Ocean made the smart move by giving Boy’s Don’t Cry for free because it shows fans that he values them.) (Funny how West is selling his Yeezy zine, a largely promotional art look-book of his clothing, for 70 bucks a pop at his pop-up shops. The most attention-grabbing poem, an ode to McDonald’s by Kanye West, has already garnered the most attention, and to those following West’s frequent antics as music’s greatest troll of 2016, this should come as no surprise. Over the zine’s 366 pages are essays, photographs of Ocean looking ecstatic while standing next to cars (“White Ferrari” is already being singled out as a crucial Blond track) and even poetry. While Boys Don’t Cry‘s title is simultaneously a nod to The Cure and a wry subversion of those Boy’s Life magazines that went out to the Boy Scouts, the zine serves a purpose much greater than that of a clever promotional artifact or a curio: Ocean’s using the format to deepen his fans’ understanding of his creative headspace over the last four years.įrank Ocean’s Boys Don’t Cry zine, given out for free at pop-up shops across the U.S., is already selling for upwards of $300 on eBay. That’s the amazing thing about Ocean’s album rollout last weekend-he released something that lived in the physical world, too–zine called Boy’s Don’t Cry, that he gave away for free at pop-up shops in New York and other cities. I loved The Mars Volta as much as the next dude, but hearing those compressed riffs from the future spinning out of a turntable on a giant Quetzlcoatl picture disc didn’t make the music sound any better. The argument for vinyl’s importance as a superior audio format really only holds if the music is mastered from analog audio tapes, where the uncompressed room noise and ambient noodlings wind up on an audible spectrum. Vinyl’s resurgence in popularity during my college years was well documented, but we saw how silly it was when some of our favorite artists of the 2000s insisted on releasing elaborate picture discs and gatefolds, because the music didn’t always sound better on wax. What’s gained and what’s lost when we expect to absorb albums this way? As a culprit of digital consumption, I’m in no position to act like a purist. Then, a music video proper in “Nikes”, and finally, a new traditional LP, Blond. Take traditional with a grain of salt, though, as the modern style has quickly acclimated us to expect a new record from our beloved artists with little to no notice (in this case, a New York Times report that startled Ocean and pushed back the album’s release).
Frank ocean albums in order how to#
First there was the “visual album,” Endless, which demonstrated that Ocean knows how to build a mean staircase in time-lapse.