The Italian film and television theorist Francesco Casetti once said relocation in the media happens “when screens offer visual conditions that are quite different from those of the traditional movie screen”. This, in short, refers to films being shown in places other than the cinema. Films being projected onto buildings, billboards and many other places that aren’t the usual silver screen we’re used to conventionally watching films on. After learning about relocation I tried to think about about real-world examples of it, particularly those that I had experienced myself. Nothing immediately came to mind until a few days later, when I watched Frank Ocean’s visual album Endless for the first time. Although it wasn’t the visual itself that piqued my interest to write this case study, it was Ocean’s music itself and how he used this concept of relocation to allow his music become more than just music.
This started on the 1st of August 2016 when, after nearly four years of studio silence, Ocean partnered with Apple Music to give his fans a livestream of an empty workshop. This remained silent for over two weeks as fans gathered to extensively watch the stream in hope of any sound from the artist they’d been waiting so long to hear. Then, on the 19th of August, Apple Music and Ocean released the visual album that quickly become known as Endless - the supposed ‘second album’ fans had been waiting so long for. Endless, for non-Ocean fans, is a 45 minute long video showing Frank Ocean building a spiralling staircase nearly from scratch. This visual is set to twenty tracks, ranging from snippets of electronic ambience to minimal acoustic performances, all ending with a ten minute long techno track. Not only is Endless Ocean’s most eclectic work, but the visual album itself realises Casetti’s concept of relocation I mentioned earlier, although this time having music take the place of cinema. In this case, the music is shown not in the form of a typical album, but relocated into the medium of film. Endless was received with mostly positive feedback for its detail, its soothing and hypnotic tone as well as its unconventional nature as a visual album - a fresh, subversive take on music. However, Frank didn’t stop there. Just a few hours after Endless was released, Frank Ocean announced the ‘true’ second studio album fans had been waiting on - Blonde.
The announcement was made on his Tumblr blog and continued the nature of his unconventional music release. Instead of simply sharing an iTunes, Spotify or Amazon link as many artists do upon a new album release, the post showed four locations where fans could get his album for free. However, it wasn’t just the album they were getting but a 300+ page zine, called Boys Don’t Cry - the name fans gave to the rumoured second album before Endless was released. The magazine itself was something of a standalone art exhibition you could hold in your hands; featuring photos, poems, scripts, essays, interviews, lists, articles and even more from a wealthy range of contributors. Ranging from an in-depth essay on cars from Ocean himself up to a McDonald’s based poem from Kanye West, accompanied by photos of West at a McDonald’s drive-thru. Blonde received rave reviews for its personality, production and more than anything the intimacy it created between the listener and Ocean.
This intimacy is what makes the Boys Don’t Cry magazine such a unique platform to release Blonde with. Here we also see the rejection to another concept within the media known as relocation, coined by Marshall McLuhan, which is the idea that old media is formatted and moved to new media. The easiest example is a film like Watchmen based on the graphic novel (old media) written by Alan Moore which was then remediated into a film (new media) by Zack Snyder. This is relevant to Blonde because Ocean could have easily curated the content of the magazine through a website, as a digital book (a current trend for magazines) to go along with the ‘new media’ of 2016. However by releasing Blonde as a physical magazine, Ocean rejects this ‘new media’ in favour of the nostalgia and intimacy only provided by the ‘old media’ of the zine format, both qualities centric to the album itself.
Endless, Blonde and Boys Don’t Cry weren’t just great contributions to the great year of music that 2016 was, but some of the most innovative and unique music releases of all time. After digesting Blonde, many fans later theorised and agreed he really took the four years away from the studio to live his life and write content just for the album based around that. Whatever Frank Ocean’s next move is, the easiest guess is to expect the unexpected.
Sources/Texts Mentioned:
Francesco Cassetti - The Relocation of Cinema
Frank Ocean - Endless
Frank Ocean - Blonde
Frank Ocean - Boys Don’t Cry Magazine, Issue 1
Alan Moore - Watchmen
Zack Snyder - Watchmen
Marshall McLuhan - The Medium Is The Message