Ocean unfolds a relationship between a sugar mama stripper and her unemployed beau over the course of two songs in one, segueing from banger to slow grind in ten minutes.

And if you put it in the form of a song, oftentimes, if the song is striking enough, you can really deliver the story most effectively while keeping the ear of the listener the whole time.” Album keystone “Pyramids” exemplifies one of these songs that’s “striking enough”, to put it mildly. He said, “What inspires me to make music is…I’m just inspired to tell stories, and you gotta make sure the listener is listening to you.

In an interview with the BBC earlier this year, Ocean explained a songwriting process closer to fiction or journalism than R&B tropes. And it would be unfair to pigeonhole his expansive songwriting by wondering about the obviously masculine, “so buff, and so strong” object of affection on “Forrest Gump”. As he wrote, he posted the letter not as a declarative statement, but as a response to listeners’ declarative statements of their own. He may have had all these experiences, but he has made a point to avoid labeling his sexuality. Ocean is not– at least, as far as we know– a “Super Rich Kid”, a young parent (“Sierra Leone”), or a groupie (“Monks”), nor is he definitively bisexual or gay. He shades an admission, much like the narrator’s, with thoughtful introspection and slow-reveals that suffuse Channel Orange’s painfully detailed character sketches. As it is with any good writing, these authors used their personal lives only to augment the stories of others. The narrator makes a point to note that they’re not gay, they’re “best friends, discoverers.” Whether Lethem was one of these boys at some point– and clarified more for his own sake than his characters’– matters as little as whether Ocean did what he did for himself or for the sake of his painstakingly crafted debut.

In the novel, which like Ocean’s songwriting draws heavily from the writer’s own experiences, two male friends engage in mutual masturbation. After reading Frank Ocean’s letter about his love for a man and how it influenced Channel Orange, I thought of a scene from Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude.

Channel orange review