Over the course of this Summer, fans across the world were delighted with several, universally-heralded festival performances from the elusive R&B maven Frank Ocean. To help commemorate his incredible live run this year, Ocean put together a visual document meant to make sense of it all, via a 32-page spread for i-D Magazine. The visual essay is filled out with pictures of Frank, pictures of band, pictures of his crew, and pictures of his fans.
For the piece, Ocean also penned a short letter, where he made a few different, thought-provoking observations. “You can answer a lot of questions with ‘Yes.’ But you can answer many more with ‘No.’ No is run of the mill. Yes is a gem,” he advised. After that, came a string of stream-of-consciousness thoughts. “Whenever I feel alone I watch live television, something about it being okay on their end makes it okay on mine. Onstage one in-ear is my mic feed and the other one is a Tim Ferriss podcast. I go long periods without talking but I raise my voice when the people on the phone are in loud places. I’ve never given my fans nicknames because the ones I think of are embarrassing.”
Near the end, he gave a shoutout to the Rick & Morty stans sweating over fast-food condiments: ” I’ll never know why or what’s with campouts for Szechuan sauce at McDonalds. But I’m way into it.” Then gave a tantalizing promise. “If you liked two thousand and seventeen then you’ll love two thousand and eighteen.”
You can check out his entire essay here.
