Channel Orange was effortlessly subtle and moving in its approach to imagery and storytelling – combining a photographic eye for detail and a close attention to minutiae (the fingertips and the lips burning from the cigarettes on "Forest Gump" the newborn baby reaching for the nipple on "Sierra Leone") with trippy surrealism and flights of sheer fantasy (the aliens watching live from the purple matter on "Pink Matter" the condo on the cloud in "Pilot Jones"). And, it would seem that since his spectacular debut-proper Channel Orange left its indelible mark on the pop landscape, Frank Ocean’s been learning the value of these lessons, too.īlonde is at once both complicated and understated, invoking the very best of Channel Orange and rendering it even more fragmented and porous. To view the piece in its entirety - to begin to understand it, and the artist who made it - requires patient and undistracted reflection. Which might feel somewhat incongruous in what are unequivocally urgent times but there’s a hell of a case for slowing down - as consumers, dreamers, creators. Endless might actually be a statement on the art of patience.
It would be easy to view the whole thing as a metaphor for the creative process (the “endless” formation, evolution, destruction and/or revision of ideas) – if the warehouse is Frankie’s brain. The staircase is effectively destroyed as he ascends to its summit (around the 38-minute mark), before Frank resumes silently building from scratch all over again. On the 45-minute long visual album Endless, we watch numerous Frank Oceans stalk the interior of a large industrial warehouse as they proceed to construct – in between breaks to check a smartphone – a tall wooden spiral staircase. I’m not sure Frank Ocean set out to foreground these issues, but as impatience began to mount over the consistent delay of the album’s release, they became impossible for him to ignore. He’s acutely aware of this dynamic, and the changing relationships between the consumer, product, art and artist, is a theme suspended in constant and quiet orbit around this project – which is really two projects (neither of which are called Boys Don’t Cry): Endless, the visual album and prelude, and Blonde (or Blond), the album-album. We constructed the mystery for ourselves all he had to do was vanish. Most of this proved to be either insubstantial, or flatly incorrect. The internet was awash with memes, GIFs, questions, conspiracies, and timelines fastidiously updating and voraciously over-analysing every fresh lead on where exactly Frank Ocean was, and what he was up to.
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