The double entendre “see me wither ” offers both a hope for long life and a desperate desire to share it with loved ones. Its songs also explore love and hubris, but the visual platform of the album forces one to consider the focal points of Ocean’s lyrical matter in relation to the meaning behind his staircase construction. The best and most eloquent example of this is in the song “Wither,” in the line: “Pray get to see me wither.” The song’s minimalist instrumental brings the vocals to the forefront along with an earnest contemplation of the finite nature of life. Time seems to be the obvious overarching subject of Endless. ![]() Was Ocean objecting to the contemporary culture of immediate music exchange with such a drawn out exhibition on long-winded process of creativity? Could he even protest such a thing when he himself owes nearly all of his fame and fortune to the internet? Was Ocean positing himself as an anti-generational spokesperson? No matter how long four years may have seemed, the album which broke Ocean’s hiatus forced fans to check themselves and question their impatient anticipation, and did so in a stroke of genius.Įndless is a unique multi-media presentation posing daunting, yet romantic, realist dilemmas. ![]() Moreover, a five day stream of the carpentry featured in Endless preceded the album’s release. From an industry perspective, Ocean has fully employed the practices of modern music business through mixtapes, surprise releases, and streaming exclusives his professional choices are a Sign o’ the Times, as his hero Prince once sang.īut in an age of immediacy and artificiality, where modernity has rid us of the most organic components of creating art, Ocean chose to release the visual album Endless – a forty-five minute music video of three Frank Oceans constructing a staircase – to remind us of the protracted toils of creating… anything. We all can be considered “products of our time,” but no artist in music has embodied such representation as artfully as Frank Ocean. Regardless of how deftly Frank Ocean has eluded categorizations of his genre and sexuality, he could not escape his context.
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