Speaking to GQ earlier, he said “I want to deflect as much as I can onto my work.” Now we’ve been asked to pay attention to his work, literally. “Here’s what I think about music and journalism: The most important thing is to just press play,” he said. That Times article represented one of the last times Ocean has done a major interview, and in it he talked about why he prefers to stay silent. “I know that in order to get things done the way you want them, oftentimes your position will be unpopular.” “I have no delusions about my likability, in every scenario,” he told The New York Times in 2013.
#NOSTALGIA ULTRA CASSETTE FREE#
He signed to a major label early in his career and then publicly rebelled by releasing a free mixtape when, he says, the company let him languish. Ocean has also made clear that his creative process is his own, not to be dictated by expectations, money, or record contracts. The speakers in the room, Pigeons and Planes observes, are actually an art installation by Tom Sachs, recently on display at the Brooklyn Museum’s Boombox Retrospective, 1999-2015. Many of the music snippets that played during the video featured non-electronic orchestration-aching and lovely woodwinds and strings-though there were also trip-hoppy beats and one mini-song with distorted, looping vocals. It forces patience, it forces boredom, it forces true mystery (though if that’s the idea here, what’s Ocean doing checking his phone so much?).
I think I started something, I got what I wanted Did, didn't I can't feel nothing, superhuman Even when I'm fucking, Viagra popping, every single record autotuning Zero emotion, muted emotion, pitch corrected, computed emotion, uh-huhĪ livestream of woodworking is a pretty on-the-nose way to communicate a desire to break from digital immediacy. And one of his best songs, “Novacane,” opens with an indictment of modern media’s numbing effects: He’s long planned to release a paper-and-ink magazine and write a novel. His albums Nostalgia, Ultra and Channel Orange are sequenced and recorded to create a feeling of flipping through songs on a cassette tapes, or fiddling with a radio dial, or playing old video games.
The 28-year-old R&B singer is an Internet-age icon obsessed with the analogue, tactile, and obsolete. Whatever Ocean’s day of carpentry signifies, it seems quite in line with who he is as an artist: his desire to counteract 2010s noise and bustle, his disinterest in compromise, his silence. Note that the video-which might simply symbolize that he’s still working on the album-arrived early on August 1.įor Ocean to respond to deafening fan demand for new music with a broadcast this unexciting is not quite “trolling,” a term that connotes malice and insincerity, someone grabbing attention simply to have it. A library-card image posted on his website earlier this summer acknowledged that many promised release dates had been blown by, and seemed to indicate that something would happen in July 2016. Boys Don’t Cry, the follow-up album to 2012’s hugely acclaimed Channel Orange, has been promised for years now. Fans have been transfixed, but less by what was happening on camera than what it might be leading to.
0 kommentar(er)
