To paraphrase David Foster Wallace’s paraphrasing, two young goldfish are swimming in a tank when an older goldfish passes them and says, “Water’s warm today, huh boys?” In response, the two young goldfish turn to each other and ask, “What’s water?”ĭistribution to artists is often water to goldfish, a fundamental necessity so pervasive, so all-encompassing that it often goes unthought about. We couldn’t have asked for anything more from Frank Ocean, it’s completely unfair to ask for more, but I still can’t help but have hoped for more. Far more so than even the aforementioned Kanye West, Ocean is seemingly beholden to no one’s vision, demands or constraints but his own.Įven though Ocean put out Blond as a joint venture with his own label, Boys Don’t Cry, even though he gave away the Boys Don’t Cry magazine for free, even though he spent years crafting a complex artistic work that was clearly unconcerned with any workings of the traditional music industry, when it came to distributing his visual and sonic work, he turned to the largest publicly traded corporation in the world.
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Whether Ocean actually intended to teach the world a lesson about patience and respecting the artistic process or not, the effect was a powerful poke in the eye to both commercial and fan expectation, a multimedia experience that, without exaggeration, helps redefine not just what an “album release” can look like, but what it looks like the be an artist in 2016.