
I put myself in her seat then I played it all out in my head." Ocean imagined himself wriggling against the seatbelt, he wrote, playing with its tension until it no longer constrained him. Her eyes seemed clear and calm but not blank, the road behind her seemed the same. "Two years ago I found an image of a kid with her hands covering her face," the artist wrote in an essay posted on his Tumblr the day this weekend the album, four years in the making, finally became available." A seatbelt reached across her torso, riding up her neck and a mop of blonde hair stayed swept, for the moment, behind her ears. cover art spelling situation, we're calling it Blonde throughout.)Īnn Powers: When he began to put himself into the mind-frame that would inspire his new album Blonde, Frank Ocean imagined himself in a moving car. And without clarity regarding the whole listing vs. (Ann Powers and Jason King write about both the physical and digital versions of the album interchangeably. We find it impossible and personally limiting to consider this album outside of its context, so the below is as much a state of affairs as it is a straight-ahead review. They did so across many time zones and man hours what emerged is a conversation that stays fair-minded and grounded and ends in questioning both the artist and his audience. Over the weekend we asked Ann Powers and Jason King to wrestle with Frank Ocean's long-awaited follow-up to 2012's Channel Orange.

Frank Ocean's raw, bleeding, diaristic storytelling guides Blonde.
