#2360 Frank Ocean - Blonde

Welcome back, team! It's mid-Jan, bouncing back from vacation, getting caught back up, back in the swing of things.

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I got a whoooole theory about how rock (the movement, not the musicalogical sound) is having its baton picked up by hip hop, and he's an album that blurs it all into nothing.

One foothold -- rock (loosely) used to be where we found those albums quite-unlike, those frame-knockers, those eye wideners. But here's the latest offering that hits it, and it's... soul? dashes of hip hop? But with more in common with Bon Iver's deconstructions, Radiohead's post-band production gestations, the Microphones' expulsions. If Frank Ocean was white, we'd have no problem calling this abstract rock, Spiderland, Laughing Stock, a warming piece of post-rock, but given his background/backstory/musical path to now, we're all wind-twisting tittering twits.

The spirit of rock is to find something sincere, something sincerely delivered, realness. To escape populism, popular grasping, and this is that - it has that audacity, that fuckitism.

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Beat's the classic identifier of popular style. Hip hop beat. Rock beat on the 2 / 4. Four to the floor. Unts unts // boots and pants. Here's this liquid sound with more guitars than beats, with more unidentifiable sounds than guitars, more mysterious glimpses and glances and goundings than sounds, even.

Which is all to say, this is fucking exciting. Thrilling, unknowable, personal, electric, and totally fucking unchained from any kind of sound, meandering under its own blasted volition, inspiring us to stumble around in the darkness.

It is adventurous. Thank god. There's still room for adventurous. Still room for being surprised. As Ocean murmurs and clips and moans and swoons his way through a labyrinth of emotions, senses, thoughts, as humble and important and complex and elemental as the thoughts racing through your mind every day -- it's the spattering synapse of being a confused person hurtling through life, cast as light on the ceiling 4.5/5