Frank Ocean – Blond

My son listens to Frank Ocean, so I started listening to this through him. I started with listening to Channel Orange and I thought that was fucking amazing. At first I was displaced by the thin-sounding R&B American-ness of it, but when you get into it you realise it’s brilliant. What I like about it is the nature of what Frank Ocean’s singing about, his little introspective vanity subjects. He doesn’t go outwards, like ‘the big wave’s gonna crush us, save the animals’, he just talks about vain things. It’s good. It’s brilliant actually.

He’s just a really weird guy singing about weird subjects. There’s that tune ‘Super Rich Kids’, which is just fucking brilliant. ‘Too many bottles of this wine we can’t pronounce’, there’s little moments of discomfort like that, turned into a chorus. I much prefer that to someone’s big treatise about, I don’t know, Assad. Or the coronavirus.