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The 7 Best Lyrics from Frank Ocean’s New Album “Blonde”

By Culturess Staff

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Sarah Nathan of Blue Thumb Music Collective runs down the 7 best lyrics from Frank Ocean’s brand new, long awaited album, “Blonde”

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Blonde, Frank Ocean’s long-awaited new album, came into the world on Saturday, leaving a trail of critical praise, intense emotions, gifs, and fire emojis in its wake. Ocean’s distinctive minimalist, often-slow soundscapes are a large part of the album’s virtuosity: the lead single, “Nikes,” opens with just sustained synth lines and a slow drumbeat, while the beat change on “Nights” has some listeners agog.

But would the controlled haziness of the tracks be as meaningful without Ocean’s ability to write lyrics about perception, regret, memory, and two people who can never see the same thing the same way? Here, Culturess checks out the lyrics on their own terms.

The 7 best lyrics on Blonde

7. Ivy: “I broke your heart last week / You’ll probably feel better by the weekend”

These lines are universally good. Dolly Parton could make them country music. Gillian Welch could make them bluegrass. Taylor Swift could make them pop. They could be jaunty, a kiss-off to an ex-lover who doesn’t have the emotional depth to stay hurt. They could be poisonous, with their venom sinking straight into the veins of a romantic playboy. In Frank’s telling, they’re full of nothing but regret.

6. Facebook Story: “It was virtual, means no sense / So I say ‘I’m in front of you, I don’t need to accept you on Facebook.’”

Ocean shares the writing credit for this song with the producer SebastiAn, who narrates this track. Like “Ivy” and“Self Control,” it tells a story where how one partner perceives a relationship and what the other one does can’t be brought into a single picture. “I’m in front of you,” SebastiAn says, but that doesn’t make his physical presence any more real than his virtual one.

5. Solo: “All she want is her picket fence / And you protest and you picket sign”

At the turnaround from “picket fence” to “picket sign,” it took me several seconds to remember exactly what a picket sign was. How could that word mean two such different things, so close together? This is the fate of all the lovers on Blonde: they think they speak the same language, but they speak right past each other.

4. Good Guy: “You text nothing like you look”

Another instance of Frank realizing two perceptions can never be made to match, this is also probably the funniest one on the album. Modern dating in a sentence.

3. Solo: “I wanted that act right in Colorado that night / I brought trees to blow through, but it’s just me and no you / Stayed up ’til my phone died, smoking big, rolling solo”

“Stayed up ’til my phone died”–how many times an hour did he check for a text that never came?

2. Nights: “Did you call me from a séance? / You are from my past life”

The past and present bleed into each other on Blonde, and “Nights” is the song that takes this furthest. Positioned at the halfway point on the album, “Nights” teases us with the idea that it will break the album into halves: slow and fast, past and present, regret and acceptance. The unnamed caller will be the last person whose memory Ocean dwells on: from here on out, it’s the present tense for him. The beat change at the 3:30 mark seems like an even stronger signal that he’s switching modes.

Instead, he rockets into the past, telling us about a 1998 Acura and eating at Shoney’s Restaurant. We get the sense that the caller is a lover he stayed with in Houston after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans. Ocean moves back and forth between this former lover and someone else he’s now leaving at home so he can work at night. Or perhaps he’s actually narrating memories of when he had to leave his Houston lover at home, but doing so in the present tense. Who can tell? Every night f***s every day up, every day patches every night up. The memories and reality can’t leave each other alone: not here, not when Ocean’s past life can call him right up and speak to him on the phone. Frank Ocean is 28–young, by many standards. What makes this line hurt is that he knows full well that 28 is old enough to have a past life.

(Photo credit: TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images)

1. Pink + White: “This is life, life immortali–”

A song about accepting the passage of time cuts off the word “immortality” partway through. Oof.

Bonus: Solo (Reprise): “So-lo that I can see under the skirt of an ant”

“Solo (Reprise)” is contributed by Andre 3000 (formerly of OutKast), so it isn’t included on the list with Ocean’s lyrics. However, I wanted to acknowledge the speed tour-de-force that is “Solo (Reprise).” In 1 minute and 18 seconds, Andre covers Solo cups, Ralph Lauren polo shirts, and rappers who don’t write their own verses, all as part of discussion of his depressed state of mind (“so low”). On an album that’s otherwise been about memories of real events, Andre 3000 rapidly summons a succession of vivid, dislocated images. “So-lo that I can see under the skirt of an ant” tells you exactly what sort of verses are coming–if you can catch it before he’s off to the next line.

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Bio Header: Sarah Nathan
There are lots of ways to tell stories, and all of them are of interest to Sarah. She is one fifth of the Blue Thumb Music Collective, who write about the experience of being a music fan in all its forms. A recent West Coast transplant, she holds out hope that one of these days, she will actually learn to surf.

Twitter: @bluethumbmusic

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