1. Frank Ocean - Blonde

In 2016, the hinge year of a grotesque age, Frank Ocean’s cars were his confessional booths. They included a white Ferrari and a BMW X6; the Bugatti “left some stretch marks on the freeway,” as he remembers listlessly. To Ocean, the car is an Americana icon of certain ideals: freedom that turns solipsistic and reckless; materialism we worship as artistry; barrel-chested masculinity, queered on backroads. Above all, transience.

Frank Ocean is the hinge artist of our time, the true voice of a generation because he takes long silences. With Blonde and its attendant works, his Boys Don’t Cry zine and Endless, he took his time building his staircase to somewhere. Elusive and independent, he weaves from genre to genre, sometimes shifting gears to obliterate category altogether, as he cruises past the conventions the culture still fears to let go. On Blonde, the languid guitar of surf rock coexists with soft doo-wop melodies; Frank the rapper—who is heady and occasionally, knowingly vulgar—coincides with Frank the singer, who is plaintive and longing. Sometimes, he just talks rhythmically, like in “Nights.” “Futura Free,” the triptych anchor of Blonde, moves from midtempo to atmospheric synth to a clanging guitar solo. The impressionistic lyrics mirror the feeling of wanting to disappear, for a spell: “Breathe till I evaporated/My whole body see through.”

Songs evaporate on Blonde, too: they’re hazed, minimalist, capricious. The sweet, airy strum of “Pink + White” is hardened by its last few seconds, as we hear birds swarm. So, too, in “Ivy,” which starts off a masterpiece of cinematic lovesickness and then warps at its tail-end, ceding to a clang of instruments. The slight touches of distortion on Blonde call attention to impermanence, the trap of artifice, and, distantly, death. But Ocean is never sanctimonious; the whole point of existence is that a dark musing on morality can—and should—be interrupted by soft flesh, a sticky plant, a designer shirt. Live a little. Live too much. Because he is a writer first, he kinks his voice to suit his characters and his stories: On his cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Close to You,” a song about the fear of solitude, he multiplies and increases. On “Seigfried,” as he considers settling down for “two kids and a swimming pool,” his warble is warm, fragile, and resigned; then he almost shrieks, “I’m not brave!” It is an ache, a primal tearing of a social contract each generation learns is a lie.

The year 2016 crystallized the political disaster right under the surface. People theorized that we needed anthems to get us through the dark night. Big choruses, hooks as wide as highway signs, regular percussion that could gird us from chaos. But our mood was languorous; jingoism was the problem in the first place. We wanted the blurred, the softened, the existential. “Inhale, in hell, there’s heaven,” Ocean sings on “Solo,” capturing the whiplash experience of being young in this country in one line. Blonde is one synonym for American. –Doreen St. Félix / Pitchfork.com

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