Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Frank Ocean, 'Blonde' and the State of the Modern Album


Remember how Spotify, YouTube and their ilk were going to destroy the album as an art form? How individual songs would become more valuable than the LP? Well, forget that nonsense. As Frank Ocean's new album, Blonde, demonstrates, a crop of musicians are resisting this mindset, producing challenging work in our internet age that only really works as a unified album. My essay is up at MEL.