Artist of the Week: Frank Ocean

Sitting only on the success of his 2012 debut album Channel Orange, FrankOcean has proven to be one of the greatest RnB vocalists of this generation.

Frank Ocean came into the listening conscience right after the release of his debut album ChannelOrange in 2012. The album is now considered a classic, in a sense that it was game changer in the music scene in the early half of the 2010’s. Frank proven himself to be among the most gifted singer-songwriters of his generation and Channel Orange can back that claim up. His debut record swings from Stevie Wonder-style keyboard breeziness to 90s R&B to mystic psych rock to crunching 8-bit funk without thinking twice.

Born Christopher Francis Breaux, Frank Ocean first embarked on his musical career as a ghostwriter for several prominent artists, including JohnLegend, Beyonce, Alicia Keys and JustinBieber. He wrote the Bieber song Bigger found on the Canadian pop singer’s 2009 album ‘My World’.

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In 2010, Frank became a member of the alternative hip hop collective OddFuture led by rapper and producer Tyler, the Creator. He began writing for the crew while making guest appearances on their mixtapes. Subsequently, Frank released his breakout mixtape, ‘Nostalgia, Ultra’, to critical acclaim in 2011 prompting several publications to list the mixtape as one of the year’s best releases.

After that success, Frank released his critically acclaimed album Channel Orange where he worked beside the likes of Malay, Om’Mas Keith, and Pharrell Williams as fellow producers. The album was previewed for journalists at a handful of listening events. Some writers alleged that certain lyrics on the album revealed Ocean's bisexuality. Ocean subsequently opened up about his sexuality in a Tumblr post titled ‘thank you’s” where he wrote in detail of a romantic relationship he had – his first love – a male. At the end of the post, he said he felt like a "free man." This makes Frank Ocean the first openly bisexual mainstream hip-hop artist.

His sexuality added much depth and meaning into Channel Orange whose  material mostly include about unrequited love, as well as class and drug dependency -- all delivered with Ocean's descriptive storytelling and understated yet expressive vocals.

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After realizing he was in love with a man, Frank "reminisced about the sentimental songs I enjoyed when I was a teenager. the ones I played when I experienced a girlfriend for the first time. I realized they were written in a language I did not yet speak." And, whether consciously or not, Channel Orange's language is admirably-- and skillfully-- inclusive. Instead of letting listeners comb through the lyrics for certain words or references, Frank mixes things up so well that he coats the entire thing with heavy doses of surreality – where pronouns are rendered useless and deeper meanings reveal themselves ambiguously.

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