Frank Ocean – White
After taking a hype-break for most of the second half of last year, a punched photographer or two aside, the Odd Future gang are starting to ramp it up again in anticipation of the release of ‘The Odd Future Tape Volume II’ on Tuesday.
Interestingly, the big leak is not from Tyler or Hodgy, but the crew’s marginal figure Frank Ocean. A New Orleans singer in an LA rap crew, he’s older than Tyler and the rest, and wiser than most of us, as White proves. It sees him channel ‘Innervisions’-era Stevie Wonder in its command of tone and poise. Both are concerned with the space beyond, but Ocean’s song is stripped of psychedelic idealism, leaving only unsaid, unspoken, serotonin depleted forgetfulness. The words I forget my first love like you forget a daydream / And what of all my wild friends, and the times I’ve had with them / will all fade to grey soon / on the TV station”, as the horns finally blew, like a gasp, and you realise that this two minutes on a mixtape may be one of the best Proustian pop songs ever written, a crooner laureate divine enough for our depleted times.
