channel ORANGE by Frank Ocean
Channel Orange (stylized as channel ORANGE) is the debut studio album of American singer-songwriter Frank Ocean, released on July 10, 2012, by Def Jam Recordings. After releasing his 2011 mixtape Nostalgia, Ultra, Ocean began writing the album with creative partner Malay, who assisted him with its recording at EastWest Studio in Hollywood. Ocean eschewed his mixtape's reliance on samples and wanted to approach sound and song structure differently on Channel Orange. He titled the album as a reference to the neurological phenomenon grapheme–color synesthesia and the color he perceived during the summer he first fell in love. An R&B and neo soul album, Channel Orange has an unconventional musical style, film-inspired segue tracks, and influences from electro-funk, pop-soul, jazz-funk, and psychedelic music. Its songs are characterized by unconventional melodies, spatial arrangements, mid-tempo beats, and instruments such as electronic keyboards, muted percussion, and shifting synthesizers. Ocean's songwriting explores themes of unrequited love, sex, decadence, class, and drugs with empathic lyrics, surrealistic imagery, conversational devices, and descriptive narratives depicting dark characters. His subtle baritone singing on the album exhibits free-form flow and alternating falsetto and tenor registers. To prevent it from leaking onto the Internet, Ocean released the album digitally one week earlier than its publicly announced date. He promoted it with five singles, including his highest charting single "Thinkin Bout You", and a supporting tour in July 2012. It debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 on sales of 131,000 copies and, as of February 20, 2013, has sold 508,200 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Channel Orange received rave reviews from music critics, who praised its idiosyncratic production, musical scope, and Ocean's songwriting, and was named the best album of the year by numerous publications.
The lead-up to Frank Ocean’s culture-shifting debut album, which included the seemingly out-of-nowhere 2011 mixtape <i>Nostalgia, Ultra</i>, was mired in mystery: Who was this elusive, vintage-car-obsessed crooner, and why was he a member of the rambunctious, uncouth youth movement known as Odd Future? Why wasn’t he signed to a record label—or was he? And how had we never heard of the inventive songwriter behind singles for Brandy, Bieber and Beyoncé? By the summer of 2012, all had been revealed: through the popularity of <i>Nostalgia, Ultra</i>, Ocean had forced his songwriting deal with Def Jam into a solo career, and <i>channel ORANGE</i> was full of laconic, literary tracks about the underbelly of Southern California life with a Didion-esque intensity and detail. “The best song wasn’t the single, but you weren’t either,” he sings iconically on “Sweet Life”, an acerbic mission statement for an album that defined a new era of laid-back—and disillusioned—R&B which positioned that B-sides are where the richest text resides. Ocean’s secret weapon was his lack of fealty to format; he disliked being categorised as an R&B singer because of its racialised history in the music industry, and also because he was so nimble across genres, experimenting with songs that could as easily be played on a Thursday night at a piano bar (“Super Rich Kids”) as during a coronation dance for prom royalty (“Forrest Gump”). His sweeping sense of song structure came to fruition on the 10-minute-long “Pyramids”, a psychedelic journey through hard techno, ambient and guitar-riffing synth pop. And the album’s guest stars—Earl Sweatshirt, John Mayer, André 3000—were emblematic of how well his artistry was regarded leading up to his first official album. Though it may sound compact in relation to the work he’d go on to release, Ocean’s ambitious songwriting set his place as a massive influence on music across genres—pop, hip-hop and, yes, R&B too.
