On 2 January 2018, when Frank Ocean posted to Tumblr a photo of his rumoured-to-be boyfriend, Memo, wearing a yellow cap with the words “IF YOU LIKED 2017, YOU’LL LOVE … 2018” embroidered on the front, it felt like the world’s favourite recluse was signposting big things for the New Year. Stans fell head over heels and the theory machine began churning again. What could 2018 possibly hold that could surpass 2017’s euphoric year of Frank Ocean? That fifth album before 30 that he hasn’t put out yet?
When the clock struck twelve on New Year’s Day and we collectively laid our 2018 calendars-turned-conspiracy-pinboards to rest, it’s understandable that some felt disappointed that the 2018 we were supposed to love started and ended with Moon River in February. 2017 had felt like an extension of 2016’s slow curtain draw, where we continued to see (and hear) Frank in more volumes than ever before. With this momentum, it seemed appropriate that he’d just keep on this path, right? Right???
Wrong. After a year of anticipation (and a new level of album theories), “IF YOU LIKED 2017, YOU’LL LOVE … 2018” revealed itself not as a statement of intent but just another tease in Frank’s bank of riddles. If you thought we’d finally escaped 2015-2016s’ tumultuous library card days, or the anxiety-ridden weeks of August 2016, you were sorely mistaken. This cryptic hangover seeped well into 2018 and cursed us for the length of a year with the expectation that something could drop at any moment. When nothing materialised, we had to reassess our expectations.
It wasn’t until later in the year that Frank really decided to show up. In November, we saw the return of fan-favourite blonded RADIO – Frank’s Beats 1 radio show – but the version that returned wasn’t the same one from 2017 that always signalled the arrival of new music. Instead, Frank aired a politically-charged series on 6 November – the day of the US midterm elections – and used the platform he’s cultivated a devout following on to air his grievances about voter suppression and right-wing rhetoric, among other politically-oriented points. To instil an urgency to vote in the cult of Frank, he aired three parts throughout the day and used the political context of these episodes to speak on himself and his own place within popular culture. “It’s never lost on me, some of the radical parts of my existence in this moment in pop music and pop culture,” he reflects on midterms pt. III as Clarence Clearwater Revival’s “Effigy” hums underneath. “But I think my main allegiance is just to being someone who’s unafraid to document their thoughts and who they are as is.”
2018 wasn’t about the music that Frank Ocean could’ve given us; 2018 was about Frank Ocean revealing a public side of his devotedly-private persona. On November 16, @blonded – the Instagram account long-rumoured to belong to Frank – went public. It was a surprising move from the introverted pop star: with the click of a button, his backlog of hundreds of personal images, previously only available to a close-knit group of family and friends went live for the world to see. Of the 300-odd posts, some were photos previously available on his Tumblr while others were newly-revealed personal shots – of himself, of his mother, of himself as his mother. The best parts of his grid, though, were the shitposts. From 15 August: a cursed image of a kangaroo with long nails captioned simply “Oh shit”. From 25 July: a screenshot of Blonde’s platinum certification followed by a pixelated image of a watch with “IM IN MY FUCKING BAG O CLOCK” superimposed across the face.
The Instagram switch was a surprisingly uncharacteristic move. Frank Ocean has been mythologised as a spectre in the pop stratosphere: unknowable, unreachable, unpredictable. The image of a post-2012 Frank Ocean is built on apparitions, faded memories, stories of people who may or may not have existed – felt through Blonde’s storytelling, both personal and detached; and in Endless’ structure, a masterwork built entirely from echoes. In a glowing profile in 032c magazine from November 2017 titled “The Artist Is Absent,” Alex Needham writes of Frank, “He is a mystic visionary – half-machine, wholly unknowable”. Only a year later – breakneck speed in Frank Ocean years – @blonded is revealed and he pushes himself (literally) naked into the public eye.
In his first public appearance of 2019, Frank was interviewed by his blonded RADIO co-hosts, Vegyn and Roof Access, for a GQ cover story, and they ask him about his Instagram account, the lack of mediation, and his decision to go public. “I feel like there was dissonance between how I was seen by the audience and where I was actually ... But there's also the idea of dialogue and discourse and conversation—like theater where the audience can interrupt you versus the television,” Frank responds. With Tumblr’s relevance sadly fading, Frank’s switch to a more personable, more intimate platform is telling. We start to see regular ass photos of a once unknowable being on our feeds and in our stories, and the illusion he shrouded himself in during his half-decade-long sabbatical is, at least partly, defused – now, it’s a two-way street. When he starts teasing new music on his IG stories at a rapper’s pace, we can be sure there’s some calculated reasoning behind it.
Frank hasn’t just been emulating the snippet-teasing style of this new wave of IG-centric rappers, he’s emulating their flows too. It seems like Frank caught the rap bug: his 2018 features, while sparse, displayed an understated commitment to bars. The rhyme scheme in his feature on A$AP Rocky’s Purity is a phenomenal, spiralling verse brimming with clever wordplay (“Pour it in foam, this white got eggshells in my omelette / My earlobes, they yellow like the yolk is runnin'”). Later in the year, he popped up unannounced on Travis Scott’s ASTROWORLD, boosting CAROUSEL with another bout of tongue twisters (“Even though the speed got old / Sprinkling methamphetamines on the leaves like the snow”) and enough double-entrendres to generate an endless list of Genius annotations.
In 2018, we saw a few different sides of Frank Ocean. For the most part, he fell back into the shadow, and we didn’t love but loathe 2018, but when he finally re-emerged he came with a litany of new approaches: rap Frank, political Frank, social media Frank. 2018 gestured towards another shift in his artistic temperament: he’s found another tight-knit group of collaborators that he gels with and he’s making moves accordingly – becoming more comfortable living in the limelight, developing artistically.
What we can expect from Frank in 2019 doesn’t come in the form of some clean, cryptic puzzle, but from a monologue in one of blonded RADIO’s midterm episodes. Interrupting Lou Reed’s Last Great American Whale, Frank muses, “When it comes to now, at this moment, getting out ideas, I have been pretty spare and minimal with what I say because, 1. not everything I think really matters, and, 2. it’s important to me to not just be making lateral moves. And I don’t mean that in terms of money or anything like that, I just mean in terms of my very personal vision of the arc of my life as an artist; I kinda wanna always feel – even if it’s a placebo effect – that I’m progressing.”
