“My TV ain’t HD, that’s too real"
- Frank Ocean, “Sweet Life”
Unlike his fellows in Odd Future, Frank Ocean seems to have
no interest in sounding young. Like Prince, Laura Marling, or Jack White (all
artists who started in their early-20s or younger), Ocean falls into the middle
period of adolescence better than he does the categories of vapid youth or
confident adult.
What makes Ocean and those artists more adolescent than,
say, an album like Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream is their indecision and
lack of clear focus. The fatal flaw in Perry’s album is that no teenager would
be able to narrow their fantasies down to someone as clearly defined as Katy
Perry’s sugarplum-fairy-in-a-bikini image; indeed, most adolescents would be
hard-pressed to narrow their fantasies down at all. It’s an era where, for the
first time, we are forced to grapple with the fact that we can even have
fantasies and dreams; childhood is an era in which everything we want seems
readily available, and it ends as soon we realize how wrong we are.
The dreams of your average teenager more closely resemble
the tenuously themed mixtapes or playlists they create or the television they
watch, and both of those images are cornerstones of Ocean’s presentation. Nostalgia,
Ultra was patterned after the former, complete with tape clicking noises
and, at one point, a girlfriend’s insulting critique (“What’s a Radiohead
anyway?”). This all fits with the literal mixtape presentation of the album; in
recent years that term has taken on the meaning of a rapper’s self-released
tape that uses wholesale sampling in lieu of professional production.
What truly unified Nostalgia, Ultra, aside from its
presentation as a self-made mixtape, was how outwardly focused Ocean was in all
of the songs. When Ocean does figure into the lyrics of the songs it’s only as
part of some relationship that determines his actions. Much like a classic
mixtape, all of the songs on the album are devoted to others, focused on
relationships and people either real or imagined.
Frank Ocean’s poverty of motion is somewhat alleviated on Channel
Orange, an album that is more television set than mixtape. The title itself
is a clue to this, as are the frequent references to televisions (the page
quote, among others), interludes capped with the sound of a TV being turned
off, and a sample of a PlayStation being started up. Video game references were
part of Nostalgia, Ultra as well (with most of the interlude tracks
being named after classic games, such as “Soul Caliber” and “Goldeneye”) but
the overall effect of these production elements is to suggest someone watching
a TV, changing channels every now and again to find something new.
Not that any of that is particularly new, of course.
Television offers the illusion of a vast multitude of choices, an opportunity
to tour the world without
ever leaving the couch. Ocean touches on that idea in “Sweet Life” chorus
lines of “Why see the world/When you got the beach?” the song that also offers
the page quote of “My TV ain’t HD, that’s too real”. The song as a whole offers
up shallow escapism as a path to satisfaction, with an oblique reference to The
Matrix (“The water’s blue swallow the pill/Keeping it surreal” references
the blue pill from that movie) as well as with the opening line, “The best song
wasn’t the single”, which could be interpreted as a slam against people who
only listen to the radio singles from an album rather than seeking out the
rest.
The idea of satisfaction through escapism crops up on other
parts of the album as well. “Sierra Leone” is a look at a Teen Mom-type
relationship that ends with the couple bringing up a child while living on
minimum wage in their parents’ homes. Ocean’s character deliberately avoids the
facts of how terrible an idea that is (“Tidbits of intuition that I been
getting/Abandon mission abandon mission/You must be kidding”) and ends off
warmly envying his daughter’s ability to believe in the lie. Similarly, “Pilot
Jones” is about a shallow, sexual relationship with a drug dealer that survives
solely on the singer’s urges (“No I don't want a child/But I ain't been touched
in a while”). The songs are also linked in how they both mention people living
in their parents’ homes while keeping ages vague.
This happens again in “Super Rich Kids”, which deals more
with family relationships than romantic ones. Nevertheless, it’s another grim
look at escapism and isolation from reality and again hits on the ability of
young adults to act like children, ending with Ocean blithely singing while his
rich alter-ego drunkenly commits suicide. Again, there’s no direct admission by
the character that their life is in any way bad, and again the song ends in
miserable action.
If we broaden that theme of shallow escapism to the more
general idea of deliberate obliviousness we can connect virtually all of the
songs to that original seed of sitting in front of the TV. Even the happiest
song on the album, “Monks”, is, at heart, a song about escaping reality even in
the face of some very blatant realities. The darkest, “Lost”, is about a woman
being drawn into the life of a drug dealer (and possibly prostitution) and
“Crack Rock” (the other drug song on the album) is a pretty straightforward drug-as-escape
tune. “Thinkin’ Bout You” is similar to
the broken-heart songs of Nostalgia, Ultra, with a singer desperate to
convince himself that an ex is still in love with him.
That love-grounded, hazy passiveness is another connection
to that core idea of blithely watching a television, and crops up several other
times on the album. While “Forrest Gump” is the most obvious example of this,
being a song entirely about watching a man run by while dwindling cigarettes
burn the watcher, the same idea crops up on the meditative “Pink Matter” and on
“Bad Religion”. The former does so through the pothead-esque philosophizing,
and the latter by having Ocean serve as a passenger in a cab, bereft of even a
destination.
That leaves only one other song, the fantastic (in all
senses of the word) and sprawling “Pyramids”. While the second half fits well
with our established theme of passiveness (a man watching his girlfriend go to
work at a stripclub) the first is similar to “Monks” in its throbbing energy. That
half-song is also the only that shows men exerting any kind of power over a
woman, with Cleopatra’s palace attendants killing her for betraying them. We
can still balance it with our theme if we understand it as a fantasy played out
by the man in the second half, but that’s, admittedly, a tenuous connection at
best.
A better connection can be drawn by addressing an unanswered
part of my original idea; if the theme of Channel Orange is in fact one
of escapism, we must then ask what, exactly, Ocean is trying to escape. “Pyramids”
offers a plausible answer via the brief analysis we just did, giving us a
slightly elaborated version of our original statement: Channel Orange is
about distracting oneself and/or escaping from flawed, unfulfilling
relationships.
Like the multitude of channels on a TV, many specific methods
of distraction are offered up on the album, ranging from elaborate fantasy
(“Pyramids”) to simple drugs (“Crack Rock” and “Lost”). It’s a natural
evolution of where Ocean found himself on Nostalgia, Ultra, with him
moving from depicting misery to suggesting flawed ways of escaping. It’s a more
active and varied way of suggesting the same thing: that love is entrapment and
there’s no real exit, save in one’s own imagination. These are existential love affairs, often built wholesale in a person's mind and always too small and flawed to truly satisfy.
No comments:
Post a Comment