Ocean has handled the hype by keeping a low profile in the last four years, he’s appeared out of the woodwork for the occasional guest spot, otherwise concealing himself to the shadows, presumably laboring over some meticulously conceived masterwork. In the last few months alone we’ve witnessed Kanye West’s frenetic, endlessly edited discharge of The Life of Pablo the final, funereal burlesque which played out around David Bowie’s Blackstar and Beyoncé’s magisterial Lemonade, a multimedia event that both addressed and amplified personal controversies, reasserting her command over her personal narrative.įrank Ocean isn’t quite on par with those icons, but his cult popularity seems on the cusp of breaking through to outright stardom, partially thanks to the mounting excitement over the follow-up to 2012’s ambitious Channel Orange. Yet as exasperating as this process can be, it also provides another outlet from which the personality of the creator can manifest. Now they seem to materialize out of the ether or through clouds of manufactured smoke. It’s easy to look back fondly on the days when albums simply arrived as scheduled, following a circumscribed period of promotion and anticipation.
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