In some circles, this endorsement of difference could be perceived to be damaging, even unpatriotic, in a year when polls have shown American voters increasingly recognize the country to be divided and pundits have fretted over these divisions. The overall effect is that, in a way more explicit than in Ocean’s previous releases and interviews, Blond(e) embodies all kinds of identities, while rebuking the idea that they can be easily collapsed into one consciousness. It isn’t the only moment in his latest releases that Ocean acknowledges differences between identities: He questions his obsession with cars as a “subconscious straight-boy fantasy” in his zine Boys Don’t Cry, and in “Good Guy” on Blond(e), he sings the word “gay” - the first time he has on any of his three albums. The 17-year-old black American who was shot and killed in 2012, Ocean sings, “look just like me.” While he declares R.I.P.’s for lives lost and ends with one for Trayvon Martin, Ocean holds a picture of Martin wearing a hoodie and grants a single look at the camera - the only one in the video, and in all 45 minutes of Ocean’s visual album Endless-while also wearing a hoodie. The suffering of which Ocean sings - declarations like “You could have held my hand through this, baby” - more immediately resembles the pop language of “ Here, My Dear” by Marvin Gaye than, say, essays in Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (or even Gaye’s own protest music, like “ What’s Going On”).īut there is nothing of the politically disengaged artist in the video for “Nikes,” Blond(e)’s lead single. Indeed, nothing in Blond(e)’s stream of heartache and drug-use ballads tackles identity issues head-on. This constant focus on his own inner world can portray Ocean as an existentialist artist-alien - someone floating outside the messy plane of American racial politics. There is nothing of the politically disengaged artist in the video for “Nikes,” Blond(e)’s lead single.

His lyrics in his albums are often confessional and individualistic, and his inward-looking ethos has expanded to other projects too his 2016 essays included first-person elegies for Prince and those killed in the Orlando shooting his visual album, Endless, primarily shows him building a staircase alongside his own clone. With songs that contain messages of abstract melancholy recalling the writings of Sartre and Richard Wright, Ocean’s work has been called “existential” before. In part, Ocean’s work reflects the broader, 20th-century European existentialist tradition. His lyrics reflect a commitment to sharing relatable experiences that transcend labels of sexuality, which, as he told GQ in 2012, are things “you can’t feel.” A number of Blond(e)’s songs, in turn - especially “ Self Control” and “ Nights” - detail love and lust for people whose gender Ocean leaves open-ended. In French, blond is the masculine version of the noun, or as an adjective describes masculine nouns, whereas blonde is feminine and precedes feminine nouns (some writers also observe this distinction in English). Ocean has released two versions of the same album - his website is selling a version called Blond, whereas Apple Music has produced one called Blonde - which some fans have interpreted as a gender-bending statement. On Blond(e), Ocean confronts the experience of multiple identities from the album’s very cover. Choosing between those identities - the American identity, and membership to a cultural minority that Americans in power have historically oppressed-can, as black existentialists explore, fundamentally clash. Du Bois called this phenomenon “double-consciousness” - the moment-to-moment awareness of being both American and black. Du Bois, writing before the genre of “black existentialism” formally existed, coined a term that has particularly informed its scholarship: In a 1897 article for The Atlantic, Du Bois wrote that black Americans are forced to view themselves through the critical eyes of others. But for black existentialists in particular, “struggles with imperialism and racism,” wrote the sociologist Paget Henry in Gordon’s anthology, became “the dominant factors in our attitudes toward existence.”īlack American existentialists believe existence is tied to political and historical context. the moment they were labeled slaves - and marked as sub-human.

Both black and white writers of the 20th century, the philosopher Lewis Gordon has noted, acknowledged that black Americans were cut off from a “universal” experience in the U.S. Scholars have long recognized that being black in America raises unique existential questions.

Frank ocean albums and songs