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raleightatum · 7 years

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Lorde Wrote the Perfect Party Album

On “Liability,” the standout piano ballad halfway through Melodrama, Lorde (the stage name of 20 year-old Ella Yelich-O'Connor) describes coming home from a breakup and falling into the arms of the only love she’s got left: herself. The interior design of Lorde’s possibly-autobiographical home in Auckland is up for debate, but as for me, I see her returning to an older Victorian number on a quiet street, old married couples and quiet loners up and down the aisle of row houses, with huge tall windows and open, creaky wood floors. I feel good about my vision of Lorde’s place, and go ahead and figure out yours while you can, because this is where the 20 year-old pop star keeps you for this dazzling forty-minute documentary of an album. A stranger walking by, looking up just long enough to catch a glimpse of a girl dancing alone, caressing her cheek, crying, screaming, partying, dancing -- the album produced as if we were hearing the music as sidewalk passersby, with Lorde playing the piano by herself, alone in the dark.

A quick runthrough of Lorde’s second studio album -- or a singles-heavy radio jaunt -- might lead you to believe that Lorde has a firm grasp on the age-old dilemma for twentysomething introverts: should I stay in or go out? The album’s first two singles (“Green Light” and “Liability”) offer decisive polarities: the former rages, the latter hunkers down. But on Melodrama, she does plenty of both, her possibly-Victorian home working as a hub for parties, Uber pickups, and morning cleanups, hallowed ground for the holy and the horror. Lorde seems not to have mastered this internal yanking and pulling of partying or not, but instead chases her whims to their full extents -- parties and painful piano ballads.

Home is ostensibly where we are the safest. We have, after all, the keys to our homes, the alarm code, blinds over the windows. The paintings and throw pillows and television and liquor cabinet are all arrayed just so to protect us -- we have, those of us without roommates, chosen this particular setup because it makes us feel some measure of safety. It is odd, then, to remember that home is where we encounter most starkly the terror, the horror, and the fucking melodrama that Lorde sings so earnestly about. When we’ve just been told that we’re too much, or perhaps not enough, and it all ends, we don’t go file into the queue at Blue Bottle, wander through the aisles at a bookstore, or fling ourselves onto a barstool at a pub (or at least we don’t at first): we collapse into our beds, or onto linoleum kitchen floors, or wilt into the carpet right in front of the stereo speakers. Home is, most precisely, where the horror is. Home is where we scream, where we cry; we slam the doors in our home, break glass in our home, where we kick people out and drag people in.

On Melodrama, Lorde lets us all into her home.

The album opens with Lorde hopping into a friend’s car, flying through a “Green Light,” doing her makeup on the way to a bar. The track is the first single, and it’s a racing, chanting thing that pulls us right back into the Lorde universe: jaunty choruses and tongue-only-slightly-in-cheek wishes for ill upon exes (“those great whites they have big teeth / hope they bite you”), but a kind of hopeful fist-pumping that’s a perfect way to start the night.

Whatever happens after Lorde sails through those green lights is documented on Melodrama, and ends, well, perfectly, with “Perfect Places,” as if the entirety of the album is a day in the life of Lorde.

“Sober” brings the party back to the house, and there’s dancing and drinks and an appropriately-in-her-head Lorde, wanting just to dance out the many questions (“can we keep up with the ruse?”; “what will we do when we’re sober?”). Lorde knows “in the morning (she’ll) be dancing with the heartache,” and that her efforts to pretend she doesn’t care are false, but “Sober,” and Melodrama as a whole, and life on the earth as a human, has this inevitability, this beating presence, this insistence on taking life as it comes, this refusal to confuse self-deprecation for self-shame. Lorde knows it’s time to dance with the truth -- but sometimes the truth is the music's too loud and the conversation will have to wait until the morning.

“Homemade Dynamite” feels like a beer run, a keep-the-party-going callback to “Royals,” but one that drops us off at “The Louvre” and “Liability,” back at the doorstep of the house, suddenly gone quiet, our singer sobered up and gone wistful alone in her living room scattered with plastic cups. These two tracks feel like Lorde at her wisest, her wittiest (“they’ll hang us in the Louvre / down the back, but who cares / still the Louvre,” which pulled me straight to Lonely Island’s “doesn’t matter had sex!” from, well, “I Just Had Sex”), her most willing to share. “The Louvre’s” muffled, spacy chorus is Lorde reminding herself to “broadcast the boom, boom” an earnest self-call to vulnerability, so that others might quietly dance too. This song, along with its partner, “Liability,” are the songs that you or I or Lorde might have been dancing to alone, a lamp and a couple candles lit, strangers looking in at these private moments of cracking, celebration, and devastating beauty. “The Louvre” ends with this gorgeous ninety second guitar plodding, and the raw “Liability” might as well be a live video of Lorde writing this song in her bedroom at four in the morning, spilling with all sorts of beautiful moments, the stuttering “e-na-na-na-everyone” from the chorus, the scooping “then they get bored of me” in the second verse, the v-sound at the end of the last “get you wild make you leave” that I’ve listened to on three different sets of headphones to figure out if the crackling is my speakers, her mic, or (my hope), a heaving, crying spit of saliva that they left in. The dead of night in a Lorde album is a vulnerable place to be.

In the dead of night, if Lorde can possibly fall asleep, maybe she dreams, and “Hard Feelings/Loveless” is that dream, a montage, a remembrance, a drifting through those nothing moments in relationships that turn out to be everything -- grocery shopping, sitting in a running car in front of your house. Lorde is having what they call hard feelings, and singing about it over and over in the chorus, and it does to the listener what it does when you, say, repeat the word “cow” over and over (cow, cow, COW, cow? It’s a funny word), repeating something enough times to question it, to reframe it, so that it starts to sound weird and thus can actually be listened to and heard for what it is: we say we’ve got hard feelings when we’re pissed off at someone, and so that becomes the definition (hard feelings, n: the act of being pissed off at someone). But Lorde’s insistence on speaking these hard feelings remind us that this is no compound word, no standalone term: hard modifies feelings. Feelings are difficult. The swooping, grating metallic strings of the bridge whoosh and crash through to dismantle the otherwise safe song, a twisting, beautiful interlude that is itself hard to listen to, hard to feel.

The semi-song “Loveless” that emerges after the industrial interlude of “Hard Feelings” is, at first, an unusual tack-on to the original song, a playful, childlike chant of “l-o-v-e-l-e-s-s” and a corner-of-the-mouth smile that says “we’re all fucking with our lover’s heads,” a mouth that you’re gonna wanna tape shut (“Writer In the Dark” echoes this warning to not fuck around with someone who’s got a microphone and a following) this playful grinning and fucking-with just one of the many ways Lorde is able to get through the night alone, but after the grins and games of this latenight memory, we find our impure heroine back at home, the house lights on, cleaning up the champagne glasses.

“Sober II (Melodrama)” is a harsh, startingly gorgeous track, as if Lorde, Max Richter, and The Weeknd threw an afterparty in the same top-floor motel suite where Frank Ocean sang about “Pyramids.” Part One of the song (“Sober”) wonders what we’ll do when we’re sober, and concludes we’ll be with heartache in the morning. But “Sober II (Melodrama)” doesn’t wait until then, jolting you from sickly sweet hungover sleep, hurling construction crew lights on the terror and trauma, the carnage of the night before. This song is bittersweet, and it goes.

Melodrama, unlike many of its contemporaries, resists the urge to indulge itself, and (if you just go ahead and count “Hard Feelings/Loveless” as two songs like I think you should) features none of the epic nine-minute tracks we’ve come to expect. Many of the songs (“Liability,” and “Sober II (Melodrama),” perhaps) stop even shorter of what you feel like you want it to be, as Lorde gets us wild and makes us leave to the next song. But then, there in the lazy long afternoon of the album, in a regathering of hope after the traumatic night before, Melodrama goes there, on two otherwise perfectly-fine songs, “Writer In the Dark” and “Supercut,” the latter pushing and pulling (Lorde’s raw vocal singing of the chorus from what sounds to be, like, the floor of her bathroom) into this Eluvium-style stargazy instrumental. It’s in those moments that the album feels tremendous -- the cutting, dazzling touches on songs you weren’t expecting.

I've heard Andy Greenwald, host of The Ringer’s “The Watch” podcast, say that television show finales tell us what the show was about. And in this melodramatic mini-documentary, Lorde tells us, quite explicitly, what the album is about in the album’s penultimate and final songs.

Throughout our night together, Lorde clearly grapples with her impulses, to stay in or go out, to scream or to cry, to dance or to talk it out, where she experiences these lurching yanks between parties and the nights alone that are all too familiar to those of us who have survived life to this point. In the reprise to “Liability,” the singer posits a been-to-therapy bit of insight: “maybe all this is the party.” The part where you pace around with the curtains drawn, drinking a bottle of wine by yourself, the part where your best friend comes over to help you clean up the mess of the night before, the tears and the cries -- maybe all this is the party.

A friend who toured with the indie band mewithoutYou once witnessed two girls approach Aaron, mewithoutYou’s singer, after a show and ask him to pray. My friend said Aaron kind of looked around, bemused, his arms kind of stretching as if to encompass everything around him, and said, “What do you think we’re doing here?” I’d like to think mewithoutYou and Lorde might agree: maybe all this is the party.

Lorde might humbly or courteously resist my label, but the album ends with a perfect song. “Perfect Places” is a last-night-in-town rebirth of the party, a kind of partying that has taken what it’s learned from the night before and is able to put things in context, to understand, because partying without a care in the world (or without an understanding of why we’re partying) is fun, but understanding the cocktail of reasons why you might want to spend your night off your face and throwing your head back and dancing anyway: there is some definite mewithoutYou, maybe-all-this-is-the-party wisdom and beauty to that.

Lorde’s grand finale is a wistful creed for those who would seek out the rooftop parties, the magical 3-a.m.-on-the-porch-conversations, the perfectly blissed-out moments (“Can we pray with you, Aaron?”) above all else, the longing for parties and perfect places when, well, it’s all the party. Lorde herself hopped onto the Genius annotation of the song and said that this dance-through-the-ambiguity, “can’t stand to be alone” partying is what Melodrama is about: “I’m partying so much because I’m just dreading sitting at home by myself hearing my thoughts hit the walls.” And so Lorde brings us the good word that thoughts hitting the walls are a party just like headstands banging the walls are too (“Hooking up...is fun but sad sometimes too!”).

The song dances along, takes someone home, and takes off all their clothes, as if the song was a regathering of the album, a recap of the long night we’ve just spent with Lorde. If all this is a party, we’ve all been invited, all of us young and ashamed, hardly able to stand being alone, and so we all dance ahead, “trying to find these perfect places.”

“What the fuck are perfect places, anyway?” Lorde asks, and we remember the dashed champagne glasses, the muted dancing alone, our view from the quiet sidewalk, the kitchen floor collapsing, the post-mortem ride home after a breakup, Lorde’s Melodrama, her Victorian house of horrors. This is where, she’ll tell us, we are anything but safe. But it might just be the perfect place for a party.

#lorde #melodrama

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raleightatum · 8 years

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March Madness Piece for Gradient

I wrote an essay on why we love and need March Madness for Gradient.

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raleightatum · 9 years

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Best of SB Nation NBA

This piece on the Grizzlies getting annihilated by the Warriors, and this list of the things I missed about basketball, and this story about the best game I’ve ever seen live all made SB Nation’s “Best of NBA.”

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raleightatum · 10 years

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My Cup of Coffee with R.A. Dickey

When guys make it to the big leagues for a handful of games, maybe an entire season, later on in their lives they'll say they "had a cup of coffee" in the big leagues. The implication here being, of course, they didn't stay long.

My baseball career was short enough to call it a "shot of espresso," or maybe, "the tiniest, whispered sip of espresso." This metaphor admittedly gets a little complicated, because, after my cup of baseballian coffee, I entered the coffee business. But before I began dispensing non-baseball cups of coffee to thousands of non-baseball-playing Nashvillians, I did have a teeny, David Eckstein-sized cup of coffee for a local college. And while I was swishing around that dirty, grimy coffee in my mouth, I faced R.A. Dickey, Cy Young Award winner.

* * *

My freshman year, I played outfield at Trevecca Nazarene University, a small, Christian college in Nashville that fines you if you miss chapel. Trevecca has a competitive Division II baseball program (the school was in the NAIA during my time)—we finished second in the conference that year. During the fall semester, a block of months reserved collegiately for football and basketball and whatever else, baseball is relegated to conditioning drills, long-tossing, batting cage work, and good-natured rookie hazing. Rules prohibit teams from holding "practice" (rules also prohibited teams from "hazing"—guess shaving our heads and dizzy bat racing us into viritigalian stupors didn't count—so we did all of these other things and didn't call it "practice").

One of the things we did was have a round-robin "Intrasquad World Series." Our 25-man roster was divvied up among three teams—Team Black, Team Gold, and Team Purple. To round out each team's nine-man starting lineups, our three coaches were eligible to play. A draft was held to select the teams—one of our players' dads owned an upscale bowling alley, and we had the live draft there, complete with a draft board and microphone'd podium, in one of the "party rooms" (definitely a place where your ninth birthday was, with a cake and party hats and a clown you're scared of and you're not sure why is there). The three teams were captained by each of our three coaches.

Our head coach, Jeff Forehand (now the coach at Lipscomb University), played high school ball at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, under his father, legendary Nashville coach Fred Forehand. Coach Forehand (our Coach Forehand) was teammates and remains good friends with former MBA and University of Tennessee star, current Toronto Blue Jay, and 2012 Cy Young Award winner R.A. Dickey. R.A. and Coach Forehand had a yearly standing agreement that, if R.A. was in town, and healthy, and just happened to be near Trevecca Nazarene University's campus during the intrasquad world series, he would pitch for whatever team drafted him. It was a risk--you draft R.A. and he doesn't show, you're down a man on your roster. If you pick him, you get a spot start from one of the best pitchers in the world.

Of course, this was 2005. R.A. Dickey was not one of the best pitchers in the world. He was one of the best pitchers in whatever room he happened to be sitting in, maybe? If he was sitting in a room completely devoid of professional baseball players? At the doctor's office, definitely, he was the best pitcher there. And, say, at the mall, although there are lots of people at the mall sometimes, so you can never be sure. He definitely was the best pitcher at any given moment at any local doctor's office, and he was sure in those a lot. Had a host of shoulder problems and all other kinds of stuff.

Also, he was old.

He'd starred in high school in the early 90's. His good friend and contemporary, Coach Forehand, was our coach, in his late-30's; this is what R.A. should've been doing at this point, settling down, having a family, "giving back" to the game. Instead, he was floundering around minor league bullpens and major league disabled lists. Numerous times, he was a shot of espresso away from being out of baseball entirely, forever.

In 2005, he was technically with the Texas Rangers. Although he was with the Texas Rangers the way you're still married to your wife even though she made you move out and you're eating pizza every single night and she is dating someone new and the divorce is just a matter of paperwork. As a formality, Orel Hershiser (just a totally random and huge name to appear in this saga) told R.A. to learn a knuckleball, like the wife saying to her estranged husband, "Um, get a job that pays six figures, and quit drinking, and dedicate your life to Christ." I'll get right on it, honey!

So R.A. got right on that knuckleball, a fickle, wavering pitch tried by few, mastered by even fewer. Tim Wakefield was able to grasp it, sort of, in the way that you don't really grasp a knuckleball anyway, but just kind of heave it up there, with your knuckles, hoping for the best. It's a long-shot pitch, capable of dancing past bats and ducking catcher's mitts. It can dart and flutter and weave, and it can float there like an eight-year-old's toss.

R.A. took up the knuckler because he couldn't take up anything else. Injuries had ravaged his other stuff—his fastball was hittable by every two-armed human in the coffee shop you're in right now, his curveball wasn't so much of a curve as a Google Maps "slight left" on its way to being a stand-up double, his fast-less fastball meant his change-up wasn't much of a change from anything, except maybe now every single human being on earth could hit a homer on him. He wouldn't have lasted 15 more minutes for the Rangers.

So he learned the knuckler.

It didn't start well. His first year throwing the knuckler, by some miraculous finagling of the disabled list, Dickey made the Rangers' opening day roster. No pitcher in major league history has given up more home runs than he gave up in his first start of the season. The Detroit Tigers launched six (6!) on him that day, which is half a dozen, and also twice the homers I've hit in all my life.

So he hadn't quite figured out the knuckleball yet. And he wouldn't, either, for a while. Six years it took—one for each of those six bombs—for Dickey to figure it out, or maybe it just took that long for the unpredictable yips and zips of the knuckleball to float the right way for R.A., in a career that had zipped in all the wrong ways for so long.

In 2012, as a member of the New York Mets, Dickey won the Cy Young Award. Six years removed from that ignominious home run record, seven years removed from making a fool of me in the Trevecca instrasquad world series.

* * *

I redshirted my freshman year. Redshirting is code for "looking good for the girls." My sole purpose at Trevecca Nazarene University—other than keeping the pitching charts, which I did with accuracy and aplomb—was to look good for the girls in the stands. I wore my socks just right, high cuffed, with my jersey tucked perfectly into my pants—and I never worried about it becoming dislodged, either, as the fastest move I'd make all season was to swiftly high-five a run-scoring teammate on his way back to the dugout. My actual on-field performance was irrelevant, unnecessary, and, if I was to keep my redshirt designation (which allowed me an extra year of eligibility on the hypothetical back end of my baseball career), prohibited. So I had to make up for it with sartorial swag.

Technically, my freshman year was dedicated to my continual improvement as a baseball player. There was no pressure on me to perform.

And then, in game one of the Intrasquad World Series, R.A. Dickey shows up.

This was not the R.A. Dickey of the Cy Young. In fact, this was not the R.A. Dickey of the major league-record six home runs. This was a half year prior to that, R.A. still testing out the knuckler, recovering from surgery—about 70%, he told us—and basically still figuring out if he could throw a baseball as a means of employment any longer. He was at the end of his rope. He could barely stand a chance on an MLB roster.

And he dominated us.

I faced R.A. four times. I made contact once. I hit it from me to you. Really. If you and I were sitting here talking, that's how far I hit it: a conversation's length. He fielded it, and easily threw me out at first. This after three straight trips ending in strikeouts.

The knuckleball was annihilating.

Maybe it was just 18-year-old me, never having seen anything like it. But it was crazy—nothing like Tim Wakefield, who just lobbed the thing up there like a greased-up watermelon. R.A. pitched the thing, hard—not like, 90-miles-an-hour hard, but hard, low-80's probably. With that amount of heat on it, the knuckler did some funny things. It dropped halfway there and continued on its path, like some sort of horizontal Tetris game. It shifted to the right just as you were about to swing, like a girl in the high school hallway, narrowly avoiding crashing into you. Most of all, it was fast, accurate, deceptive, and dizzying.

That this man couldn't cut it on a major league roster had major league implications for me: I was nowhere close. I had tasted, and I had seen: my cup of coffee tasted nothing like his.

After completing a full season of looking good for the girls at Trevecca, I retired. When he could hardly carry his own arm out to the mound, R.A. Dickey struck out my baseball career.

You can go ahead and pour one out for me—I was about to brew a new cup of coffee anyway.

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raleightatum · 12 years

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Street Fight in a Sweet Life: Searching for Something Real in Channel Orange

Frank Ocean is not playing games. He doesn’t even know any of the moves.

“Start”—the fly-on-the-wall opening track of Ocean’s first studio album, Channel Orange—ends with three recognizable sounds: the flick of a television, the crystalline hum of the PlayStation start-up tag, and computerized sounds from a video game menu screen.

Nostalgia, Ultra, Ocean’s 2011 mixtape, begins with a similar track—we overhear someone, presumably Ocean[1], sift among cassette tapes, fast-forwarding, rewinding, changing sides. And though it appears that Ocean has upped his technology game since then, the game remains the same.

The opening track from Nostalgia, Ultra? “Street Fighter.”

The digital sounds on Channel Orange's “Start”? The menu music from Street Fighter II.

But, the thing is, Frank Ocean is no good at the games. And he’s not looking for a fight either. Left, down, up, up, B, B, A—is it even worth it?

Frank Ocean just wants to be loved

...

Channel Orange was released a month ago, flashing onto the Billboard screen at #2, popping off 131,000 first-week sales, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Proud, gushing, almost misty-eyed reviews have been raining down. The hip-hop and R&B scene finally seems to have a breath of fresh air—Ocean is their voice. He’s pure in the way that honesty makes you pure—opting for sincerity when jealous, jaded, cynicism would do. On the day before he surprise-released Channel Orange a week early, Ocean published a letter on his Tumblr. Dated December 27, 2011, the letter is inextricably linked to our reception of the album, and our acceptation of Ocean. You know it by now—the letter tells the heart-searing tale of unrequited love, Ocean’s first love, love in the summer, love for a man. Ocean was 19. The “coming out” (whatever that means—this album is very much not about Ocean’s sexuality) was probably necessary, in light of some of the album’s material (particularly “Bad Religion”). And the honorable, hopeful vulnerability endears us to him—his words remind us that we’re in the family:

“I’m starting to think we’re a lot alike. Human beings spinning on blackness. All wanting to be seen, touched, heard, paid attention to.”

So yes, Frank Ocean wants to be loved. But in this work, this masterfully human record from the 24 year-old, love—if it comes at all—doesn’t come without a fight. “You get this great work, but you suffer—you really, really suffer,” Ocean said in this New York Times profile. This isn’t an all-out street fight, though, an angry Ocean out for revenge. This is Ocean the only way he knows how to be, incapable of being insincere—the love, the work, the suffering, all of it spinning on blackness in his brain, the fight between Ocean and himself.

…

This is an album to be listened to alone, maybe with one other person, in the dark, quietly, occasional eye contact and a head nod when it gets really good, that’s it. Also, whiskey. Something about the warpy electro sounds necessitates the aloneness, the darkness, the buzz.

Outfitted thusly, it isn’t hard to glide right into Channel Orange's first swirly tune. On an album cloudy with drug-smoke and second-guessing, the first single, “Thinkin Bout You,” is pulsing and lulling, beautiful and self-deprecating. “Or do you not think so far ahead?” Ocean asks just thirty-five seconds in, his heart-splintering falsetto almost implying that, yeah, maybe he’s the crazy one to be thinking like this, to be thinking about forever. Always gettin’ in over your head, Frank. After riffing through a sarcastic second verse (“Got a beach house I can sell you in Idaho”), Ocean’s pendulum swings, and he justifies his forever-talk, and it seems like a relief: “It will never get old, not in my soul, not in my spirit, keep it alive.” His lovely cry embraces hope, like maybe it’s not so crazy to be thinking about forever after all.

But Ocean throws in the towel on “Fertilizer,” a breezy summer rock ditty, admitting that, sometimes, the best version of “hope” or “love” we can get is for someone to be there, to be present, giving us something, even if it’s bullshit, if that’s all they’ve got.

But is this hope, after all? Or is it a stubborn refusal to see things the way they really are? Is there even a difference?

On the fourth track, the off-kilter, something’s-gone-wrong[2] “Sierra Leone,” Ocean speaks candidly about his “tidbits of intuition”—“abandon mission,” they say. But he doesn’t, of course, because, well, the “shit (is) feeling too good.” We see that things don’t always line up for Frank Ocean, his attempts at love having to be justified, qualified, set against what will never be enough. But what else can he, can any of us, do but try to make the best of what we have? And so the key changes, and a baby is born, and Ocean lays her in a cradle, and sings her into her dreams, a lullaby. Sweet dreams, little girl. If only you knew what we know: Frank Ocean isn’t very good at singing lullabies.

…

You get the sense that Frank Ocean doesn’t sleep much. Most of Channel Orange feels like it was born in darkness, a studio lit by a computer screen, the restless, fretful Ocean creating this lovely, pained work, alone, at two-thirty in the morning. Though some of the groovy beats and slow jams sound like they were made by and for John Mayer (okay, so two of them were) on a sunny afternoon in Ladera Heights, Ocean leaves his mark in two distinct ways: the lyrics, which possess the hyper-self-awareness reminiscent of writers like Dave Eggers and Douglas Coupland, as Ocean finds himself hopelessly wrapped up in his own head; and the “lullabies.” As if intentionally turning his gift (a mellow voice that I’m convinced would sound good and right even if he hit the wrong notes, if that’s even possible) into a curse, a cross to bear, Ocean’s harmonies often sound haunting and pained, urgent, dragged out, or just strange, different, because they can be, or because whatever, or as if to say, this isn’t as fun as it looks. Not even Ocean’s awe-inspiring falsetto sounds triumphant. It appears high-reaching, confident, and ambitious at first listen, but you realize that the sky-piercing high notes are actually a lament, and these are the notes Frank Ocean sings to keep himself from crying.

So no, I don’t think Frank Ocean would be good at singing you to sleep. Especially if you knew what he knows.

…

What Frank Ocean knows: all any of us ever want is real love. I’m sorry that I have to keep saying it, that I keep using that word—“love”—and my hope is not to make Frank Ocean out to be some naïve, weepy, sappy, bleeding-heart dweebo who’s watched You’ve Got Mail too many times. Ocean is watchful and questioning and eager for connection, and knows all of us are too. That’s what the drugs, cars, and girls are about.

And so we get the trio of tracks—“Sweet Life,” “Not Just Money,” and “Super Rich Kids”—which take turns lampooning the attractive lunacy of absurdly rich youth culture. Probably speaking from personal experience with the brash young Odd Future richlings, Ocean lists the perks of being a super rich kid, laying them out before our hungry eyes: lots of expensive wine, drugs, cars, maids, jewelry, and, of course, sex! It really should be said again: EXPENSIVE WINE! DRUGS! CARS! MAIDS! JEWELRY! SEX! But Ocean knows just like you and I do—that none of it matters, that joy rides in Jaguars and blowjobs in showers really suck when no one actually gives a damn about each other. Unsuspecting listeners will be jarred to life by the offhanded bratty-ass-ness of Odd Future mate Earl Sweatshirt (whose guest verse is so good and blasé you get the sense that he still really likes the Jags/drugs/blowjobs/etc.), but they should be awakened by Ocean’s jarring plea right before: “I’m searching for a real love.” And so he shoves his hands in his pockets and plods around L.A., pacing, as if searching for something real. Or at least that’s what it sounds like. And can’t you see him doing it? Roaming the streets, crying out, “I’m searching for a real love,” enacting a melancholy scene in the musical of his life?

…

If love is what Frank Ocean is searching for, then, he finds it on the second half of the album. Somewhere in the midst of pain and pleasure and head-bobbing jams (“Lost," “Monks”), Ocean knows he will uncover the real among the lost, in jungles and temples, in “mosh pits and wet tits,” in Tokyo and India, Miami and Amsterdam.

And what was once lost does get found, except, to Ocean, this love is the worst kind of grace, a cult of questions and curses and killing yourself. This love sounds like a church organ and strings, meant to uplift, meant to mean something. It sounds like droopy guitars drowned in nothing. It sounds like Heaven, or a bedroom, or Hell: moaning, begging, crying out, “love me, love me, love me, love me.”[3]

…

The two best songs on Channel Orange are “Pilot Jones” and “Pyramids.” Roaring with the sound and humanity of the rest of the album, the two ambitious tracks are set in the middle, the collective cornerstone of the record. On “Pilot Jones,” an ethereal, spacey track that feels like you’re gliding above the clouds, the song—and Ocean—is grounded by a beat that seems to come from below the earth. The pounding bass gets in your head—like, in there—and brings the hopeful, blissfully ignorant Ocean back to planet Earth. This song, all of it—lyrically, vocally, emotionally, musically—is Frank Ocean. The suffering, the fight, the almost-masochistic affection that Ocean pursues throughout the album, is here, as he lays bare the awful, universal dilemma: knowing what you’re getting yourself into (Ocean goes to a no-life druggie for his fix: “I knew what I was on”), and being unable to resist it (“I just don’t know why/I keep on trying to keep a grown woman sober”). But it’s at this point—in the song, and in the truthtelling—when Ocean is at his best. The beautiful, layered family of Ocean’s harmonies are almost shaking their heads, laughing at the absurdity of his own enabler-playing role. But, if you listen, you sense in the harmonies that the grown-woman-babysitting isn’t what’s absurd. Ocean is about to go back to her—that’s what keeps him shaking his head.

“But I ain’t been touched in a while/By the dealer”—Ocean’s voice mirrors the words, a little hesitant at first, reserved, but unable to keep himself from going for it, because he’s hopeful, trusting, against his better judgment, and you hear the trust, and the hope, you hear it building, and you hear him go for it in the four-note drag-out of the second syllable in “dealer.” This is the shining moment of the entire album.

Finally, and, sweetly, right before the plane lands, we come to understand that Ocean is not to be pitied in this struggle with himself. He might be stubborn, choosing what he knows might never work, but he does it in the name of hope, of redemption, which he believes in, believes is coming: “If I got a condo on a cloud/Then I guess you could stay at my place/I’ma get one.”

…

“Pyramids” needs to be listened to. Go, do it now. This will be here when you come back. (While you’re at it, go outside and take deep breaths, look around you, notice something, stay out there for a minute longer than you feel like you should, think about what you noticed, and come back inside. This, again, will still be here.)

Obviously, this epic ten-minute story stands for itself. “Pyramids” is the centerpiece, as if Ocean simply wanted to pour everything into one track, and the rest of the album got made out of what overflowed from this one song. The themes of a thousand years are all here—love betrayed[4], love chased after, love found, love that is not enough, love that is never enough—as Ocean takes us back in time and wakes us up again, here, where we are, the interlude like awakening from a bizarre death-dream in the pyramids, a millennium of pain, and sadness, forward motion, growth, and strength. And so we get what we have always wanted, and everything’s different this time, and so we take a breath[5], go for it, and everything is right—Yes! It feels so right!—and it feels so good, but wait, no—no, now it’s over, and it isn’t free, and maybe it never was, and the sad, little horn plays.

Maybe this song, this album, should stop being analyzed. Although I’ve tried to treat this work with extreme love and respect, there comes a point where my vision of what’s going on—my interpretation of Ocean’s art—my art of his art—stops being helpful. On a very basic level, I’m just talking, and you’re just reading. It might be best to close our eyes and really just listen, and feel, try to remember what it was like to have someone back, but not really, and to have them leave again. Or maybe we should close the door, turn off the lights, pour some whiskey and go to that place, the place inside ourselves, where all the good and all the bad and all the love and all the pain are kept, the place we know we shouldn’t go, the place of cyanide and street fights--and go there anyway. Or maybe we should run, run like the cheetahs back into time, run and hope and pray that none of this had ever happened.

But I don’t think Frank Ocean would.

[1] I am aware of the dangers of assuming a “character” is the author; i.e., I understand that not all works are intended to be interpreted autobiographically. However, after actively and intentionally listening to this record, and because of Frank Ocean’s public transparency, I feel okay about treating Channel Orange as a mostly autobiographic work. In his now-famous Tumblr letter, Ocean says, “The work is the work. The work is not me.” I understand this quote to mean that he is not defined by the work, leaving open the possibility that the work is about him. I see this album as creative nonfiction. So, for the sake of this essay, I will refer to the singer/narrator/first person voice in the songs as Frank Ocean.

[2] The seemingly unrelated words that indicate the ending of one line and the beginning of the next: “I just ran out of Trojans/horses gallop to her throne.” Trojan horses. Interpret this cryptic Trojan War reference however you will.

[3] Listen to “Bad Religion” and “Pink Matter,” which are terrific and human.

[4] “I found you laying down with Samson and his full head of hair” is perfectly written, and devastatingly sad. Consider the Old Testament tale of Delilah going to Samson’s bed with an ulterior motive—cutting the Nazarite’s hair—and compare it with Ocean’s awful retelling.

[5] The breath Ocean takes at the 7:00 mark is crushingly heartbreaking.

#frank ocean #channel orange #bad religion #pyramids #pilot jones #street fighter #sweet life #earl sweatshirt #odd future

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