But Frank’s not just fixating on tragedy he’s studying missteps the same way “Solo (Reprise)” guest star André 3000, of Outkast, did in remaining defiantly sober as he came up, while famously declaring that all of his heroes did dope.Īndré’s appearance here is fitting. Doomed musical forebears hang around like cautionary tales: Elliott Smith is quoted in “Seigfried,” and Kurt Cobain, 2pac, and others creep into lyrics elsewhere. Blonde’s constant is a reflexive sense of the burgeoning freedom of self-discovery and also the dangers of chiseling out one’s ideal self mistake by mistake. “Solo” finds him single and enamored of acid and free love, all the while imagining the bad trips, medical and psychological, that befall the careless. Ocean can never be again: In “Nights,” he’s a homeless boyfriend hanging around a significant other in Texas after being displaced from Louisiana by Hurricane Katrina. The new album Blonde is a rogues’ gallery of all the bygone Franks that Mr. Frank Ocean lives haunted by the possibilities.

The trip from adolescence into adulthood is the forest of these fears, of forked roads to possible futures that dissolve the instant you set about a specific path. On record, Ocean is constantly questioning whether or not his best life lies in his rearview, fretful that some burnt bridge or wrong turn has quietly and imperceptibly wrecked everything.

Are you happy? Would you give up life as you know it to zip back to some idyllic teen summer and laze on the arm of a sorely missed first love? These questions salt the bedrock of Frank Ocean’s work, from the Coachella romance of “Novacane,” breakthrough single from a mixtape literally titled Nostalgia, Ultra, to Channel Orange, an album of brokenhearted reminiscences set in motion by a PlayStation firing up a game of Street Fighter.

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