Frank Ocean – Nostalgia, Ultra. (2011) [Self-Released] // Grade: A

Don’t call this record R&B. I mean do it if you want, but don’t put it in a category as if it belongs there. Times are changing, and this record is certainly on a wavelength with a vital avant-garde that springs from young American music yet again. You can almost see it oscillating directly into your mind, or out of your mind—totally trippy. For real though, this record has a quality that simply doesn’t exist in most of the music that’s come to serve as the representation for our times. Nostalgia, Ultra. has the same kind of vitality that drove me to dig through garage sales, flea markets, estate sales, thrift stores, rummage sales, classified ads, storage unit sales, and more looking for older music that would show me the light. We’ll see if it has the staying power—which I think it does—but it’s off to an incredible start, and it is at the least one of the greater releases of the year so far.

The record came out towards the middle of February, and has apparently built up a decent amount of recognition which doesn’t seem like it’ll end soon. I kept overhearing about it. Then someone mentioned it on twitter and forwarded me a link. Nostalgia, Ultra. is pretty incredible. Not only by the standards of current music, not just as one more in the endless series of releases, but as the artifact of a real human life. On “Novacane” he doesn’t paint himself as the typical money-certified monolith of a flawless life of envy that we’ve come to expect from hit records. Instead, he speaks about his life in candid terms admitting that while he is living a life of envy, he is conflicted, and still struggles with being human:

From “Novacane:”

I think I started something/ I got what I wanted/ Did didn’t I/ I Can’t feel nothing superhuman/ even when I’m fuckin’ viagra poppin’/every single record auto tunin’/ zero emotion muted emotion/ pitch corrected computed emotion

From “There Will Be Tears:”

Cause these boys ain’t had no fathers neither/ and they weren’t crying/ my friends said it wasn’t so bad/ They say you can’t miss what you ain’t had/ well I can I’m sad

Apparently Frank Ocean has been around for a bit in Def Jam record limbo, and has written songs for John Legend and Brandy, and more recently #BeyondSay but as we’ve come to learn just because you make great music, and have a deal with a major label, doesn’t mean you’re gonna put out a record.

The music maintains an incredibly compelling mood somewhere between relaxed and exhausted. At times it feels like the narrative is born out of succumbing to sheer overwhelming pleasure, and at times it seems to tell the tale of ongoing futile efforts to overcome the causes of discomfort, or regret in a somber world. While sex is definitely a topic, and its excess is told of, it isn’t glorified at the expense of the depiction of women. And it’s all done in a manner that skirts classification more than it concedes to it. It’s contemporary music, sophisticated in the ways that our lives have become sophisticated. And when we try to understand it as pre-ordained to fit outdated categories we fail to see that it is in fact more like Werner Herzog’s Ecstatic Truth, than the new sound of R&B. It is much-needed empowered alternative to what we’ve settled for.

Download Frank Ocean’s Nostalgia,Ultra. (Click Here)

- Zachg