- #Blonde frank ocean full album download free series
- #Blonde frank ocean full album download free free
To those not deserving, I’ve stumbled and lived every word,Īndre worries that his quest for authenticity was effort spent in vain, that his hard work meant nothing when other rappers use ghostwriters. That everyone wrote they own verses, it’s coming back different,Īnd, yeah, that shit hurts me, I’m hummin’ and whistlin’
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He closes with a series of haunting lines:Īfter 20 years in, I’m so naïve, I was under the impression I don’t know what it’s like with a skirt on.” Andre raps that throughout his career, he felt like “a kid, lookin’ at the other kids with astonishment” as younger rappers changed the game. He criticizes women who have plastic surgery and then impose an unrealistic double standard on men, but then he acknowledges his own misogyny, rapping, “I hate that it’s like this, I feel for you. He feels intensely low, beaten down by the culture around him and the onslaught of tragic world events (he raps, “So low that I can admit / When I hear another kid is shot by the popo / It ain’t an event no more”) as well as his own regrets. Andre’s high-speed rap flows so smoothly that his despondent message can easily slip by. This theme continues on the exceptional “Solo (Reprise),” which is rapped by Andre 3000 (one half of rap duo Outkast). On “Nikes,” he sings to a partner who is looking for someone “real”: “All you want is Nikes, but the real ones / Just like you, just like me.” In a world of counterfeits, Ocean values authenticity. The album’s final track, “Futura Free,” begins with Ocean’s rise to incredible fame from humble beginnings (he sings, “I used to work on my feet for seven dollars an hour”), but comes to the conflicted resolution, “Please gimme immortality / I’m going rapidly, fading drastically.” He uses legendary rapper Tupac Shakur as an example, highlighting the conspiracy theory that Shakur was not murdered in 1996 but is actually still in hiding today: “They tryna find Tupac, don’t let ‘em find Tupac / He evade the press, he escape the stress.” This sentiment exposes Ocean’s dissatisfaction with culture, especially in the music scene. “Solo” epitomizes this feeling though he is happy being alone, he uses drugs to escape because “it’s hell on Earth and the city’s on fire.” He vacillates between the knowledge that life is short (for example, on “Seigfried”: “A moment one solar flare we’re consumed / So why not spend this flammable paper on the film that’s my life”) and the troubling emptiness of indulgence.
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His life is not free from pain, however, and he walks the line between embracing excess for the sake of living life to the fullest and using that excess to numb himself against the ache of melancholy longing. On “Ivy,” a song to a past lover, he sings, “I ain’t a kid no more / We’ll never be those kids again.” Similarly, on “Pink + White,” he reminisces about growing up in New Orleans, climbing trees, and listening to Michael Jackson, but concludes, “It all ends here.” Current-day Ocean is experienced and mature, having experienced heartbreak without becoming bitter and hateful towards past partners. Ocean has come a long way since Nostalgia, Ultra, his 2011 debut mixtape, and he deeply feels the loss of his teenage years. In Blonde, Ocean looks to the past with fondness, but many of the tracks also mourn ended relationships-without bitterness, and often with a sense of lingering affection. It is sensitive and vulnerable, and in a hip-hop culture of destructive hyper-masculinity, Blonde’s introspection is truly brave. It is a thoughtful, expressive, layered look into Ocean’s past, his relationships, his attitudes towards fame, and his journey to discovering his own identity.
Blonde is an album that has taken its time in becoming a cohesive whole. Anticipation for Blonde was high among fans it comes as the long-awaited follow-up to 2012’s Channel Orange, which proved Ocean’s talent as a singer, songwriter, rapper, and poet and launched him into the upper echelons of the R&B and rap communities.īlonde carries high expectations, especially in light of the brilliance of Channel Orange, and it does not disappoint. Blonde by Frank Ocean (released August 20, 2016) Frank Ocean’s second studio album, Blonde, is a vulnerable expression of love, nostalgia, and what it means to be “real.”įrank Ocean’s new album, Blonde, was worth the wait.