![]() Throughout his recent multimedia releases like the pre- Blonde visual album Endless and his “Nikes” video, a new awareness of being grown up emerges as he weighs the benefits of moving forward, with the liabilities of speeding away from his past. Ocean is now 28, an age that delineates the boundary of emergent adulthood. (Ferrari didn’t return requests for comment.) Ocean sings, “Bad luck to talk on these rides/Mind on the road/Your dilated eyes watch the clouds float/White Ferrari/Had a good time.” Tangled in here is a line about youthful blundering - 16: how was I supposed to know anything -before the song returns to its plaintive meditation on silence, or silencing: “I didn’t care to state the plain/Kept my mouth closed/We’re both so familiar.” A song about love, connection, and the fragile frisson of the unspoken, the track unfolds via a drive in a car that is simultaneously ephemeral and overt: a white Ferrari. Ocean sings about this kind of enforced repression on “White Ferrari,” one of the album’s most moving ballads. (A BMW spokesman said, “It’s great to see artists and longtime BMW enthusiasts such as Frank Ocean sharing their passion for our brand.”)įrank Ocean Drops New Album ‘Blonde,’ Gives Out ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ Magazine at Pop-Up Shops But sometimes internalizing means swallowing, hard, keeping things hidden deep. The fundamental struggle of adulthood is to take one’s external signifiers of identity and internalize them. ![]() But it’s not just a means of protection, it’s also a reinforcement - physical evidence of how the young driver wants to be perceived. In this song, the BMW X6, a hunchbacked and hunkered-down SUV, is fortified. “I ain’t a kid no more/We’ll never be those kids again/We’d drive to Syd’s, had the X6 back then.” “Safe in my rental like an armored truck back then/We didn’t give a fuck back then,” he offers. BMWs and wistful recall continue to play a key role on Blonde, in particular on the song “Ivy,” where Ocean sings about his past, a time that seems to conjure an insular, inaccessible, yet intoxicating nihilism for him. Ocean’s nostalgia is so thick, it was the title of his first real solo effort, Nostalgia, Ultra, a record that just happened to feature a 1980s BMW M3 on the cover. Spokespeople for Acura would not comment on this call out.) Ludacris loves his old Legend so much, he had it restored and featured on the cover of his most recent album, 2015’s Ludaversal. Meriting its own line is the car’s model name, The Legend, which seems to simultaneously reference Ocean’s childhood longing for celebrity, and his current hankering for mythology - a glorified fantasy of the past. No binary A/B sides here - at least six discs.įrank Ocean’s ‘Blonde’: 10 MVPs Who Contributed to the Album (“1998 my family had that Acura, oh/The Legend/Kept at least six discs in the changer.”) Yet this allusion to an obsolete medium, the compact disc, instead of accentuating its limitations, showcases its ability to provide a broad range of possible identities. ![]() In a deft callback to his adolescence, he recalls riding around in his family’s car during his youth in New Orleans. Ocean also uses cars to conjure the complex formation of identity over time. (When asked for an official response, a rep for Bugatti said, “We don’t comment on placement in movies, TV, songs, etc.”) He recalls a used Sedan he drove before his current friends even knew him (“Remember when I had that Lexus? No/Our friendship don’t go back that far”) before boasting about driving a seven-figure supercar (“Bugatti left some stretch marks on that freeway”). Ocean recognizes that moving forward is sometimes moving up, but he wonders what is left behind, and how quickly. In “Futura Free,” Ocean confronts success, looking back on his past earning minimum wage, and out to his million dollar-making present. Blonde is full of songs about the amorphous fourth dimension, time, and all manner of cars are used to carry their lyrical weight.
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