“Mango, peaches, and lime… Why see the world when you got the beach?” Emotion aside, channel ORANGE is Frank Ocean’s version of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral in its vivid depictions of cultural turmoil, a sociological diagnostic in the spirit of Joan Didion’s White Album. It’s the kind of innocence you wanna ride with. He even put “Forrest Gump” on there! The song, a wistful ode written from the perspective of Forrest’s girl Jenny in the cornball ’94 film, boasts a grinning, sing-song simplicity, stretched out bald with cheesy sentiment and no self-consciousness. It’s the album of a man who believes in his own music, flaws and all. This year’s channel ORANGE delivered on that promise, showing the extremes of his depth, and exactly how wide open he truly was. Nostalgia, Ultra, 2011’s debut full-length, made us a promise and we fell for the album with the passion and faith of converts, enveloping ourselves in his contemplative sweetness, the satin tenor of his voice. Not simply a pop star or a sizzling phenom or a young flash on a stylist’s resume, though he still blazed through his first-week Billboard charts with the ferocity of Usher and Chris Brown. But it would also be disingenuous not call it like we feel it: Frank Ocean has emerged as one of American music’s greats, potentially of all time. It’s a fool’s game to predict an artist’s longevity off their first album, even if you think that first album is genius and was preceded by a jams-rich catalogue.
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