Blonde: Preparing For The End

Almost everyone knows where they were when Frank Ocean’s Blonde came out. It was right at the end of an often mythologized summer of 2016. It was transformative for me. I moved out of Lakeland, Florida after my sophomore year of high school as my family packed our bags in the car and traveled across the country to a small town in Alaska. With my pops being in the Coast Guard, I’ve frequently moved but never such a massive leap. It was the best time of my life and 2016 provided a killer soundtrack for eternal memories. The romanticization of that time period never felt far-fetched to so many kids my age. Blonde came out at the very end of the summer, ushering in a new school year but also something much deeper for us kids. It was a goodbye of sorts; nothing we knew was going to be the same after Blonde.

Blonde is a sobering album on the melancholy that exists in reminiscing. It frequently focuses on past love but it’s much more than that. It lasers in on the smaller details; smoking and sex in Colorado (“Solo”), the gay bar an overly talkative guy took him to in NY (“Good Guy”), or the freckles and earrings on a past lover (“Seigfried”). It’s the little details, even the mundane ones that inform so many memories. Frank is yearning for love but more than anything, it’s chasing for the simpler times. On “Ivy”, he tearfully yells, “I ain’t a kid no more. We’ll never be those kids again.” One of…