saving them for a more traditional release a lá channel ORANGE) and goes full-in on the ambient music + abstract lyricism and singing.

Something I haven’t mentioned yet is the structure of the album. It is perfectly divided into two halves by the beat switch in the middle of “Nights”. The first half is a bit more upbeat and conventional, and the second half slows it down and gets a bit stranger. Now, I love this moment in the album, I love the idea itself, but I do not love the execution. I think this could’ve been used so much better, maybe with a bit more obviously romantic, summery instrumental palette for the first half, and even more dives into noise and ambiance in the second? Or a more obvious change in lyrical content? Either way, it contributes to my overall dissatisfaction with the structure and purpose of Blonde.

Listening to the album now I often feel a sense of whiplash going from song to song. The interludes don’t really help either. Why is “Solo (Reprise)” just an André 3K verse? I don’t dislike it, but why is it here? Why are “Be Yourself”, “Good Guy”, and “Facebook Story” here? What are they adding to the album? I don’t necessarily hate any of them or their inclusion, they just feel a bit off for me. I don’t understand their inclusion or what they add to the album. I think these issues might be fixed if their instrumental backings were more obviously connected to the songs immediately before and after them, in the vein of a multi-movement ambient piece. But as it stands, the album itself is too inconsistent for me to give it anything above a 70/100.

As always, let me know your thoughts, especially if you’ve listened to Blonde and agree or disagree with anything I’ve said. If you enjoyed, consider sharing this, subscribing, or even pledging your support! Everything helps, and I appreciate anything you can do to help make my dream of writing for a career a reality! Until next time, take care of yourself and read/watch/listen to/take a stab at something interesting!