I simply don’t know why I am who I am, but I do know I’ll love anyone who genuinely makes me feel loved and secure in this world, gender be damned. It’s hard to write about my sexuality because it is punctuated by question marks. Around males this fear vanishes, but around females this fear motivates a sense of self-improvement, to better myself and make the outside reflect the in. Fear of not being accepted for who I am, fear of misrepresenting the person I truly am and pretending to be someone I’m not.
The reason for all my failed relationships with girls is inexperience I’m just not accustomed to how the opposite sex functions so I attempt to tread carefully out of fear. My high school years resulted in a few intimate bonds with boys that were nothing more than friendships, but enough for me to lower my guard to guys and be completely at ease around those I trust. I realized that in my mythically misguided quest for “normal” love, considering heterosexuality “normal” was myself suppressing interior feelings I now understand have been a part of me forever. This resulted in me fucking up spectacularly (twice!), and in fucking up, I had to personally reevaluate why I was doing this to myself.
#Frank ocean albums run time free#
So when graduation rolled around and I was finally free of those high school bonds, I felt a strong need to make up for the four lost years of a “normal” experience and throw myself onto the first girl at college that showed signs of romantic interest towards me. I went to an all-boys Catholic school and spent many hours on cross-country trips with the guys on my quiz bowl team, so I became relaxed to being around males all the time, yet lingered wishingly on the thought of a standard heterosexual relationship (an endeavor I struggled at due to my bothersome lack of female friends). Then, I was anxious about the future but masked it with the comfort of the familiarity that ruled my life.
Realizing this duality was the secret to my newfound love for Ocean’s genreless masterpiece, as was time.īlonde was released the summer before my senior year of high school. This duality of personality, of sexuality, is made clear right from the title Blonde, the female adjective, is the official name, while blond, the male adjective, appears on the cover. With the beat switch of “Nights” occurring almost perfectly at the middle of Blonde’s runtime, the song reinforces the thread of duality that is woven so strongly into it. “Nights,” the Chanel-logo-shaped key that unlocks the world of Blonde, very much encapsulates the album in its entirety. This time, I started by attacking the album from its heart. Sure, on a musical level I very much enjoyed channel ORANGE, but did I ever fully grasp what he so desperately wanted to say? I felt it necessary to give Frank the better chance he deserves, so multiple rereads of Frank’s open letter and reflective relistens of channel ORANGE later, I was finally ready for Blonde. It took looking up the meaning of “see on both sides like Chanel” to recognize that I had never understood Frank in the way he asks to be understood. “My guy pretty like a girl / and he got fight stories to tell,” asserts Frank at the beginning of the song, unabashed about himself and less reserved in his lyrics than I had ever perceived him. It took a listen to “Chanel” (the first of Frank’s post- Blonde solo singles) for me to reevaluate Blonde. By the time “Future Free” noisily faded out, Blonde had escaped - a lightyear ahead of me in meaning. I was lucky to be taken back to the land of the known when André 3000 unapologetically exploded on “Solo (Reprise),” but it was a fleeting moment. Every song sounded so empty, so unconventional in its instrumentation, establishing an atmosphere that suffocated me with its unfamiliar air. And upon first experiencing the surreal soundscape that is Blonde, I was lost. In fact, I opted not to view the video and instead dive straight into the album, since “Nikes” kicked it off. I was not caught up in the extremely speculative pre-release hype cycle either (I gave up hope after July 2015), so when the “Nikes” video dropped, I was not in a tizzy scrambling to watch it.
In a word, it was cold compared to Channel Orange’s vibrant neo-soul soundtrack for an endless summer, Blonde was the bitter wind whipping across a snow-blanketed landscape. I did not like Blonde on my first listen.
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