Ocean plays a quick Radiohead snippet before being told to turn it off, or he sings new lyrics over The Eagles’ “Hotel California,” (a move that would result in a near-lawsuit, and a harbinger of how a music industry could stifle any kind of casual fun almost instantly). After Nostalgia, Ultra, everything Frank Ocean did would be the most important thing ever.īack in those heady days when most of the context for the tape was that it was from a guy who was somehow associated with Odd Future even though he was older and had already had a music career that never really took off, there still was an appealing looseness to all of it. Nostalgia, Ultra was a love letter to music, and, whether he knew it or not, a goodbye to being able to make songs without the world noticing. Both seemed to say something about R&B: In those early days The Weeknd shook off the genre’s roots, opting for nihilism while shunning warmth. Both announced new artists that almost immediately impacted the state of pop music in major ways.
#Frank ocean nostalgia free#
I shouldn’t have, but how could I not? Both were free releases. It sounded like Ocean had chiseled away at these songs, holding onto them until they achieved the perfect midpoint between bleary nostalgia and emotional honesty. Nostalgia, Ultra felt more like a bedroom record the kind of thing a guy with a preternatural talent for songwriting could cook up in his attic and then dump into the world unsullied by expectations or popular convention. Too untouched by the music industry hype machine that Odd Future were then embroiled in. It felt too genuine to give it the quick blog post once over and move on.
I mentioned that during that week, rather than listening to the Frank Ocean tape for the days it’d been out, I’d gone down a highly specific rabbit hole, spending countless hours listening to a low fidelity mixtape rip of Waka Flocka and Mystikal’s “Cookin Up 1000 Grams.” I hadn’t engaged properly with Nostalgia, Ultra because I wasn’t sure how to. My post was published days after Nostalgia, Ultra’s release, a lag that’s basically unthinkable on today’s internet. You like Odd Future, right? Frank Ocean is connected to that. My initial thoughts basically boiled down to: Here’s this tape. On this site five years ago (give or take a couple days), I wrote a post about Nostalgia, Ultra, the mixtape that introduced Ocean to an entire audience of people that didn’t even realize they cared about R&B.
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