Frank Ocean and The New Cultural Politics of Hip Hop

Please recondition yourself/It’s not just money/it’s happiness/It’s the difference between happy and being sad/it’s the difference between having a home and living on the streets/It’s not just money/it’s so much more

- Not just money, Frank Ocean

(Photo credit; www.beyonce.com)

Somewhere in the late 2000s, a quiet revolution was staged. Almost imperceptibly, hip hop was turned inside out to reveal its sensitive side. We didn’t see it as it happened, but we heard its repercussions and reverberations, and before we knew it, the murky landscape between R&B and hip hop had been altered by new aural masters. Mid-2012 signalled the arrival of hip hop’s new wunderkind – one its gatekeepers can’t claim as strictly their own, but who is unassumingly revolutionising their territory. With his indie-style sensibility, complex musicality and uncanny openness, Frank Ocean has arrived as a game-changer in a game that was not even unaware of being subtly manipulated. Americana has never sounded like this, neither has hip hop held the revered American Dream accountable in the way Frank insistently does. His critique is unrelenting, his genre unspecified and his opinion culturally relevant. Tyler The Creator might be the leader of hip hop’s avant garde Odd Future collective, but Frank is fast becoming its poster child: a poster child carving out his own space through terms of engagement that register the sound of a new cultural politics – but the endorsements from the likes of Jay Z and Beyoncé don’t hurt either.

The first sign that his terms of engagement were going to be different was explicitly laid bare in his open letter, shared on Tumblr, but originally intended to be included in the album sleeve. A poetic revelation of a summer romance gone wrong with another man, the letter registered not so much as a “coming out”, but rather as a sharing of his experience of the perils of first love. It is a marker of Frank’s skill as a poetic storyteller: a transparent story that reflects his commitment to have no secrets and preclude no questions. With the same characteristic openness, Channel Orange reflects his refusal to hide behind androgynous pronouns – the bare, stripped stories are populated with tales of men and women he has loved and lost, juxtaposed by the complex layering of his futuristic urban sound. This particular story is delivered as a new kind of love song that seeps through the undertones of his Bad Religion, as he elegantly equates unrequited love with the  religious perversion of a one-man cult that ends in the cracked whispered vocals whimpering “I could never make him love me, love me…love me”. But he doesn’t ask for sympathy, nor demand it. This is simply an invitation to bear witness: one screenshot in the bleak landscape that is Channel Orange, an album steeped, and perhaps even inculcating a new excavation of hip hop’s sensitive side. The avant garde singer/songwriter said, in a Guardian exclusive, “'I wanted to wake up without this freakin' boulder on my chest”. It is the emotional weight of this boulder that is inescapable in Channel Orange, the world upon the back of a 24 year old American trying to make sense of his place in it, rendered painfully visible. It was this vulnerability that was evident in his MTV Video Music Awards performance as he performed mostly seated, accompanied by a lone acoustic guitar. You could almost hear the calls for next year’s coveted Best New Artist Grammy – an award for which he’ll probably have to contest against the UK soul new guard, currently fronted by Emeli Sande, Michael Kiwanuka and Lianne La Havas.

Frank Ocean’s debut album, Channel Orange, is a 17 track opus that takes the form of an extended meditation on the accumulation of capital and power, informed by a critical consciousness. It is the same consciousness previously heard on the musings of Talib Kweli, Lupe Fiasco and Dead Prez, yet slanted by the use of a rap sensibility to create music that exists at the intersection of hip hop, funk, electro RnB: a future-sound delivered with the calm cadence of a critique covertly offered through 808 beats. The New Orleans native is arguably Andre 3000 reincarnate: in the hip hop world, but defining his relation to it on his own terms. But Prince and Stevie Wonder also seep through, with nostalgic D’Angelo falsettos and a hint of Kanye West swagger. It isn’t the swagger of West’s “ball so hard” mentalities, but the quieter West: introspective and self-reflexive. Channel Orange could be considered kin to West’s 808 and Heartbreak – an album Frank name-drops on his breakthrough single off his Nostalgia E.P: “Swim Good”, as he croons “there’s some pretty good beats on this 808 CD”. The politics of the musically ambitious project, with its real world cinematics, dark tones and harsh realities, occupies a shifted hip hop landscape, slanted by the perspective of a sonic creative working with a different political economy.

It seems hip hop’s sensitive side is no longer the obscene underside of the genre, which in the 2000s has been populated with beats that hit harder and fast, and lyrics emptied of political content, and instead, saturated in the mantras of capital. Hip hop’s money spinners have become masters of audio product placement, we know what cars they drive whether pluggin’ Aston Martin Music or calling for Lamborghini Mercy, what drinks they prefer – a trend popularised by Puff Daddy and Busta Rhymes’ call to Pass the Courvoisier (although the former is now synonymous with Ciroc Vodka, even referring to himself is Ciroc Obama), and as for the labels they wear? Well they now own them, as from Sean John to Kanye West’s eponymous line, hip hop’s royalty are signalling their arrival into the high life. In this political economy, sensitivity and social consciousness have fallen by the wayside. Yet Frank, enters this territory by altering it, shifting focus away from that often mentioned club to the streets and suburbs, and comfortably erecting his own space between rap and R&B: with a lyrical depth that rivals today’s most eloquent MCs delivered with the sensitivity of a crooner not content to talk of cash, girls and cars in the same way as his counterparts.

It’s a gap previously tenuously bridged by Kanye West and Drake, and Frank is perhaps the latest member of this boys’ club, with their preppy collegiate sensibility and willingness to wear their hearts on the sleeves of their cardigans and pullovers. Positioned between hip hop and suburbia, this new guard, rather than revelling in their new-found suburban bliss, are attempting to navigate the dilemmas of their economic migration through verses that articulate a complex relationship with capital.  But he enters with less of the schizophrenia of Drake’s and West, which the latter most explicit explores in his song “Power”, where he contends against his own complicity in the system of capital he critiques. Layered between the economics of traditional hip hop, Drake’s YOLO mottos and West’s call to go HAM (Hard as a Muthafucker), is a new wave of cultural politics in Frank’s music, that is not so much turning hip hop on its head, as returning to the 80s and 90s sensibilities of a hip hop aware of the demands of capital society. It is hip hop seeped in the complexities of humanity, with the kind of soul searching of philosophy graduates with well-worn copies of Marx’s communist manifesto, delivered through lyrical genius that is able to make sense of shifting contexts of experience. And it is certainly a new mode of engaging reality that refuses to be co-opted into the mainstream of capital America, unveiling a picture of Americana that contrasts the images of another new artist on the fringes of hip hop: Lana Del Rey. Her Chateau Marmant, Hampton-obsessed geography, off her debut Born to Die, stands as the antithesis of Channel Orange’s more complex political economy.

Following the experimental Nostalgia E.P, Channel Orange, despite being Ocean’s debut, is offered with the tenacity of a veteran artist who has decided to take creative control on the third album. The album eschews convention, and is instead a conceptual offering that uses experimental intros in a way previously heard on TLC’s CrazySexyCool – they form impressions and create an ideological framing for the next track. It is no accident that “Not Just Money” is placed before “Super Rich Kids”, the stark contrast between the two voicing Frank’s disapproval, as he cinematographically populates a scene with beach houses, exquisite views and talk of “too many bottles of this wine we can’t pronounce…too many joyrides in daddy’s Jaguar”. It’s suburbia seeped in drugs with maids who “come around too much” and parents who “ain’t around enough”, and a lifestyle Frank cheekily scorns in his song “Sweet Life”,  with the (seemingly) aloof delivery of lyrics that state “why see the world, when you got the beach, and the sweet life”. But aloof and apathetic, he is not.

What differentiates Frank from hip hop progenitors of this new cultural politics is his insistent critical through line. Channel Orange delivered like a thesis on wealth and power, an unrelenting commentary that begins on track three “Sierra Leone’s” call for “a new day” that “will bring about a new dawn” and continues until track 11 “Lost”, where Fank’s protagonist laments his lover working too hard, a perpetual traveller of capital cities caught in the hustle for capital establishment. The stories he tell are universal and familiar, but he creates a sense of three-dimensionality in the vulnerable, lost and defeated souls that populate the bleak reality of Channel Orange. Exploring experiences of “economies of difference”, Frank intersects inner cities and suburbia, strippers and rich kids, “crackheads” and forlorn lovers. The tracks are vignettes that reflect experiences from multiple sides, the 1% and have-nots existing side by side in a political encounter that is delivered through densely layered beats and off centre samples: whether the monologue of “Not Just Money” or sounds of dogs barking, as organs, synths and electronica are drawn into cinematic symphonies, that can last for either one or 10 minutes. But pedagogy it is not, there is no didactic preaching, but simply an honest portrayal of the order of things, subtly delivered in a way that seems to urge you to draw your own conclusions. It follows that Frank’s Twitter Bio states: “you don’t know anything, and neither do I”.

With a consciousness of context, Frank Ocean emerges as the face of the new cultural politics of hip hop: an unexpected political approach situated in a landscape that has traditionally been comfortable to align itself with corporate America. His Americana is the underside of the American Dream, the painful perils of its pursuit, the complex challenges of its arrival, and the ignorant stagnancy of inheriting it. Channel Orange could be the soundtrack of Occupy Wall Street movement, the characters of his audio nouveau contending against the urban realities and narrative imaginings of a humanity that, as he stated in his notorious letter, consists of “human beings spinning on blackness. All wanting to be seen, touched, heard, paid attention to”. Channel Orange, and Frank Ocean’s larger oeuvre, is an invitation in to unadulterated experiences, that are inescapably political in their difference, yet complexly register  as colliding economies within the same geography. But as, he told The Guardian, 'experience' is an interesting word. I just bear witness.”