Last year, in his first major interview supporting “Blonde,” he told the Times, “It’s not essential for me to have big radio records,” before admitting that he obsessively studies his streaming tallies.
“When I think of ‘single,’ I automatically picture putting something that I’ve put everything into on some conveyor belt,” he continued. In 2012, he described the radio as “a conveyor belt with little soul” to me. Ocean has as complex a relationship with this system as he does with the other music-industry pillars that he pined over as a child: the charts, the labels, the Grammys. By contrast, Ocean’s first offerings seemed designed for the fan to appreciate alone in silent awe, but not exactly to belt with friends in dingy bars. Traditionally, big artists release big songs in hopes of a big album radio plays and plays, stoking anticipation, and release dates are climactic as fans collectively dig down the single’s rabbit hole. Similarly, his second album campaign began with “Nikes,” a crawling, chipmunked free verse over minimal trip-hop, which sounded just as intentionally out of step. An impressionistic prog-funk epic about an Egyptian queen and a stripper in a motel was not the sticky sing-along Ocean felt so capable of when early fans and critics flocked to his self-released mixtape. The track’s initial arrival was not unlike its appearance at our karaoke session: unexpected, perplexing, and knowingly disruptive. “Pyramids,” the lead single to Ocean’s “Channel Orange” album, from 2012, is over nine minutes long. Seriously, who performs Frank Ocean’s “Pyramids” at karaoke? After the first few taps of an icy note and a familiar vocal riff, the group heard where our new challenger was heading, and stared in disbelief. Just as the session had reached perfect pitch, however, it was thrown into a tailspin. Props were utilized a latecomer knee-slid into a performance, mid-song. The courteous tried to entertain the mostly empty room, and muted competition grew between our cluster of regulars seated at the bar, a pair of young women in leather pants sitting in an alcove, and a few nondescript strangers at far tables. booth and a microphone, and song choice grew paramount.
On a frigid night last month, three groups of friends took turns knocking through twangy covers of the usual suspects: The-Dream, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, the Cardigans.
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